Allen Fisher: Reading 'mummers' Strut'

In 1995, Allen Fisher published a poem entitled ‘Mummers’ Strut’ in an issue of the magazine West Coast Line,[1] accompanied by a statement of poetics. The poem is organised into twentyseven short numbered sections, mostly in couplets, ranging from two to twenty lines in length. The predominant impression is of a fragmented discourse that is hard to read as constructing a consistent speaking voice of a narrator on a single theme, and yet the poem offers numerous, more subtle, continuities throughout. The division into sections emphasises the fragmented nature of the text but also suggests areas of local coherency that can be compared across the whole. The principle technique that Fisher employs in this and other works is a form of collage; combining materials taken from other texts, often altering them in the process (a technique Fisher calls renarration). This altering of the quotations from other texts amounts to what Fisher calls a ‘subversion of collage form’ (WN, p. 110). These elements are in turn juxtaposed with Fisher’s own self-generated material. Throughout his long poetic sequence Gravity as a consequence of shape, of which ‘Mummers’ Strut’ is a part, Fisher provides lists of resources he has used in the construction of his poems, usually located at the end of a book, like a bibliography. What is particularly notable about ‘Mummers’ Strut’ is that, unlike most of Fisher’s output, it includes endnotes which precisely indicate the origins of each part of the poem’s fabric. This provides a rare opportunity for an exact comparison of the materials Fisher has drawn on and their final appearance in the text of the poem. It is hoped that such a comparison will suggest ways in which Fisher’s hypercomplex work can be understood and appreciated as literary art. In the West Coast Line statement, Fisher offers a description of a compositional procedure that is divided into three stages: research, selection and presentation. Fisher’s description of the research stage divides his sources for ‘Mummers’ Strut’ into six sources of discussion on ‘the human condition’ and works concerned with ‘aesthetics and architectural order’ (WN, p. 109). The former category contains the work of rock-musician Kurt Cobain, the ‘pseudo-clinical and case study’ research of Helmuth Plessner, William Blake’s notebooks, William Cowper’s ‘Ode to Peace’ and Peter Kropotkin’s political writings (WN, p. 109). The latter category includes Cicero on oratory and aesthetics, Pliny on painting, M. Quatremère de Quincy on aesthetics, and works on architecture by Vetruvius, Hegel, Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, Gottfried Semper and Heinrich Tessenow. Fisher subsumes the remainder of his sources as ‘culminating’ in one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks and Dante’s The Divine Comedy, although references are also made to Anthony Kenny’s work on Wittgenstein and the work of Hugo von Hoffmannsthal on aesthetics. The selection stage of Fisher’s procedure involves choosing from this range of research data, and the presentation stage involves deciding how the words generated during the research and selection stages are actually laid out on the page with ‘stanzas broken into fragments indicated by line-breaks’ (WN, p. 110). Fisher actually offers his own reading of the first section of the poem in order to illustrate the stage of selection. The section of the poem is quoted here for comparison: