Nidhi Surendranath is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English. During the summer of 2024, she went to the United Kingdom to conduct research on Ian Hamilton Finlay's work with support from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.
How do you ‘read’ a poem that is inscribed on stone and placed in a curated garden? Are the trees and the wind flowing through them a part of the ‘text’? How is the reading experience altered if the same text is read on the page like a more conventional poem?
These questions came to mind when I first heard about Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s (1925-2006) poetry garden called “Little Sparta,” situated in the Pentland Hills about an hour’s drive from Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1966, Finlay moved to a seven-acre farm called Stonypath and slowly transformed a part of the land into the garden now called Little Sparta. However, the garden is only a small part of Finlay’s extensive body of work that features text inscribed on a range of media such as the page, stone, wood, or metal. With a grant from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, I travelled to London and Edinburgh to “read” Finlay’s poem in the archive and on-site to uncover more questions about how readers interact and interpret poetry.
Finlay’s work excites interest from scholars of poetry and art alike given the range of materials on which he has inscribed poems.
In the earliest part of his career, he published work that looked more like what we think of as poems: verses broken into set patterns of lines and printed on a page.
He then moved on to ‘concrete poems,’ many of which were still printed on a page, but which broke free from stanzaic structures and pushed the limits of what we think of as poetry. In poems like “Sea-Poppy I,” Finlay collected a series of fishing boat registration numbers and arranged them in whorls, the title and the pattern drawing links between the flower growing along the shore and the boats dotting the seascape. Finlay printed some of his concrete poems onto postcards, calendars, and other printed media, bringing poems into forms that people could interact with in unique ways. Soon after, Finlay began experimenting with multi-modal poems that bridged the gap between poetry and sculpture.
I visited the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London, where some of Finlay’s works have been exhibited in an artist room. The collection showcases works that contain several elements typical of Finlay’s oeuvre—textual art that plays with typography and space, the motif of the garden, and the ever-present theme of the sea.
I was especially intrigued by the work “Is There a Ship Named the Wave Sheaf?” It features a glass orb resting on a mass of fishing nets, almost like a pearl nestled in an oyster. The work connects the labors of the fisherman and the artist to that of the natural world, commenting on their complex interconnectedness. The Tate has a public-access exhibition, and its archives also include some of Finlay’s correspondence. Reading some of his letters, I was struck by Finlay’s need to exchange ideas with his fellow poets and artists, even as he lived in some of the most rural parts of Scotland.
The culmination of my research trip was the visit to Little Sparta. I had browsed several photographs of the garden in preparation for my trip. But nothing could have prepared me for the windy atmosphere of the Pentland hills that transformed the sparse text of Finlay’s poems into an experience that alerts the visitor to the specificity of the present moment as well as the iterability of experience. A poem on the page carved onto a headstone and placed in the garden at Little Sparta became a memorial stone. The moment that it preserves, however, is different for the artist and each visitor.
While I do not yet have the answers to questions I asked when I first met Finlay’s work, I certainly have new lines of inquiry that have set me on the path of thinking about poems and material.