You can read my review of the brilliant Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery at The List. It's on for a while yet, so do try to catch it.
As a bonus beat, here's my essay on Finlay's little magazine, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. This was done for Prawn's Pee, a daily paper published from the Old Hairdressers during this year's Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. It's based on a journal article I did around 18th months ago and since then I've done further research and have refined my arguments, so it's by no means definitive, but I hope it gives a decent overview of this fantastic magazine, which can be read in full at Ubuweb.
Incidentally, the Prawn's Pee folk are curating a room in the CCA's current exhibition on its previous incarnation, The Third Eye Centre. With archival material, including photographs and tapes, of Glasgow performances by Derek Bailey, Brotherhood of Breath, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Leonard, Ted Berrigan, Jerome Rothenberg, Henri Chopin and many others, it couldn't be more up my street.
The
Poet's Blueprint: Ian Hamilton Finlay's Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
and
1960s Scotland.
The
1960s were a transitional period in Scottish culture, as the
dominance of the Scottish Renaissance movement, led by Hugh
MacDiarmid, was challenged by a new generation of writers. MacDiarmid
was Scotland's great modernist poet, but by the late 1950s he and his
followers had become reactionary and defensive, clinging to a vision
of a national culture which looked increasingly narrow and outdated.
In his 1962 essay, 'The Beatnik In The Kailyard', Edwin Morgan spoke
for many younger writers when he argued that ‘the Scottish
Renascence has begun to loosen its hold on life… (resulting in) a
gap between the literary and the public experience which is
surprising and indeed shocking in a country as small as Scotland’.
He was dismayed that established writers took ‘almost no interest…
in the important postwar literary developments in America and on the
continent’ and bemoaned
'a
desperate unwillingness to move out into the world with which every
Scottish child now at school is becoming familiar – the world of
television and sputniks, automation and LPs, electronic music and
multistorey flats...'
Morgan's
essay articulated the frustration felt in certain quarters that new
and experimental voices were being stifled by the old guard. Excluded
from newspapers, mainstream literary magazines and anthologies,
younger writers were forced to seek alternative outlets, or even
create their own. This is the story of one such outlet, Ian Hamilton
Finlay's magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
which
brought Scottish writers into contact with international avant-garde
communities and stands as important contributions to the 'mimeograph
revolution' in which small presses and little magazines helped
transform the post-war poetic landscape.
Finlay
and Morgan received their first international breaks through Gael
Turnbull's transatlantic
magazine Migrant,
which
ran for eight issues between 1960 and 1961. Produced
on a second-hand duplicator in Turnbull's spider-infested Californian
garage,
Migrant
was
a truly DIY affair; printed on cheap yellow paper, with functional
layout and typesetting, the magazine rejected traditional standards
of 'quality' publishing. The point was to get the work out there, as
cheaply and efficiently as possible. While
some copies did make it into bookshops, Migrant
was
conceived as a semi-private enterprise, principally distributed
amongst poets, although any one who was interested could subscribe.
Turnbull and his Worcester based co-editor Michael Shayer, liked the
magazine to
'theatre in rehearsal [rather] than the presented performance'. It
was a laboratory where poets could experiment and discuss their
ideas.
Having
achieved only limited success as a writer of short stories and radio
plays, Finlay was struggling to have his poems published. Undeterred
by an initial rejection from Shayer, Finlay persevered, and sure
enough, his next batch of poems were duly published in Migrant,
alongside
an excerpt from a letter in which he expressed his alienation from
the Scottish scene. Through
Migrant,
Finlay
became aware of the 'New American Poetry', particularly that
associated with Cid Corman's seminal magazine Origin
and the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
Finlay soon recognised a kinship, writing to Turnbull in 1961: 'Your
new American poets, Creeley, Dorn, etc – I feel they are my
brothers'.
