Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (Volume 8) (Poets for the Millennium)

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique “poem of place” in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (Poets for the Millennium) (Volume 8)

Arts & Photography

Finlay, Alec

Finlay, Ian Hamilton Hamilton

History & Criticism

University of California Press

The term "without day" refers to the "adjournment" of the final sitting of the Scottish Parliament in 1707 to some future but unspecified date, "sine die" - (without day). "Without Day" was an open competition, with information circulated across Scotland and internationally, inviting proposals for artworks, performances and other interventions relating to the new Scottish parliament. 100 contributions are included from writers, artists and architects, whose number include Douglas Gordon, Robert Crawford, David Bellingham, Ian Stephen, Richard Price, herman de vries, Tom Pow, Halla Beloff, Gael Turnbull and Pavel Buchler among others. The fact that these proposals are "without day" and will never be realized has allowed imaginations to take flight, and the resultant provocations, critiques, and utopias provide a springboard into Scotland's postdevolution and postmillennial future. "Without Day" comes with a mini-CD of a new audio work by William Furlong, comprising recordings made around Scotland on May 6, 1999 - the day of the first elections to the new Scottish parliament - in which people discuss their aspirations, hopes and dreams for the future.

Without Day: Proposals for a New Scottish Parliament

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Polygon

The Libraries of Thought and Imagination celebrates books, libraries and biblophilia. Artists and writers were invited to select and write about an imaginary bookshelf and consider the different characteristics of private and public libraries. Contributions range from the way individual books are presented, catalogued and stored, to imaginative, explorations of the library as a historical and philosophical model, a reification of thought. Written and photographic essays discuss a number of important library projects and book interventions by internationally renowned artists.

The Libraries of Thought & Imagination: An Anthology of Books and Bookshelves (Pocketbooks (Series), 12.)

Poetry. TURNING TOWARD LIVING is a collection of circle poems written by Alec Finlay and other contributors. Alec Finlay is an artist and a poet, recently artist in residence at THE BALTIC (Gateshead). His press Morning Star (1990 -2003) has published more than 50 titles. Alec coordinates the renga platform, a shared writing project: poetrycircus, a series of readings and performances and a new collaborative piece entitled Sewing Circle, as part of his residency at the BALTIC. Check out other SPD titles by Platform Projects including MESOSTIC HERBARIUM and THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS.

Turning Toward Living: Circle Poems

Morning Star Editions

Poetry. Multimedia. "MESOSTIC HERBARIUM is an album of phytological and mycological poems collected from people in many countries...the mesostic is guided by certain rules: choose a plant, its name gives a stem; compose a poem, one word per line...MESOSTIC HERBARIUM relates to orders of knowledge, in particular botany...Through these poems we can gauge a wide-ranging cultural vision of nature, for there is an anthropology at work here..."--Alec Finlay. Includes CD-ROM of WORDWOOD, a collection of animated mesostic poetry by pupils at schools in Durham Sunderland Region and Perthshire. Check out other SPD titles by Platform Projects including THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS and TURNING TOWARD LIVING.

Mesostic Herbarium

Poetry. THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS collects questions asked by children aged 3-5 years, as compiled by Alec Finlay. The book is made in part by Creative Partnerships which works to give school children throughout England the opportunity to develop their potential, their ambition, their creativity and imagination through sustainable partnerships with creative and cultural organizations, businesses and individuals. Check out other SPD titles by Platform Projects including MESOSTIC HERBARIUM and TURNING TOWARD LIVING.

The Book of Questions

Poetry. Non-fiction. SHARED WRITING: RENGA DAYS is an anthology of essays and poetry of participants in renga, the 1000 year old Japanese art form of shared writing, and a companion to Verse Chain: Sharing Renga and Haiku. Illustrating the mushrooming of the renga platform project through residencies and tours around the British Isles, SHARED WRITING offers one hundred verse hyakuin renga and photographs of renga days. The intention of this work is to inspire your own linked-verse poems. "It is generous and inclusive . . . In that circumstance of shared place and time it does seem to be a sharing of pains and joys and as such maybe, or certainly, ceremonially" Angus Reid. Alec Finlay, a renga master who conceived the wooden platform where participants commune for renga days, authored this book.

Shared Writing: Renga Days

Platform Projects

Cultural Writing. CD + Booklet. Music. SIREN is the fourth in a series of multimedia projects entitled "bookscapes," created by Scottish artist, poet, and publisher Alec Finlay. SIREN explores sounds created by both humans and their surrounding environment. Collaborating with Chris Watson, Finlay recorded a man and woman simultaneously singing Tim Buckley's "Song to a Sailor" at dawn on two piers in the harbor of a North East English coastal village. SIREN contains the video, photographic, and audio documentation of this event. In this and the other publications in the "bookscapes" series, Finlay strives to shift the reader's focus from the single pages of a book to the open process of reading between word, image, and animation.

Siren

Watson, Chris

Dtarnaccee Dmaunsciec

Hodson, Andrew

Music

Be My Reader is a trove of texts made and found by Finlay over the past two decades, touching on philosophy, landscape, dance, football, travel and technology. Affectionate, celebratory and vulnerable by turns, it includes such key texts as his popular homage to Robert Creeley 'I Know A Poem', the long poem-mapping of the Wittgenstein Hut in Norway, and poems which emerged from art projects for civic spaces and landscapes, all interspersed with pitch-perfect renderings of off-key phrases overheard and chanced upon. Formally adventurous and restlessly curious, Be My Reader is a unique confluence of contemporary experimental and generative forms together with the lyric voice.

Be My Reader

Shearsman Books

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Books by Finlay, Alec