Tony Frazer: Introduction to Roy Fisher's Interviews Through Time, & Selected Prose
The origins of this book lies in my conviction that Roy Fisher's interviews, all of which are now very difficult to find, contained a great deal of information that would be of use to readers and students of his work and should therefore once again be made available. The interviews that had hitherto been published—the majority of them between 1970 and 1985—tended to concentrate on his earlier work, and thus arose the idea of commissioning a new interview which would concentrate on the period starting with the publication of A Furnace. This was long overdue, given that A Furnace is by common consent Roy Fisher's magnum opus, at least so far.
Our concern throughout was to focus on poetics, with a little biographical leavening, and the interviews that have been plundered to make up this narrative were chosen with that in view. This is no reflection on the other interviews, which often covered the same themes or were, for various reasons, more ephemeral in nature. Each of them in fact has something to offer, but those selected here offered more and enabled us to avoid too much elision from one interview to another. Simply republishing the originals as they had appeared would of course have led to innumerable overlaps and anachronisms. In view of this, we decided that a cut-and-paste approach would be the better option and would serve to lend an air of narrative logic to the whole proceedings, especially when combined with the 'Antebiography' which opens this volume. The new interview with Peter Robinson however, which was commissioned especially for this book, appears here in its entirety. Having reached this stage, it was clear too that the review of his own book The Dow Low Drop that Roy carried out for the magazine The Rialto also fitted well into the overall scheme of things, and made an amusing conclusion to the constructed narrative that was then in development.
Five of the BBC Talks for Words are also included—the original fourth Talk was left out as the author was dissatisfied with it—because these represent more of Roy Fisher talking, albeit more formally, and at the same time form one of the very few prose pieces that he has allowed to see the light of day. They were worth rescuing from oblivion.
copyright © Tony Frazer, 2000