The
Peter Finch Interview with Ian Davidson & Zoe Skoulding
Peter Finch works in both traditional and experimental
forms and is a regular performer on the reading circuit. In the
sixties and seventies he edited the ground-breaking literary magazine,
Second Aeon, exhibited visual poetry internationally and toured
with sound poet Bob Cobbing. From the early seventies until the
late nineties he was treasurer of ALP (the Association of Little
Presses). Between 1975 and 1998 he ran the Arts Council of Wales's
specialist Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. In 1998 he took up his current
post with the Welsh Academy. He runs The Academi, The Welsh National
Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers.
He has published more
than 20 books of poetry including Food, Useful & Poems For
Ghosts (Seren), Antibodies (Stride) and The Welsh Poems (Shearsman).
His New & Selected Later Poems is forthcoming from Seren in
2007.
His prose books include
a number of critical guides including How To Publish Your Poetry
and How To Publish Yourself (Allison & Busby) He also compiles
the poetry section of Macmillan's annual Writer's Handbook and
the self-publishing section for A&C Black's Writers' &
Artists' Yearbook. He is a regular book reviewer and writes articles
on Cardiff, Wales and the business of poetry. His poetry and criticism
is widely published in magazines and anthologies.
Ian Davidson is a lecturer at the University of Wales, Bangor.
His poetry collections include: Harsh (Spectacular Diseases),
Human Remains and Sudden Movements (West House), At a Stretch
(Shearsman), No Way Back (West House) and As if Only (Shearsman).
His poems have also appeared in magazines such as Poetry Wales,
New Welsh Review, Chicago Review, Shearsman, The Gig, and Masthead.
Zoe Skoulding teaches creative writing at the University of Wales,
Bangor. Her work has been included in various anthologies and
translated into Slovak, Bosnian and Bulgarian. She has been involved
in several cross-media projects, and is currently working on poetry
and soundscape with the psychogeographical ensemble Parking Non-Stop.
Her collaboration with Ian Davidson, with whom she also co-edits
the literary magazine Skald, has extended from poetry to film
and performance. Her most recent collection is The Mirror Trade
(Seren).
Q: Can you tell us about when you started to think of yourself
as a writer and something about the context in which that happened?
A: It's so long ago it gets hazy in the mists of time but there
was a distinct moment when I worked this out. I'd decided that
what I wanted to do was to be a singer, and this was in the time
of the singer/songwriters, the Phil Ochs and the Bob Dylans; and
what you did was expressed yourself by turning up with a guitar
and sang things. So I went out and bought the guitar, I bought
the harmonica harness, and put the harmonica in it and the kazoo
in next to that and got some bottle caps and tied them to my feet
with rubber bands so I could clip clop with the rhythm as a one
man band would do, and set about being a singer/songwriter. Trouble
was I couldn't really play and my voice was hopeless. In fact
I was so bad I got thrown out of a number of the disreputable
pubs I sang at, and I came to the conclusion I couldn't really
be a singer songwriter after all. I was left, instead, with the
thing that I could do which was the writing of the lyrics. So
I did a bit more of this, and tried sending lyrics off to singers
I admired, and there was deafening silence from every approach
I made, including the one I made to Willie Dixon, Howling Wolf's
bass player, who, when I met him after a concert in Bristol, nodded
his head at me, took the manuscript and screwed it into a ball
and shoved it into his pocket. I eventually realised that writing
songs as songs wasn't the way forward. Songs as poetry might be
better. It was what poets had always done, wasn't it?
Q: Can you tell us anything about the literary context of your
work at that time?
A: The work of significance from the 60s for me, that was around
in Cardiff, where I was brought up, came to me not from the work
from school or college or from officially sanctioned government
literature departments but from America, the Beat Generation:
Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, and so on, the
writers who wrote about their amazingly exciting lives. It was
totally different from more traditional work I'd encountered before,
completely different from, for example, Walter de la Mare, and
I realised there was something in all this which connected poetry
with real life, my life. There was the feeling that you could
do what you wanted to do with poetry, you could push at boundaries.
Ginsberg, for example, had decided that what he wanted to do was
invent a new form and would write out in a single line what he
could speak with one breath. When the breath ran out that would
be where the line would end, and he had these big long lines that
came in blocks, and this seemed to me to be a new and very exciting
approach. Ginsberg had just invented this, plucked it out of nowhere,
and moved ahead. I thought "I want to do this". The
Liverpool Scene arrived, and with it the merging of music and
poetry with Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and others.
I eventually met Adrian Henri, who was also a painter and the
most interesting, I thought, of the three. We became friends and
he pointed me in some new directions. That was the very early
period when I was just starting in Cardiff.
