minimalism and seeming penchant for “simple” abstraction has an ironic edge: the recycling of classical or avant-garde forms gives those forms a semiotic turn. Take Finlay’s 1968 version of his concrete poem, Homage to Malevich, now assembled as a diagonally placed cross of identical word blocks, thus alluding to Malevich’s paintings of crosses. Each block alternates the lines, “l a c k b l o c k b l a c k b.” An early essay by the poet Susan Howe called “The End of Art” (1982) provides us with a superb analysis of this text. The right hand column of b’s, Howe notes, “seems arbitrary. Is this to be read horizontally, vertically, or all at once?” And she notes: The two words lack and lock look alike but mean opposite things. Modified by a variable (b) they form two new words, block and black. The b at the end which at first seemed arbitrary now makes perfect sense. An extra that has created something else. Carry it over to the left and begin with black. The vertical letters l, k, and b, positioned as they are, make vertical lines that pull the eye up and down, and that pulls the o, a and c letters apart (the o’s and a’s are the only ones that vary). The round short letters give a horizontal tug, which prevents the poem from being read up and down. The black (figure) and block (ground) balances with lock (stability) against lack (instability). Something open verses something closed. Are lack and black one and the same image, or exactly opposite? Are block and lock alike?… Do black and white open or close? Are they absence or presence? Sense or nonsense?
Such semiotic relationships between letters and words represent a curious spin on Russian zaum. Malevich’s poet-friend Khlebnikov examined the magic of etymologies, finding roots of unlike words that produced surprising conjunctions, whereas Finlay is interested in reduction—in this case, in what happens when one consonant of a given monosyllable—here the “b” of “black” and “block”—is removed, creating the words “lack” and “lock.” In both cases, “The Word as Such,” as the Russian futurists called one of their major manifestos, is central, but Finlay’s is a cooler, cerebral version of Khlebnikov’s more mystical word play. Another way of putting this is that Finlay’s impetus is more Wittgensteinian than Suprematist. And this brings me finally to The Blue and The Brown Poems of my title. In 1968 Jonathan Williams of the Jargon Press published a large folio calendar, a long page with calendar of each month printed near the bottom and the upper part containing a lithograph of a concrete poem by Finlay. The verso of each page has a short commentary on the concrete poem in question by the critic Stephen Bann, printed as a small square. The publication, Williams tells us, was “conceived during a hike through the Great Smokies in July 1965 by Dan Haberman of Graphic Arts Typographers, New York, and myself.” On the first two-column page, the left has an introduction to the “Poetoypographer Ian Hamilton Finlay” by Williams, the right column a Foreword by the artist-critic Mike Weaver. Williams writes: Finlay is not a “poet” in the narrow sense most have reserved for the poor souls who have to practice this vestigial occupation. Finlay is a “maker,” a man who puts things together—which is the real definition of poet in the Greek, as Buckminster Fuller has reminded us. He makes poems out of letters that have no sound in them, that function as objects to contemplate with the mind’s eye.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Table Talk (Barbarian Press, 1985), 4, 9; Susan Howe, “The End of Art,” Stereo Headphones,” Number 8-9-10 (1982), ed. Nicholas Zurbrurgg, 40-43; see p. 43. Many, but not all, of the individual poems had been published in earlier Finlay books or as cards. The Blue and the Brown Poems calendar was published by Atlantic Richfield Company and Graphic Arts Typographers with the calendar design by Herbert M. Rosenthal (Aspen 1968). Each of the twelve lithographs measures c. 21 x 13 inches.
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