Jerry Rothenberg & I have put IHF into the second volume of POEMS FOR THE
MILLENNIUM (whihc, btw, shld be available in GB any day now). Here's the
commentary we wrote to go with his pages -- which may be of interest to the
discussion -- Pierre
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.
(I.H.F.)
While still emerging from a poetry of small structures. written in the
dialect(s) of urban Glasgow, he described himself to one of us (circa 1961)
as "just a wee poet who writes wee poems." Shortly thereafter, as an
offshoot at first of children's word games he had been devising, he created
a new textart with affinities to the internationally based concrete poetry
movement of the later 1950s (see above, page 000). Minimal in its verbal
means but marked by prolific ventures into publication, Finlay's poetry
developed into a public (inscriptional) art — its most striking expression
(& one of the most genre-breaking works of poetry of the twentieth
century), a "classical" garden & temple (Stoneypath, later called Little
Sparta) at his home in rural Scotland. What is evident throughout his
later work is that its pastoral facade is the cover for what he understands
-- &, unlike many others, fears -- as untamed "savage nature," exemplified
in modern warfare & in "the notorious Nazi-German organization, the SS ...
equated with nature and ... [signifying] ... the ultimnate 'wildness' on a
scale whose other, 'cultivated' extreme is the eighteenth century." The
objects & inscriptions at Little Sparta & elsewhere are replete, therefore,
with machine-gun-toting gods & goddesses, bird feeders in the shape of
aircraft carriers, corinthian columns facing double-columned guillotines,
revolutionary maxims from Saint-Just & Robespierre, a "Siegfried Line" with
laundry hanging from it (like the famous British war-song), & the double
lightning bolts of the Waffen SS above the entrance to a classic grotto or
intercalated, still more pointedly, in the Italian word oSSo (= bone)
engraved onto a block of (classic) marble. Finlay's later success as a
visual/verbal artist -- conceptual not hands-on -- has been marked by
recurrent controversy over just such (necessary) symbols.
--
=========================================
pierre joris 6 madison place albany ny 12202
tel: (518) 426 0433 fax: (518) 426 3722
email:[log in to unmask]
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What often prevents us from giving ourselves over to
a single vice is that we have several of them."
— La Rochefoucauld
“All my life I’ve heard
one makes many”
— Charles Olson
==========================================
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|