Q: Those influences were coming from outside, from Liverpool
and America. Did those places seem a long way away at the time?
A: Well America was a long way away at the time. And American
culture was very influential. Anything American was first, and
anything British a pale imitation. And if it was Welsh you just
didn't hear about it. That's not the situation today. But I then
turned my attention to the whole business of getting published.
There were very few outlets for new writers, and particularly
if you wrote outside of the dominant pastoral English line of
poetry. I decided that since no one else would publish me I would
do it myself. so I started a magazine: Second Aeon. Issue 1 contained
something like 90% of work by Peter Finch and 10% by my friend
down the road. By Issue 2, I'd decided I needed other contributors
and this opened me up to new areas of creative activity in the
UK.
Q: The magazine Second Aeon became very influential. Do you
want to tell us something about its development?
A: It ran to 21 issues. The first issue was 6 pages and a cover,
and the final issue was around 300 pages and perfect bound. As
the magazine went on, it developed a circle and we began to put
on readings in south Wales which attracted other writers, and
by the time I got to issues 3, 4 and 5 I was in touch with writers
from all over the UK, and had managed to tap a very small grant
from the Welsh Arts Council. I had also become associated with
writers centred around both the Poetry Society, in its revolutionary
phase, and the London Musicians Collective. All this was a tremendous
stimulus to what I did next. This was the point at which schizophrenia
arrived. In Wales, we celebrate our schizophrenia. We have north/south
schizophrenia, we have urban/rural schizophrenia. We permanently
seem unable to work out who we are. When two people from Wales
get together they start talking about their origins. I'd met quite
a number of writers of significance from Wales, who were then
known as the Anglo-Welsh: Harri Webb, John Tripp, John Idris Jones,
Herbert Williams, Sally Roberts Jones, John Ormond and others
all of whom had attended or taken part in readings I'd put on.
Or if they hadn't done that, then they'd contributed to the magazine.
I'd also got to know Geraint Jarman who introduced me to a range
of Welsh language writers. All this material began to appear in
Second Aeon -- American, London metropolitan, Welsh. At the same
time I also found myself attracted to the work of the more outlandish
experimental writers in the UK at that time: Dom Sylvester Houedard,
Nick Zurburg, Bob Cobbing, Andrew Lloyd, Henri Chopin, and others,
who became a tremendous influence on me because they demonstrated
a completely different way of handling poetry. On the one hand
there was the writing I encountered in Wales, where in some way
you had to have a plot, where a piece of writing began, went through
some story, event or sequence, and had a culmination, a revelation,
or a resolution. On the other hand writers such as Henri Chopin
would talk instead about the "micro-particles of language"
and the way that process was more important than content. Not
the beginning, not the end, but the way you got there. So I found
myself between these two polar opposites. I decided to bring the
one that was from outside Wales, the modernist notion of making
poetry from the things around you (text, speech, things found),
to Wales and tried it out. The result was total derision. Not
amongst my immediate contemporaries, but from the wider Welsh
cultural world. Comments such as "monkeys jumping on typewriters
would produce better work than this" was on an early pamphlet
of mine by, ironically, someone who, thirty years on has been
seen praising my achievement in the pages of the UK nationals.
Q: Could you say something a little more about the work of
Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing for those here who are not familiar
with their work?
A: Henri Chopin was, as his name suggests, French while Cobbing
was, as his name suggests, English. And they used to kid each
other; Cobbing would call Chopin 'Henry Chopping' and Chopin would
call Cobbing 'Bob Cobin'. The field they both worked in was what
later became known as sound text composition. They would work
on the notion that you could make poetry by extending language
beyond meaning. Chopin experimented with tape recorders. He speeded
up and slowed down voices. He used objects such as the stiffener
for a shirt collar to manipulate the recorder tape head. And then
he made assemblages of these through multi-tracking, inversion,
repetition, cut and splice. Cobbing discovered you actually didn't
need a machine at all and worked by letting his voice imitate
the technology. So while Chopin would appear on stage with a tape
recorder and microphone, Cobbing would turn up and perform his
verse ad lib. Cobbing progressed to the position where he declared
that he now longer needed a printed text. He would read (perform
might be a better word), for example, a pile of stones. He would
look at them and find letter and word shapes and vocalise those.
Each progressive stage of all this takes us further and further
from the written text. By contrast, in Wales, things appeared
to be returning further and further back to the roots of written
text, the revival of strict metres and arguments over how Dylan
Thomas had used Cynghanedd (and, indeed, if he had) and how the
past influenced the present and so on and how all this could be
progressed.
Q: You mentioned early protest singers as an influence and
then your involvement in the alternative London scene. All these
were politically motivated. Were you? And if so have you sustained
that political motivation?
