The Company One Keeps | Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Concrete Poets
The Hawthornden Lecture Theatre
National Gallery of Scotland
The Mound
Edinburgh
EH2 2EL
Wednesday 14 May 2025
12:45 - 1:30 pm
free, booking essential (in-person and streamed online)
Dr Greg Thomas, writer, editor and author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019), will be talking next month at The National Gallery of Scotland, one of several
events and exhibitions being held this year to commemorate the centary of Finlay's birth.
This talk will explore Ian Hamilton Finlay's relationship with the international movement of concrete poetry, which, during the 1950s–60s, re-energised modernist experiments at the fringes of literary and visual form. During the early 1960s, Finlay's encounters with concrete poetry fundamentally reshaped his approach to poetic and artistic creativity. But by the end of that decade he was pointedly distancing himself from the style.
Thomas will consider the reasons why, exploring Finlay's aesthetic and cultural ties to the concrete poetry movement, and to figures such as Edwin Morgan and Dom Sylvester Houédard.
To meet demand we are also offering an online live stream of the event.
For more information, and to book a ticket, please visit the link below.
