Further to... File's Residual Definitions -- by Beyond the Pale

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File--

Your Residual Definitions are still-points arrested from the bewildering perceptual flow of the moment that provide, with their multiple-take depths and resonances, lovely opportunity for slow reflection and contemplation. This would seem a high form of art indeed, the opposite and annihilation of such nano-cerebral efflorescences as, say, the more sordid of football chants.

Habitual resort to Zeph's marvelously useful Other Stuff archive galleries having familiarized us with the extremely interesting Pseuds picture-poem tradition of which your earlier works in this genre appear to be the prototype, the extension of that tradition in these new works is very much to thank you for, File.

Wee but not twee, pithy but not pathological, these works may stand as mute testimony for the value of the complex manifolds of the aesthetic in the face of the simplistic and/or clinical. (Thinking again here--as, like the hippopotami in your kitchen, once they've visited, who can forget them?--of those Spurs XII chants.)

File, I'm certain this connection won't come as any revelation to you, but when I look at and think about this picture-poem mode of yours, I'm taken back happily to the work of the wonderful Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), whose "concrete poems", picture-poems, postcard-poems and other brilliant marryings of the diverse dimensions of the verbal with the visual (and later on, the sculptural as well) formed a precious part of my own education in poetry.

How vividly and unforgettably Finlay's brilliantly compressed figurations live on in the mind, with their immediate moment always essentially "concrete" and palpable, yet their reverberations rippling into philosophical text (in which they are often rooted) and literary and historical context (with which they frequently engage).

For me, your work moves out from Finlay's into a new millennium--a context fraught with new challenges, but also rich in new possibilities, particularly in the realm of computer arts, where your own specific procedures are perhaps most interesting to me.

IHF called himself "in a wee homemade way, a sophisticated person," and "a wee, old-fashioned poet."

He also called himself, resorting to his native Scots, "thrawn" (stubborn, uncompromising). In the official literary culture of Scotland in the years of his emergence as an artist he remained something between unknown and scorned. And indeed that was a beyond-the-pale status of which, like so many deeply independent grand creators, he made good artistic use. His against-the-grain stance as a maker supplied him an energy of resistance that allowed him to move from the poetic realms of his early mentor Hugh McDiarmuid into a cosmopolitan and international area of production wherein he was both an acknowledged player and a strong influence.

I first heard about Finlay's work in the early Sixties from the American poet Robert Creeley, who was at that time already paying close attention. Finlay founded Wild Hawthorn Press (to be the source, over several decades, of myriad wondrous poem-cards, "kinetic booklets", poster poems, etc.), and published his first book of poems, The Dancers Inherit the Party, in 1960, with American poets Creeley and Robert Duncan providing epigraphs. He would soon (1961) found the very interesting magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, titled after a Creeley line. To Creeley's generation of American poets, IHF's work remained the most significant being done in the British Isles.

And it had determinative influence upon the next generation as well, especially in the late 60s, when it was creatively morphed--psychedelicized might be a better term-- into the concrete-poetry style innovated by Aram Saroyan. A microscopic attention upon the word or words isolated in visual space, producing works like Saroyan's "eyeye", was the culmination of the Finlay method as had been first illustrated in such wee poems from The Dancers Inherit the Party as "One Orange Arm of the World's Largest Windmill/ autumn" or "The sea, I think, is lazy,/ It just obeys the moon."

From that latter example one understands IHF had not only a painter's eye but the ear of a musician--and in the tradition of the experimental "sound poem", as well, his work plays a major part.

And he is also to be remembered as that rare strain of political poet, the non-speechifying kind. Fishing boats often provided his "material", but equally often it was a historical subject--most interestingly, perhaps, the French Revolution. And I think of his Wild Hawthorn Press poem card with a drawing of a pansy metamorphosing into a panzer.

For those interested, here are a few selected Finlay picture-poem links:

wild hawthorn press: jan 09 offers:
http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com/January_2009_Offers.html
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"poverty, pitted with larks"--in neon:
http://www.dailyserving.com/art/Ian-Hamilton-Finlay-3-23-07.jpg
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neon poems from exhibition 2007 victoria miro gallery london (one year anniv of ihf's' death):
"diamond-studded fish-net"/ "water-cooled watercress":
http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/_376/
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poster-poem: le circus, 1964 (tate gallery)
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=78421&searchid=9248

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