It
is certainly possible to draw parallels between Finlay and Creeley:
the everyday language and subject matter, the short verse forms, and
an outlook which can be both playful and bleak. Most significantly,
he shares with Creeley and his fellow post-imagists an interest in
the poem as an object. Finlay would draw the name of his own magazine
from Creeley's 'Please', a poem which draws attention to the fact it
is a 'made thing', as his contemporary Robert Duncan put it: 'This is
a poem about a horse that got tired/Poor.Old.Tired.Horse... This
is a poem that tells the story/which is the story'.
Migrant
the magazine closed in September 1960, Turnbull and Shayer feeling
that it had made its point. An identity had been established, and the
press would now concentrate on producing pamphlets by the roster of
writers who had come through the magazine. Finlay's The
Dancers Inherit The Party, published
at the end of 1960, proved to be a great success, quickly selling out
its first edition. Morgan's brilliant collection of Eastern Bloc
translations, Sovpoems,
followed
in 1961.
Migrant
provided Finlay with the model – and the contacts - to found his
own Wild Hawthorn Press with his partner Jessie McGuffie in 1961
(from 1964, he would be assisted by his second wife Sue). Finlay
readily acknowledged McGuffie’s role in running the day to day
business of the Press, and her earnings as a teacher helped subsidise
their activities. In a letter to Turnbull, Finlay explained that the
'idea is to publish human
poetry, small books, well done, with good lineocuts'. Early Wild
Hawthorn publications included collections by the Americans Louis
Zukovsky and Lorine Niedecker, as well as Finlay's own Glasgow
Beasts, an A Burd (1961),
which caused great controversy for its use of Glasgwegian dialect. To
MacDiarmid, this was not the kind of Scots in which high poetry could
be written and he dismissed Finlay and his associates, somewhat
ludicrously, as 'Teddyboy Poetasters'.
Finlay
and Morgan, together with the poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson,
formed what Alec Finlay describes as an
'oddly homely' avant-garde, 'less a programmatic movement than a fey
shoulder pressed against the wheel of the moribund Scottish
Renaissance'.
In
contrast to the culturally elitist Scottish Renaissance, this
informal alliance embraced popular
culture, the folk revival, new technology and the spoken language. A
Scottish identity was important to Finlay, but he wanted to define a
new aesthetic, rejecting the high-art elitism of MacDiarmid and his
followers. 'I believe at heart, that people can really enjoy
poetry—not just poets', he told Turnbull.
This
plural
vision of Scottish culture can be seen as part of the 'thaw' that
Finlay alluded to in the title of a planned Wild Hawthorn anthology.
The
Thaw
was not just a Scottish, but an 'international phenomenon', wrote
Finlay in a letter to Morgan, who was to edit the book. The emergent
culture of the early 1960s represented hope to both poets. 'Us, The
Beats, CND etc etc are all symptoms
of
something else,
something good,
not as yet defined', he wrote. The anthology, he hoped, would
articulate 'the
warm, new, we're for life thing, you know what I mean'. The
Thaw went
unrealised, but Finlay's tentative efforts to gather material would
help shape the direction of his magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
There
were also plans for an anthology of 'sound, Dada, etc poems' entitled
Cool
Ossian. The
nod to James MacPherson's disputed reconstructions of ancient Gaelic
poetry was a cheeky acknowledgement of the constructed nature of
national traditions, while the 'cool' brought an ironic Beat
sophistication to the project. Finlay was fond of Scottish kitsch,
and he planned to give Cool
Ossian
a tartan cover, illustrated 'with little blocks of highland
cottages'. Describing the project to Morgan, he wrote, 'I
am “wicked” as you once said, but I believe that nothing will
preserve a tradition so much as kidding
it'.
Cool
Ossian ultimately
went unrealised, but its concept is another winning example of
Finlay's playfully imaginative approach to tradition, where new
hybrid forms emerge from the fusion of local folk and international
avant-garde.
