Poet, psychogeographer, and hero of the Welsh avant garde, Peter Finch is a writer for whom the phrase ‘force of nature’ could have been invented. Come to think of it, he probably invented it himself, or spliced it together in a cut-up. Now in his mid-seventies, the shaven headed septuagenarian feels more culturally relevant than ever, not least because of his verve and iconoclasm. If, like him, you’ve an appetite for literary subversion, you’ll find his double volume Collected Poems good enough to eat.

The books begin at the beginning, so I will too. Like so many emerging poets in the 60s, Finch was inspired by Ginsberg’s “Howl”’, together with The Mersey Sound poets, McGough, Patten, and Henri. Their writing gave him permission to exist outside the literary establishment, and instilled a desire to create his own poetry magazine, the Second Aeon, which launched in 1966. Initially little more than a showcase for his own work, it ran for 21 issues, becoming hugely influential. It brought him into contact with a broad range of writers, including concrete poet Sylvester Houédard, proto-postmodernist Nicholas Zurbrugg, and sound poets like Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing. Their influence can be seen in Finch’s early works like Antarktika, ‘the visual score for, and transcription from a sound-text composition made on a stereophonic cassette recorder’, and Blats, ‘a collection of none poems’, whose composition involves chance, which, Finch reminds us in his original introduction, ‘is the natural order of things’. Such experimentation is well represented in both volumes of Collected Poems, which are characterised by Seren’s high production values. One of my favourite visual poems from volume one, for instance, is “Walking”, a tribute to the poet Eric Mottram created by photocopying Mottram’s Selected Poems onto a single sheet and then manipulating the text. As Andrew Taylor tells us, ‘Finch then inserts Mottram himself into the new Snowdonia-like textscape as a red dot’. In the original publication, Finch avoided the cost of colour printing by adding the red dots by hand, but Seren has a bigger budget and a broader palette, and Mottram enjoys a more permanent position on the printed page. It’s a striking image that I’ve looked at so many times that my copy now falls open to reveal a red dot ascending a mountain of semi-obliterated text.

Experimentation pervades both volumes, but sits alongside a wealth of accessible material. In one interview Finch says that, when it comes to a poet’s relationship with the public, ‘The trick is to avoid impenetrability and get the balance right’, and I think he manages to do that in much of his writing. While he frequently covers difficult territory, and some of his work is cryptic in the extreme, you can’t help but be struck by the creative intelligence behind it, and the sense that he has our best interests at heart. Bob Cobbing had a word for Finch’s aesthetic – ‘verbivocovisual’ – which is appropriate in that, while you often need to see and/or hear his work in order to fully appreciate it, much can be consumed in the usual way. Indeed, the irreverence and intertextuality of Finch’s visual poems and cut-ups can be seen in his more conventional writing. Take, for example, “All I Need Is Three Plums”, which, as you may guess from the title, is in playful dialogue with William Carlos Williams. It opens:

I have sold your jewellery collection,
which you kept in a box, forgive me.
I am sorry, but it came upon me
and the money was so inviting, so sweet
and so cold.

I like the way this exposes the moral implications of Williams’s “This is Just To Say”, forcing us to reflect on the nature of trust, theft, transgression and forgiveness. It transforms the impact of the speaker’s plea to be forgiven, and the language employed to justify his behaviour. It closes:

Please forgive me, I have taken the money
you have been saving in the ceramic pig
and spent it on drink, so sweet and inviting.
This is just to say I am in the pub
where I have purchased the fat guy from
Merthyr's entire collection of scratch and win.
All I need now is three delicious plums.

Forgive me, sweetie,
these things just happen.

I love the jokey references to the original, like the delightful reworking of the word ‘sweet’ in the final stanza, ‘Forgive me, sweetie’; it exposes the duplicity and latent hostility of Williams’s speaker, inviting us re-examine his professed contrition, reminding us that confessions are narratives designed to excuse the penitent.

Finch’s attitude to the literary canon is gloriously subversive, as can also be seen in his text message reworking of Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’:

‘N Wst Brdg’:
'nvr saw nvr flt clm so deep!!!
rvr flws at hs sweet wll (own):
Deer GD! vry hses seem slp | |
+ all tht BIG HRT lyng still!’

Again this is indicative of Finch’s playfulness, which is often overtly comic: if you’ve ever seen him read you’ll know that humour frequently combines with his infectious enthusiasm, making for powerful and often hilarious performances.

As a psychogeographer, Finch’s principal interest is Wales, and particularly his beloved Cardiff. He is the author of Real Cardiff 1, 2, and 3, together with Real Wales, among other place-based books, and hundreds of individual poems about the region. Again his poems about place range from the experimental to the conventional; Wales-themed list poems abound, for instance, such as “The City Region”, which lists Cardiff street names, and “Colon” which presents a list of Welsh battles. I’m particularly fond of his Zen Cymru haikus:

This Wales leaks there isn't one
That doesn't
Is there?