A: The politics that derived from the 60s, the cold war, genuine
fear of annihilation, the Cuba crisis, and I remember lying down
in a park fearful that I could hear bombs above, the threat from
the east. Those things are not relevant now. But they were very
real then. Those concerns were echoed in the work of the Beat
generation writers. Ginsberg in particular, was, for example,
involved in surrounding the Pentagon as an act of peace, filling
guns with flowers, and so on. It became part of the culture. If
you were alive in the 60s you had to be dissatisfied with how
you were being governed. The process that Ginsberg demonstrated
with his breath pattern derived long lines, taught me that conventional
techniques are not the only ones. The second part of your question
asks, I suppose, if the politics and the motivation have got lost
over time. The simple answer is yes. Since the sixties writers
have shown surprising restraint in what they say, but then again
that might be true of culture as a whole.
Q: Can you talk a little more specifically about the techniques
you used in the poem A Well Proportioned Panorama and how you
take some of the techniques of early modernism such as the cut
up and use it in a high-tech way.
A: One of the things that's happened to my writing in later periods
has been the realisation that there is an audience. When I worked
with Cobbing and Chopin the audience was somehow incidental to
what you did. I remember Yoko Ono, who was due to appear at a
theatre in Cardiff, sending instead a large photograph of herself.
This thing - it was big, six foot by six foot - was wheeled onto
centre stage and left there. We all sat and stared in silence.
It was an hour at least before people began to drift off. I then
began to think about how a consideration of audience could be
integrated into performances, especially performances which used
modernist techniques. In recent times I've tried to make an engagement
with the audience become part of what I do. A Well Proportioned
Panorama uses cut up techniques. Quite early on I came across
some translation software, I think it was on a cover-mounted disc
on a computer magazine, and I installed it on my home machine.
It worked but the results were usually imperfect on a number of
fronts. Such software is enormously literal. Later a rival company
released a better suite and I obtained that too. Still imperfect
but less so. I then sent a piece of R. S. Thomas text back and
forth between the two translation engines. The later engine, the
better one, would translate the words into French and then I'd
return these back into English through the poorer engine. Then
I'd send the resulting text back round the loop again. On each
journey randomness would intervene and the text would move progressively
further and further from its origin. I've used this technique
before. I wrote a poem for the late Eric Mottram by photocopying
his entire collected poems onto a single sheet of paper and then
photocopying copy onto copy which ended up with a black blur looking
like a blurred representation of the landscape of north Wales
- a place Mottram loved to walk in. This was the same idea. Let
the machine progress the piece. There was, however, human intervention
in A Well Proportioned Panorama in so much that I chose some lines
over others in particular, to bring out humour.
Q: You say you think of audience but you also place demands
on the reader don't you?
A: I do. I think that if you're trying something out and pushing
at the boundaries, to see what you can do with a poem and keep
it as a poem then some things will be readily comprehensible and
some won't be. I think it's being fair to an audience to give
them things they can engage with immediately while at the same
time giving them things they might find more of a challenge. The
trick is to avoid impenetrability and get the balance right.
Q: There is, of course, a long tradition of poets walking and
writing about their experiences. What particular ideas are you
picking up on or rejecting in these poems?
A: I began this, what is now quite a long sequence, with the Wordsworthian
notion that out there is an untrammelled wilderness to be engaged
with. I'd also been meeting other writers and talking about whether
there were any subjects that simply could not be written about.
Subjects rarely seen in verse. We would challenge each other.
Poems about death - easy. Poems about pipeline regulations - slightly
harder. It struck me that the activity of walking might be something
I'd like to write about. I set myself the task of composing a
sequence. This was at a time of much literary consideration of
place: poets such as Allen Fisher and Chris Torrance, for example,
who had begun creating a series of works which engaged with place
in different ways.
Q: One of the things that strike me with the walking poems
are the way in which you distrust the text. You're always throwing
guide books into brooks or coming across signs that send you the
wrong way.
A: Part of it is simply to put humour in the poems. But of course
distrust of the text is vital in all matters, and I have a general
distrust of guide books which rarely give you all the information
you want.
Q: Where does the form of these poems come from?
A: I was interested in speed, in getting across the idea of movement.
I abandoned punctuation and began to put line breaks in places
you wouldn't expect them to keep the pace moving and the words
close together. Those were the formal considerations.
Q: It also gives a physical sense of negotiating the landscape.
You also include some elements that other poets might leave out.
A: Yes, that is entirely right. And I try to record the walk as
soon as possible after the experience so the detail gets in. That's
pretty true, actually, of much of what I do. Use speed and then
reconsider later. Didn't Wordsworth actually say that poetry was
all a bit like that?
Salvaged
by Finch from the Way Back Machine in August, 2024