In
January 1962, Finlay wrote to Turnbull to say that McGuffie and a
friend from the folk circuit, Paul Pond (aka Paul Jones of Manfred
Mann), were starting 'a monthly poetry sheet' called
Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
While the magazine never included any editorial comment, an insert
from
POTH
3 (1962) declared that 'The Wild Hawthorn Press believes in BEAUTY
TRADITION EXPERIMENT'. As Alec Finlay writes, Ian Hamilton Finlay had
'no interest in experiment for its own sake... there was no poetic
party line; rather, [POTH]
extolled his timeless themes, the sea and domestic life'. POTH
would come to be associated with concrete poetry, but this was only
one aspect of the magazine, which, as Alec Finlay notes, served as
Finlay's apprenticeship, not only as an experimental poet but as a
designer and publisher.
Early
issues saw Finlay explore the idea of an alternative Scottish
tradition, championing overlooked lyric poets such as Hamish McLaren
and embracing the popular culture disdained by MacDiarmid and 'the
posh ones'. Hence the playful but pointed inclusion of a poem and
cartoon by the popular Glaswegian cartoonist Bud Neill, and the
celebration of William McGonagall, who Finlay described as 'the first
stream-of-consciousness writer' and 'a cubist'. Finlay
also published poets who used forms of Scots that were closer to the
spoken language than the dictionary derived synthetic Scots or
Lallans of the Scottish Renaissance. Among them were the Edinburgh
poet Robert Garioch and the Shetlandic poet Veng.
Several
of the contemporary Scottish poets featured in POTH
shared Finlay’s interest with island life and rural communities,
including the Orcadian George Mackay Brown and the Hebridean Ian
Crichton Smith. To define POTH
purely in terms of its 'Scottishness', however, is limiting. An
interest in the rural and domestic is not exclusive to Scottish
poets, after all, and POTH
highlighted
such commonality with themed issues such as Teapoth
(POTH
23m
1967) and
Boats
Shores Tides Fish (POTH
15,
1964). While the magazine helped reinvigorate Scottish literature,
this was not its sole aim. POTH
belonged
to the world.
POTH
sampled
widely from a range of modern European poets, placing figures from
the first half of the century (Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, Trakl),
alongside contemporary voices such as Gunter Grass and Hans Arp.
Anselm Hollo, a London-based Finnish poet who had been a major
contributor to Migrant,
submitted
his own work, as well as translations of Finnish and German poetry. A
key figure was Morgan, whose interest in the Eastern Bloc saw him
bring translations of Russian Futurists such as Mayakovsky and
Pankratov to early issues of POTH,
as well as the contemporary Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky.
Americans
such as Jerome Rothenberg, Dave Ball, and Cid Corman further extended
the scope of work in translation, from the contemporary avant-garde
to medieval Japan. The New American Poetry was heavily represented
too, with Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley,
Theodore Enslin and Ronald Johnson among the many prominent voices.
South
American and African poetry were also included. This rich mix shows
POTH’s
commitment to opening Scotland up to different international voices,
reclaiming the internationalism of the early Scottish Renaissance for
a new generation. It also maps an idiosyncratic path through
modernist poetry, locating POTH,
and its roster of emergent poet-translators,
within
the avant-garde continuum.
POTH’s
most significant engagement with the international avant-garde,
however, was to come with its promotion of concrete poetry. While
concrete was not as dominant a feature of POTH
as some may think - most of Finlay’s own concrete poetry appeared
elsewhere - its presence was nonetheless significant, not least for
being the first Scottish publication to feature the form.
Furthermore, concrete informed the magazine’s approach in a number
of ways, encouraging Finlay to experiment with the visual
presentation of poems, and poetic form itself.
In
1963 Finlay told Turnbull, 'I feel that I have come - at least for
the moment - to the end of poems that are about,
and want to do poems that just are'. Concentration and simplicity
was, as the leading European concrete poet Eugen Gomringer wrote,
'the very essence of poetry', and, as Finlay wrote in a much-quoted
letter to Pierre Garnier, concrete poetry was classically beautiful,
offering 'a model, of order, even if set in a space which is full of
doubt'.