We can’t miss the homophonic pun, but there’s more to it than this. To me this poem is quintessentially Finchian, partly because of the humour, and partly because of its unwillingness to be reduced to a single meaning. The implication is that there isn’t a definition of Wales that doesn’t ‘leak’, in the sense that the place will always evade definitive descriptions. Finch persistently works against definition: his writing, just like his favourite subject of Wales, invariably refuses to be pinned down.

In his foreword to the second volume, Ian McMillan relates an anecdote about once inviting Finch to talk to a group of his students. McMillan told Finch that the class needed livening up, which the latter clearly took as a challenge. Having begun by reading a few conventional poems, Finch produced a copy of a Mills and Boon book and began reading from that. As he read he started tearing out the pages and eating them. McMillan considers this ‘a deep examination of the relationship of the writer and the reader, the performer and the audience’, which seems like a fair point. The ultimate meaning of such experiments remains elusive, of course, but the world is better for them. They have driven Finch’s art since the sixties, and while they don’t always find such radical expression as the literal consumption of printed text, they’re rarely predictable, or boring. You might say they’re what make both volumes of Collected Poems good enough to eat, and at close to 1000 pages it’s a copious repast.

This is almost 1,000 pages of poetry, stretching from 1968 until 2021. You might think, why not add a couple of new poems and it could have 2022 on the cover; and of course the answer is that Finch has another book coming out later this year. The man is unstoppable. 

A quick recap if you are new to Finch: the poems range from the formally inventive to the conventionally formal. He is well-known in Wales as an innovator, a surrealist, a relentless experimenter. His collections mash up art, the concrete with the mainstream, the list poem, the poem with no words at all and the downright weird. So to nail him down to a philosophy or an aesthetic seems overly ambitious, but there’s a thread running from his first published work in 1968 through to what he’s going to write tomorrow – things fall apart. His drive is a restlessness, an inability to accept the status quo, a free acknowledgement that everything is in flux and that to deny this or try to impose order on the unorderable is doomed to failure. We don’t want things to fall apart, and the struggle against it is what gives Finch the fuel for his vehicle. 

The abstract work makes us experience this by his refusal to conform to what we might think a poem is. Consider the first line of ‘Politic’, a poem from Math (1996):

The modern is (could be) always (inevitably) historically (mythologised) possibly (certainly) at war (rebuilding) (restructuring) (unplating) with what comes (arrives) (sails) immediately (historically) before (after) it. 

Now, there’s a lot going on in there, but if your first reaction is to find it incomprehensible – don’t worry. Imagine being a surfer. The thrill of surfing is not in trying to control the water; the thrill is in fearing you might fall off. 

More conventional poems explore entropy in more explicit ways. In ‘Roofer’, ‘black sludge everywhere’ and ‘the tar fix to repair / the flat roof fails as I watch it.’ In ‘House Painting’, the narrator decorates a wall whilst new neighbours are ‘eating things on sticks’ whilst ‘thinking how hard it is / to change anything for long’:

We’re there. This is the future.

I wet the brush, 

try again.

Many of the non-narrative poems are ‘about’ order breaking down and stability turning to decay. Sometimes poems falter until the words and then the letters themselves degrade, ending in a static-like hiss. Putting together the Seren collections has involved some heavy-duty excavation; with many of the original pamphlets in extremely limited editions, a long time ago, much has vanished or has slipped down the side of Finch’s sofa. The appeal of the typewritten poem is its imperfections, and in an endnote for ‘Blues,’ the editor explains that the lost Olivetti typewriter originals are recreated with a font designed to mimic its decayed look. 

If most of us are in a battle to impose order on chaos, the corollary for Finch is that we can make a poem out of anything. At the launch a few weeks ago, someone asked Finch his tips for conquering writers’ block. Good question – we’re in expert company here. Stand up. Take a book – ‘this is an old Mills & Boon novel,’ Finch explained, ‘I got it for 5p in a charity shop.’ Rip the book apart – physically destroy it. The pages scatter to the floor. Pick pages up at random. Read out lines that leap out. Stitch them together, and you have a poem. The cut-up technique has had its day, but as a workshop exercise it’s one of many useful things you can learn from watching Finch in action. It’s a jumping-off point for something else, and you won’t know what until you get there. Rather like stretching before exercise, you find you can run further. 

At the end of the launch the more gig-inclined of us found scraps of abandoned Mills & Boon as souvenirs. ‘…kissed Viola elegantly, looking proud and yet modest in some indefinable way,’ mine says. 

