Roy Fisher 

A Poem Not a Picture

On a ground remarkable for lack of character, sweeps of direction form.

It’s not possible to determine whether they rise from the ground’s qualities or are marked on to it. Or whether, if the first, the lines suck the ground’s force up, or are its delegates; or if the second, whether the imposed marks mobilize or defeat it; or both, in all cases.

Out of a scratch ontology the sweeps of direction form, and, as if having
direction, produce, at wide intervals, the events.

There are wiry nodes made of small intersecting planes as if rendered by
hatching, and having a vapid, played-out look. But they are the nearest the field has to intense features. Each has a little patch of red.

The Only Image

Salts work their way
to the outside of a plant pot
and dry white.

                   This encrustation
is the only image.
                       The rest—
the entire winter, if there’s winter—
comes as a variable that shifts
in any part, or vanishes.

                            I can
compare what I like to the salts,
to the pot, if there’s a pot,
to the winter if there’s a winter.

The salts I can compare
to anything there is.
Anything.

from Talks for Words

Long ago I formed the idea of becoming a poet by writing poems. I’d
tried painting, and I’d tried music, but had been oppressed by the
difficulty of avoiding academic training in these arts–an avoidance
which at the time seemed to me essential. But it was a time when nobody
in this country would have suggested that it was possible or desirable to
teach imaginative writing beyond the rudiments of school composition, so
my way was clear. My readings about poetry threw up very few prescriptions, and I was sorry rather than glad to find even those. I can remember struggling, rather unwillingly, to take to heart the warnings Wystan Auden issued in the preface of his selection from Tennyson. He said that if a young man came to him full of important things he wanted to say, then that young man would never be a poet; if, on the other hand, he said “I like hanging around words, listening to what they say,” then maybe one day he would be a poet. I thought this a piece of rather mystical pedantry, but I saw the force of it. And it was probably my first acquaintance with the anthropomorphic view of language, the suggestion that it has a will of its own. It’s one of those jokes that feeds off a real unease.