Saturday, 12 June 2010

happy birthday

Happy birthday (yesterday) to Roy Fisher (his eightieth). For which occasion the above Shearsman volume appears. Peter Robinson has done a fine job of editing a collection of unpublished work by Roy together with essays, memoirs and poems by a goodly number of authors (myself included). I won’t single anything out here since the whole thing reads well. It’s not an obligatory nod, more a set of joyful responses. At the back of the book there's a photo of Roy playing the piano, courtesy the archives of Notre Dame University where it was initially captioned: 'John Cage played one piece that consisted of four and a half minutes of silence in his 1980 performance of avant garde music'. This item must be of some amusement to a man who thought he had fallen silent around the time when he published his Fulcrum Collected Poems in 1969.

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