Bubbling beneath all of this is Finch’s second theme – the individual’s place in the wider scheme of things. This is the middle eight, if you like, in his rock song. ‘Out at the edge’ sees the poet on a Pembrokeshire headland, looking towards America: ‘but don’t see it. / Mist, distance, earth’s curvature, / or maybe it just isn’t there.’ 

In ‘Mountains: Sheep’ he pauses in the middle of nowhere, annoyed by some graffiti. ‘While I seethe / they stand and shit. / When I go / they stay.’ The world carries on regardless, whether we’re there or not. Finch is touching at the existential here; keep grinding away at this idea and, like the typefaces, our sense of identity, purpose, fades and vanishes. But – as always – it’s done with humour. For someone who might be described as a ‘difficult read’, he is not a difficult read. ‘We communicate largely by the act of communicating,’ he informs us in ‘Talk Talk’. 

Some poetry folk think you can’t be any good if you’re funny, or at least you’re more likely to be a better poet if you’re not funny. Because being good is serious, isn’t it? At the very least, you can’t be both funny and good in the same poem. Finch would disagree. Intelligence means having perspective and having perspective means you have, or should have, a sense of humour. In fact he wouldn’t even disagree; he’d politely demur that there isn’t a discussion to be had. In ‘Lost’, for example, he finds himself looking ‘in my mother’s shed for a missing cat I’ve never seen.’ The set-up is well-observed melancholy. ‘The rain on my back like 1940 and / my father’s hat still on the door.’ The ending conveys loss and a somewhat Pooter-ish isolation in perfectly-pitched, unresolved humour. ‘A cat skits along the bungalow ridge tiles. / Could be the one. Who knows.’ 

On Planet Finch, if you see a random gathering of stones, your mind whirs away kinetically in ways that the stones themselves do not. ‘they could build / a wall, a harbour, couldn’t they? / they don’t’. Only rarely does he drift into the sour. The uncharacteristic ‘Meeting her lover’ vents an anger that does not do the narrator, or us, any good. ‘His car is shit fast he tells me I / couldn’t give a damn.’ He heads quickly back to experimenting, innovating, and we go with him. The second brick in particular sees Finch exploring theories of consciousness, spacetime singularities, gravity and whether or not a clock goes more slowly as it approaches lunchtime. This is not someone who just writes about the view from city bookshops on a rainy day; although there are plenty of those too. 

Anyway, as another critic suggested 15 years ago, Wales is Finch’s adopted land, despite having lived there all his life. His homeland is the international one of Dada, surrealism and collage. You’re going to find poems that will pass you by in these two collections, and you’ll probably even find a few you actively dislike. It doesn’t matter. If you won’t get on a plane because you don’t understand how it works, you’ll never go on an adventure. Plunge in, don’t worry about it too much and let the Finch hop about in front of you, cock its head to one side, pin its beady eye on you and say yes, you might feel a bit challenged when in a sudden flutter I land on your knee – but go with it.

The idea of a 'Collected Poems' has always seemed a scary prospect...  

As in – What? You want to dig out everything I’ve ever completed or abandoned and put them all in a book? Why? Some will be so bad they’ll be embarrassing.

Except it’s the type of thing that usually happens to more accomplished and better known writers than me, and usually when they’re dead, so the truth is there is nothing to be frightened of.

On the opposite side of the experience, reading every poem someone has written might seem a massive and potentially draining task unless you were planning to write an academic thesis.

Even so, I was fascinated by the idea of Peter Finch’s two-volume Collected Poems (Seren, £19.99 each book) given that he had so much of his early work in long out-of-print small magazines – and that he is still alive.

As a kind of preparation, I looked again at Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, published in 1988, three years after his death. It’s illuminating to see how organised and competent a writer he was when he was still so young, though perhaps that’s in part a result of the constraints of his time, in that it was easier to know then where to pitch oneself if you wanted to write poetry and were English. But what did I gain from reading all of those early poems, including one published in a school magazine when Larkin was sixteen? Sadly, the answer is not a lot.

What would Larkin have thought of it? True, he kept meticulously dated notebooks, to the point where an individual poem could be traced over time, but I am not sure that the legendary librarian of Hull University would have approved of every single one of the contents of these personal books being lumped together and offered to the general public as proof, one way or the other, of his historical standing. Perhaps the limit of his intentions in keeping the notebooks was to offer any future students a chance to assess him in terms of an essay here, a thesis there. (Or maybe he’d wanted them thrown out when he had gone.) But the whole lot thrown together for public consumption?

