HAMILTON FINLAY, Ian. Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. Issues 1-25. I.H. Finlay and various contributors. 1962-1968.
25 volumes. A complete run of Finlay’s seminal periodical.
Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. was a forum for the verbal and the visual, the traditional and the modernistic, the creative and the theoretical. It introduced new kinds of poetry into Scotland and enabled Finlay to establish contacts with the outside world.ʼ (Yves Abrioux).
‘Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. 25 is a photographic record of works by various artists exhibited at different sites in the streets and gardens of Brighton – and even out at sea…. Published in 1968, the last issue of Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. is entirely devoted to one word poems. The mode was devised by Finlay in the mid-1960s … Finlay observes that “It seemed obvious to me that one could not have a literally one-word poem on the page, since any work must contain a relationship; equally, one could (conceivably) have a one-word poem in a garden, if the surroundings were conceived as part of the poem.”’ (Yves Abrioux).
‘The scope of P.O.T.H. was formidable. It is difficult enough to think of any other poetry sheet so simple and yet delighful, let alone consider that it bought together such names as Ad Reinhardt, Earl Haig, Charles Biederman, Pierre Albert-Birot, Theodore Enslin and Bridget Riley… P.O.T.H. had far more variety and range than the combination of Ian Hamilton Finlay and concrete poetry might suggest. This variety ties in with Finlay’s aesthetic of all art, which is something beyond and before the compulsive modernism of the avant-garde often propagated by the small press.’ (Simon Cutts)
Murray 2.1–2.25
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