Allen Fisher

dance

Language: english

Translations: german (danse)

dance

her right foot on one of the physicist’s left foot her left on the other’s
right

a completely civilised art
remarkable lucidity
the body clear to eye the feet distinct from the legs the legs from the
trunk the shoulder the arms the head each separately defined

danced while I hummed to fit rhythmic patterns to them with my feet

news flashed laboratory to laboratory parity not conserved
remarkable lucidity afoot
the physicist broke away from a food queue danced a jig

Allen Fisher

photo © Paige Mitchell

* 01.11.1944, Norbury, London, United Kingdom
lives in: Hereford, United Kingdom

Allen Fisher, born in 1944 in London, is a poet, painter and publisher, teacher and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival and is the edit of Spanner magazine.

Allen Fisher has been involved in performance and poetry since 1962. In 1969 his poetry and art practice developed different strands of processual, conceptual and systematic methods. Altogether Fisher has over 150 publications in his name consisting of art documentation, poetry and theory. He has written four main long sequences of work: the PLACE project (1971-1980), Blood, Bone, Brain (1970-1980), The Art of Flight (1970s) and Gravity as a consequence of shape (1982-2007).

photo © Paige Mitchell

After starting Edible Magazine during the 1960s, and setting up Aloes Books in 1972, he started Spanner in 1974. Spanner continues to publish art and poetry texts and a series of chapbooks. From 1975 until 1980, he ran New London Pride Editions with Elaine Fisher, dedicated to writers then working in London. As editor of Spanner and "New London Pride", he has published many of the Revival poets.

Fisher started painting in 1978. After twenty years in lead and plastics industries he started teaching art, art history and poetry at Goldsmiths' College in the eighties, moved to Herefordshire College of Art & Design in 1989.
In 1998 Fisher became Head of Art at Roehampton University, was appointed as Professor of Poetry & Art in 2002 and became Head of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2005 and was made Emeritus Professor in 2009.

His early long project PLACE was published in a series of books and pamphlets in the 1970s. PLACE is a development in open field poetics, focusing on South London, and incorporates a series of books including Convergences (1978), Becoming (1978) and Unpolished Mirrors (1986).
Originally published over several years as a series of interconnecting books, it incorporated influences from Blake, Olson, Pope, Wordsworth, Robert Kelly, Walter Benjamin, Jung, Dickens, Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, Marxism, the Situationists, conceptual art and researches in mythology, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, immunology, topography, zoology and much else – and yet remains unclassifiable.

Parallel with this ten-year project PLACE, he developed systematic sequences of poetry, such as The Art of Flight based on the notes in Bach's The Art of Fugue and Apocalyptic Sonnets which invented the double sonnet. During the 1980s he started a series of works in art history and poetics (Necessary Business 1985, Topological Shovel 1999 and Confidence in lack, 2007).

Gravity as a consequence of shape incorporates many small books and booklets started in 1982, culminating in 3 collected volumes: Gravity (2004); Entanglement (2004), and Leans (2007).
This very long sequence is a mix of science, everyday language and the poetic tradition of Britain, combined with comments from philosophy, politics, and business to a web of texts that goes beyond collage and montage techniques and is closely related to forms of conceptual art and techniques of contemporary art.

This was followed by a book of emblems (poem-image-commentary) called "Proposals" and, in 2014, a collage book of poetry, visual images and prose quotations called "SPUTTOR". A book of essays "Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture and Perception" regarding American and British Poetry & Art Since 1950 and other essays on poetics was published by the University of Alabama in 2016. Forthcoming: a "Companion" to his work with essays by contemporaries and an "Allen Fisher Reader", both due in 2017.

Fisher has exhibited widely, including a retrospective painting show in Hereford Museum & Art Gallery in 1993, and one-man shows in London, 2003, and Hereford, 2013. Part of his processual work is in the Tate Collection and his painted work is owned by museums in Hereford and Iceland and private collections in America, Australia, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

Allen Fisher lives as Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University in Hereford.

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