Finch, being alive, at least has been able to control what’s included and what is quietly omitted. And, even if that makes it a kind of Selected Collected Poems, I don’t blame him a bit. This way, we know he feels there is, or might be, some value and relevance in each of the pieces that are included.

And I do prefer the idea of a Collected Poems, good, bad and indifferent, to one of those slim Selected Poems volumes that only scratch the surface of what a poet is about. I’m thinking of another book on the shelf, the unsatisfactory, 33-poem selection of W H Auden’s work, published in 1968. I believe Auden was involved in the production of that, so must take some responsibility for it. However, so much is left out that it runs like a brief introduction. And, of course, there was so much more to come.

Back to Finch, whose work now stretches back more than fifty years. He, and everyone else involved with the project, will know the collective effort and dedication that is required to get something like this into print. It’s huge but admirable – and, in my view, well-deserved, if the arrival of a Collected Poems is, in the end, to be considered an accolade.

I had a fairly inadequate stab at considering what Finch is about in a previous blog, centred on the books I had bought of his over the years, so don’t intend to attempt an in-depth assessment of the 950-odd pages in the two volumes. Sufficient to say that as usual, while there are orthodox, plainly written pieces, some apparently personal and anecdotal, and therefore easy to understand, in others the boundaries of what people might perceive a poem to be are tested again and again. (If you want to see the earlier blog, it’s under the title of The Value Of Doing Things Your Own Way – A Brief Look At The Work Of Peter Finch, from June 2021.)

Years ago, on a work trip, a colleague picked up a book of Diane Wakorski’s work that I had with me. He read a couple of the poems, looked mystified and said: I don’t understand. Is this poetry or is it just ideas? As usual, I found it hard to respond. I am no defender of anyone’s poetry, including my own, or other kinds of writing for that matter, and for all the time I’ve been writing I still can’t explain exactly what poetry might or might not be. That, perhaps, to me, is the point – and why I find Finch interesting. 

My friend put Wakorski’s book down and took the traditional higher ground that poetry wasn’t poetry if it didn’t rhyme. There wasn’t much point in telling him about Paradise Lost or The Prelude but stupidly I did attempt a vague stab at the suggestion that poetry may have used rhyme because travelling, illiterate balladeers found it easier to remember the words if they had the comfort of rhymes to hold on to, rather like most songs. Once it started to be written down and published, by those who could write and afford to publish, this was no longer necessary, although for centuries people preferred it that way and many still do. Yes, folks, I came across as a pretentious idiot, sensed it, and fell back on the weary old chestnut In the end, it’s what you like, which always translates as I’ve no idea what I’m talking about.

What my colleague would have made of Finch, I can’t imagine. We have the concrete poems, sound poems, performance poems, whatever comes into your head poems, even images of, for example, crumpled pieces of paper, purported to be critical reviews in poetry mags of the time.

He does what he wants and does it his own way. We don’t have to like everything he does. He would probably think there was something slightly wrong with us if we did because the point is that he’s trying to challenge us to rethink, reconsider, wonder why something he has done in an apparently odd way is how it is. I enjoy the way he explores ideas, in the methods he uses to communicate as well as in the more formal texts.

In his foreword to the second book (1997-2021), Ian McMillan recalls the time 
Finch was guest poet at Ty Newydd, the longstanding venue for those who want to attend poetry courses. McMillan, who was teaching there, asked Finch to liven things up a bit – perhaps a daft and dangerous thing to do! Finch responded by reading chunks of a Mills and Boon novel, tore pages out as he read them – and ate them. McMillan felt that in doing so he challenged the relationship between writer and reader, performer and audience.

Terms like avant-garde, concrete, experimental, inventive, alternative are so often applied to poets the world doesn’t quite understand or can’t pigeon-hole. I don’t want to go too near those traps but to interest me a poem has to feel like it’s living, breathing, feeling. At his best, Finch involves me in his work in this way. 

Some will inevitably gloss over the stranger pieces because they won’t ‘get’ them. Sounds, images, images which combine with texts, found poems, all fit with a quotation from Finch, included by Andrew Taylor in his introduction, where he says: It is a perfectly respectable approach to make poetry from not what is inside the head but from the swirl of words outside it. 

Taylor also calls Finch one of Britain’s leading poets. I’m not really sure what one of those is but I take the point that Finch is trying to challenge where poetry might take us – and in that sense is attempting to lead us somewhere, anywhere, perhaps he’s not exactly sure where, to offer us the potential to move our own writing into places we had not previously considered taking it.

There are just too many pieces in this spread of more than half a century of writing to pick up quotations or select one over another. Enough to say I know I will read and re-read, look at, dip into these two books, as and when, for a long time to come. I am grateful to Finch himself and to Seren for having the energy and ambition to make them available.