The Allen Fisher Companion

This volume is a long-awaited collection of essays which gives a chance for Allen Fisher's many admirers to study his work in depth with a group of experts.

The essays included here cover the range of Fisher's career. Redell Olsen and cris cheek discuss Fisher's relations to Fluxus and the documentary. Will Rowe approaches Place in terms of the large-scale poem as a heuristic device, a 'practice of knowledge'. Pierre Joris addresses the important topic of health in Fisher's work. Will Montgomery considers Brixton as a 'sounded space' in the work of Allen Fisher and Linton Kwesi Johnson, while Steven Hitchins tackles one aspect of Fisher's significant engagement with science: fractals as a way of negotiating the discontinuity and noise of everyday life. Robert Sheppard discusses The Apocalyptic Sonnets as the link between Fisher's two large-scale projects, Place and Gravity as a consequence of shape; Scott Thurston offers a close-reading of 'Mummer's Shout' (from Gravity) in terms of its compositional procedures; Clive Bush engages with 'Philly Dog' and the political limitations of Deleuze and Guattari; and Calum Hazell explores Sputtor in terms of collage, quotation and poetic knowledge. The volume closes with two collaborative pieces: an interview between Fisher, Paige Mitchell and Shamoon Zamir, and a selection of documents relating to PhillyTalks #19 with Karen Mac Cormack (17 October 2001).

Robert Hampson was Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is now a Research Fellow in the Institute for English Studies, University of London, where he co-organises the Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar (with Amy Evans Bauer). His publications include New British poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester University Press, 1993), with Peter Barry; Frank O'Hara Now (Liverpool University Press, 2010) with Will Montgomery; and Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (Shearsman, 2016) with Ken Edwards. His own poetry publications include Seaport (Shearsman, 2008), an explanation of colours (Veer, 2010), and re-worked disasters (kfs, 2012), which was long-listed for the Forward Prize.