Concrete
poetry made its Scottish debut in POTH
6
(March
1963), its
back page featuring three poems by the Brazilian Noigandres school.
While the rest of the magazine is printed in a traditional serif
typeface, the three concrete poems are printed in the original sans
serif font. The concrete poem is designed as an object for
contemplation, and the openness of the form allows the reader to
bring their own associations and interpretations. Finlay understood
that the concrete movement had many aspects and possibilities, and
subsequent issues reflected this diversity. POTH
10
(October
1963), the
first fully concrete number, presents historical examples of the form
by Gomringer and Augusto de Campos, alongside innovations such as the
typewriter poems of Dom Sylvester Houedard and the abstractions of
Robert Lax.
Finlay
published one of his first concrete poems in POTH
8
(1963),
a number
that pays tribute to the Russian futurists. In 'Homage To Malevich'
Finlay draws explicit connections between the constructivism and
concrete poetry, referencing the Russian's 'Black Square' paintings
by presenting a grid of text consisting of permuations of 'black' and
'block'1.
Finlay referred to these 'abstract word compositions' as his
'suprematist' poems, as opposed his 'fauve' poems, which, Alec Finlay
notes, recreated 'sensed experience'. The latter are more
epigrammatic in form and use colour to produce different effects. The
two approaches are featured in Finlay’s first concrete book, Rapel,
from Autumn 1963.
His
contribution to POTH
14
(1965)
is, on one level, a play on colour-object associations. The 'correct'
pairings - 'blue sky', 'red roof', 'green field - are systematically
rearranged so we have 'blue field', 'green roof' and so on. The
mismatched colours have a long, spear-like dash through them, while
the 'correct' pairs are left intact. Yet how incorrect are these
alternative pairings? A 'red sky' is familiar enough, and it is
possible to imagine a 'blue field' of flowers, or even a 'green roof'
of verdigris. And if we think like Finlay’s beloved fauvists, then
all manner of colour-object associations become possible. The reader
is therefore invited to contemplate the poem on a visual and semiotic
level. This extends to the poem’s form, which, in its
unconventional arrangement of the text, recalls the open-field
poetics of Black Mountain. In a mimetic concrete poem, we might
expect to see the 'sky' at the top of the page, with the 'roof' and
'field' below, so as to represent a picturesque landscape. Indeed,
Finlay does just that, placing 'red sky' on the first line and so on.
However, he confuses matters by, for example, placing 'red roof' on
the fifth line, with 'green sky' to its right on the line below. As a
result, the poem becomes a cubist landscape, its features seen from
multiple angles. What at first appears to be an inscrutable
arrangement of words and dashes is revealed to be a highly
sophisticated play on linguistic and visual signs in poetry and art.
In
parallel to POTH,
Finlay
produced a number of innovative poem-objects for Wild Hawthorn Press,
from postcard and poster poems, to kinetic books and fold-out
standing poems. He would take these poem-objects a step further,
however, with the outdoor works he produced with a number of
collaborators. In 1967, the Finlays moved to Stonypath, where he
would begin work on the garden which later became Little Sparta. It
seems appropriate then that the final POTH
(number
25,
1967) was
devoted to the kind of epigrammatic one-word poems Finlay would later
inscribe on stone, wood and metal. This sub-genre of the short poem
was a Finlay invention, a zen-like distillation of the monostich, or
one line poem. They are also related to concrete, their shape and
layout contributing to their overall effect. The title of the poem
could be of any length, but they were to be set out in a particular
way. Their form, as we see below, is very much a model of order:
The
Boat’s Blueprint
Water
Placed
in the centre of the page, surrounded by negative space, the form
achieves the openness Finlay talks of. Like his concrete poems,
Finlay’s one-word poems are an invitation. The test of these poems
was, for Finlay, whether they were memorable and resonant. This
example certainly achieves such an aim. As Finlay explained himself,
'the shape of the boat is determined by the nature of water, or he
who understands water may calculate the appearance of the boat;
further, water is blue, water is blue print (on white stones), water
is clear and has lines on it, like a blueprint...'
