The Poet’s Blueprint: The Pastoral and the Avant-Garde in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor.Old.Tired.Horse

Abstract

This article examines the Scottish poet-artist Ian Hamilton Finlay’s 1960s little magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse., locating it within Scottish and international contexts, and analysing its role in the development of Finlay’s work. The magazine opened Scotland up to new international developments, rejecting the nationalist dogma of the Scottish Renaissance movement led by Hugh MacDiarmid. It also built upon the networks established by such poet-publishers as Cid Corman, Robert Creeley and Gael Turnbull, making an important contribution to the international poetry scene of the 1960s. Often associated with the concrete poetry movement, POTH was in fact open to a number of avant-gardes as well as more traditional forms. Out of this eclecticism came Finlay’s unique blend of the pastoral, the classical and the avant-garde, while the magazine’s experiments with the visual presentation of poetry anticipated Finlay’s later work.