Roy Fisher:
Propositions and Openings
Editor’s textual note
To plan and draft A Furnace, Roy Fisher (RF) used two unlined foolscap-size ‘University Series Manuscript Books’ with blue hard covers (now faded) and (frayed) maroon bindings, made by Sandford and Mann Ltd, at 72-73 New Street, Birmingham. On 29 January 1984 in the first of these he wrote under the heading Working Notes: Prospectus on p. 97: ‘Sort the Ps & Os. See what they omit, formally and materially.’
He adds that he would do this ‘to make a Prospectus, of what the thing asserts, rather than just what it is interested in.’ He then draws a line and, underneath it, begins a numbered sequence of these ‘Propositions and Openings’ - which gets as far as six, at the bottom of the page. Overleaf, on 3 March 1984, he begins what he calls Text on the next recto.
Though there are a few further pages of ‘Ps & Os’, the proposed organising of this material gives way to working notes and draft text towards his long poem. For this posthumous editorial ‘sorting’, I have begun with the six that RF numbered and ordered, then gone back to the beginning of this inspiration, which started sometime after 22 January 1984 (the last date on the previous recto) on p. 83. These I have numbered from 7. They continue on the following rectos to p. 91. There is an attempt to return to this method for making progress on p. 101, after the six numbered ones, but it peters out into fragmentary notes to self, and the final few that I have published here are selected from among these various materials.
On 8 August 1985, a pencil date at the top of p. 83, RF returned to these notes towards A Furnace, when the poem was completed, writing under the pencilled date: ‘Transfer spares to Odes, Notes, Cartoons’. This refers to another notebook, dated at the front on that same ‘8. viii. 85’, and in fact entitled Odes, Notes and Cartoons. This is a filled project notebook of 124 pages in which a large sequence of ‘Odes’ is planned, sketched, and abandoned. Though left aside, the project did prompt a number of completed separate poems: eg ‘Three Stone Lintels at Eleven Steps’, ‘A Working Devil for the Birthday of Coleman Hawkins’, ‘Near Garmsley Camp’ and ‘A Sign Illuminated’.
On the blank rectos facing the pages with the ‘Propositions and Openings’ there are some ink additions and comments, and then some further pencil comments related to this transfer of materials to the ‘Odes’ project. The numbering of all these remarks is presented as editorial, between square brackets, since most of these aphoristic propositions are not numbered, and I have done so to make keying annotations in my Notes to them as regards RF’s marginal running commentary, editorial cross-references to published work, or occasional explanations of references, as simple as possible.
The cross-referencing and explanations of references are by no means complete or exhaustive, and RF’s annotations include a series of numbered cross-references of his own. These are presumably to entries in other notebooks or cards compiled towards his poem, but it has not been possible at this time to track to which other materials in the archive they refer.
Peter Robinson
December 2020