Pete,

yes what interests me is the lack of classifiable participation... it
strikes me that participation in a positive and unabashed pomo is an
American, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E phenomenon. Finlay however was working with
ideas of procedural or superimposed form so early that he's worth a
look... whether you think that he escaped from concrete, or developed it,
as Tony Lopez said here (hello Tony, remember meeting in a boozer in
Holborn?) - I think both escaped and developed - he was doing sculpted,
sandblasted, inscribed, and floating poems from 1966 onwards... Concrete,
late late modernism, was still stuck on a Pound-Fenollosa idea of the poem
as iconic - which, in reading haiku etc. as replete, fixed, ultra-visible,
which is, as they used to say, classically orientalist. IHF
instead went into images of the social which were ironically fixed at a
certain stage - the contingent humorously sculpted into the permanent.
This brings together the 'natural' Enlightenment social forms, of which
nations used to be made, the violence which makes them, and ultimately
the deconstruction which reads them. Thus, the sculptures of St-Juste, the
guillotine as a model of order, the battleship bird tables at
Stonypath, etc.

Yeh I'm not sure he's an icon here at all... there's a recent collection
of criticism called Wood Notes Wild which relies very heavily on visual
art critics; their contributions are the best, which is telling. There's
a certain amount of dross in it, unfortunately, largely from Scottish
cultural critics struggling to cope, and feeling panicky in an
interdisciplinary envirnoment. This makes me think that really, the
avant-garde is not such an outdated idea. Try Heroic Emblems, 1977,
compare it with later American langpo.

I think, tho' I'm not sure, that IHF may not be well enough to receive
visitors at Stonypath now. If you're serious about going and you can
wheedle money out of some institution, you should speak
to his son Alec who lives here in Edinburgh, I can tell you how to get in
touch. Meanwhile I think I might stop whining on about IHF for the moment;
there are so many other things to whine on about. Pete, ideas about
journals for short American publications on IHF? Someone steered me
towards Flashpoint on Web del Sol and a reply to an article there looks on
the cards, but I may manage to squeeze out another...

Thanks for feedback. Chris, make yourself heard mate.

Michael



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