As
Finlay commented in a letter to Ernst Jandl, one of several poets he
invited to contribute to the one-word POTH,
the form
has 'haiku-brevity, without reading like a pseudo-Japanese poem. Or
in another way, it is very close to the classical Latin epitaph or
epigram'. Or, indeed, the Poundian epigram, or William Carlos
Williams short poem. It should come as no surprise, then, that
American poets responded enthusiastically to Finlay’s request, with
Ronald Johnson, Jerome Rothenberg, Jonathan Williams and Aram Saroyan
among the contributors. Concrete poets, from Britain to Brazil, also
submitted, as well as poets known for more traditional forms such as
the Scots George Mackay Brown and Douglas Young. It seems appropriate
that Gael Turnbull, who played such a pivotal role in Finlay’s
development, is also among the contributors to the final POTH.
Concrete
influenced Finlay’s approach to the visual presentation of poetry
in a number of ways, and the later issues of POTH
'became the epitome' of the magazine, as Alec Finlay writes, 'each a
unified design'. These numbers might not have achieved the total
integration of meaning, form and design that Finlay’s innovative
kinetic and sequential poem-books did, but they do represent a move
away from the miscellany of the magazine, towards the unified form of
the artists’ book.
Unlike Migrant,
POTH did
adhere to basic standards of quality publishing. Until issue 15, POTH
used the
same basic layout, with a typeset masthead and minimal use of
illustrations or colour. It was only with the advent of photo-offset
printing technology that Finlay could fully experiment with modern
design styles and illustrations. The range of design styles in those
later issues is dazzling, from austere neues typographie to the
graceful line-drawings and calligraphy of the Scottish painter Margot
Sandeman. The English artist John Furnival was an important
collaborator, lending his versatile talents to some of the most
richly illustrated issues. POTH
18 (1966)
is a collaboration between the American poet and artist Ad Reinhardt
and the optical artist Bridget Riley, and each page shows his
beautifully handwritten text wrapped around her large, stylised
zeros.
POTH's
eclecticism should not be confused with a lack of direction or
discrimination. Finlay did have strong connections with particular
schools, but, as Alec Finlay writes the 'generous principles' of the
small press revolution 'had a more lasting impact than any particular
variant of the avant-garde'. POTH
played a crucial role in his development as a poet and artist, as he
absorbed new forms, experimented with the visual presentation of
poetry, and developed his particular blend of the pastoral, the
classical and the avant-garde. Rural imagery and folk forms became a
vehicle for innovation, while concrete poetry lead Finlay off the
page and into the environmental art of Little Sparta. In its own
playful, discursive manner, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
was both
a manifesto and a laboratory. Or, as a one-word poem might have it
(with apologies to IHF):
The
Poet’s Blueprint
poth
Selected
bibliography and further reading
The
full run of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
is
available on Ubuweb. http://ubu.com/vp/index.html
Abrioux,
Yves. Ian
Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer. Reaktion
Books, 1994.
Cockburn,
Ken with Finlay, Alec. The
Order of Things: An Anthology of Scottish sound, pattern and concrete
poems.
Pocketbooks,
2001.
Finlay,
Ian Hamilton. The
Dancers Inherit the Party: Early Poems, Stories and Plays.
Ed.
Ken Cockburn. Polygon, 2004.
Finlay,
Ian Hamilton Finlay. Selections.
Ed. Alec
Finlay. University of California Press, 2012.
McGonigal, James. Beyond
The Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan. Sandstone
Press, 2010.
Morgan,
Edwin. Essays.
Carcanet, 1975.
Price,
Richard. “Migrant the Magnificent.” PN
Review
33.4 (March-April 2007).
<http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=2948>.
1
For an excellent analysis of this poem, and concrete poetry in
general, see Susan Howe's essay 'The End of Art'.
