The Displaced Omphalos-(s)tone: Ergativity and the Contrapuntal Deixis of the Midlands in Roy Fisher’s Eccentric Topopoetics

Abstract

Birmingham occupies the pivot of a centripetal metaphor of cardinal points. Yet the historical marginalisation of the industrial Midlands has rendered its centrality almost inconceivable for its inhabitants. In postwar poetry, the most salient figure to speak from this inconceivable centre is Roy Fisher. A pioneer of neomodernist topopoetics in the British Poetry Revival, this self-effacing jazz pianist embodies the period’s fluctuating alignments of place and thought. He does so by de-centring the local poetic subject via two related processes: deictic counterpoint and shifts towards ergativity. The latter term names a syntactic structure, foreign to English, in which the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are paired. This linguistic metaphor captures the displacements of transitivity and deixis that Fisher’s multifocal poetry effects on the thematic nexus of the Midlands and the poetic subject. This eccentricity is where Fisher is coming from.