Graduate Student, English Studies
Thesis Title: Little magazines and the Scottish avant-garde in the 1960s
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Dr Eleanor Bell
Dr Jonathan Hope |
About
Stewart Smith is a second year PhD student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, researching the magazines and small press publications of Ian Hamilton Finlay. I am particularly interested in the way these publications experiment with format as well as form. Finlay's interest in the poem as an object most famously found expression in his concrete poems and his garden Little Sparta. However, perhaps less attention has been paid to the particular innovations of his 1960s magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse or the poem-books, postcards and prints he and Jessie McGuffie produced for their Wild Hawthorn Press. I locate this within the context of the post-war avant-garde, in particular developments in pluraesthetic poetry and artists' books, and consider the ways in which Alec Finlay has continued and contextualised his father's work through his own activities as a poet, editor and publisher.
