E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is pleased to post a talk by Robert Sheppard given recently at the Manchester Literary Festival, 18 October 2010 (with Fleur Adcock , Jon Glover , Michael Symmons Roberts , Peter Robinson , and Jeffrey Wainwright , and Ian Pople chairing). On ‘Stops and Stations’: from A Tribute to Roy Fisher The invitation to speak about a single poem by Roy Fisher already makes me feel that violence has been inflicted upon the considerable body of work we now possess. Such stringency favours the isolated poem as against the sequence; it seems to me that much of Roy Fisher’s brilliance reveals itself in extended – often serial – works. The single poem conserves its energies in a centrifugal way, looking to itself for its sense of form, finding just enough confirmation of its own viability, its vitality, its need to exist, from its own resources. It seems to me that what we used to call free verse (and we haven’t found a less clumsy term to replace it) requires more of that energ...