But Finch differs markedly from Thomas in at least two important senses: despite his penchant for flagrant experimentalism, Finch is in many ways a populist, not a diffident loner and commensurately he is a Welsh poet of the over-populated south, nestled against the Severn Estuary with its ‘heavy population, heavy water’ (‘Severn Estuary ABC’, Poems for Ghosts, 1991), not of Thomas’s depopulated North Wales and lonely coastal outcrops. Maybe I did’.įinch’s work has drawn uneasy comparisons with that of poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Leonard, and, of course, R.S. In ‘Looking for the Southern Cross’ ( Zen Cymru) the guard outside a museum ‘said cross / boy you want Jesus. Thus ‘South Wales Haiku’ ( Food, 2001), with its (mis)use of an ancient and exotic form:įinch also has a keen ear for the strange and funny things people say, dropping punctuation to get the tone just right. His poems are often riddled with funny, seemingly off-the-cuff observations of people being people – not least on his own home ground, industrialised South Wales. Many of Finch’s pieces have the immediacy and crowd-pleasing panache of work conceived for the stage. He has also written cheeky bastardisations of famous sonnets by Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the latter in the language of a text message, called ‘N Wst Brdg’: In old age bird song and reliable grouch’. Thomas, something of a mixed influence and inspiration for Finch: ‘A pioneer of dark wounds and internal tensions. He is playful, often irreverent, and his oeuvre includes entertaining autobiographical and biographical prose sketches, such as ‘RNLD TOMOS’ ( Useful, 1997), about R.S. Unsurprisingly, his poems take on many forms. Finch, then, is a lot of things, and after publishing more than 20 collections of poetry, he gives no indication of running out of steam. As Finch has acknowledged, such poems need to be ‘accessible’, and ‘humour is an advantage’. Performance poetry, if it is going to work, must be egalitarian, not elitist. In the 1980s, Finch developed a passionate interest in performance poetry, and perhaps more than anything else he is known as a highly animated, kinetic performer of his work – or at any rate that part of it which is geared towards public recital.
Comments such as ‘gross heap of dross’ and ‘what effrontery’ are visible in the first image, before the creases take over and render the criticism nothing more than waste paper.
The piece ‘On Criticism’ ( Selected Poems) deals with the critics’ presumed responses to such work, constituting as it did three photocopies of an apparently unfriendly review, increasingly scrunched up into a paper ball. Finch’s early compositions included testing items such as cassette recorders to their technical limits and logging the results, and putting together ‘found’ poems, such as ‘Wales’ ( Selected Poems, 1987), ‘machine-assembled from a collection of early issues of Poetry Wales’. A lot of such work is, by its very nature, virtually unquotable – and often owes as much to conceptual art and music as it does to modern poetry. Thanks in part to the sound, visual, concrete and performance poet Bob Cobbing, early in Finch’s poetic career he discovered and fully embraced experimental poetry, setting off a quest to push poetic boundaries in these directions himself.
In 2011, he won the Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry.īrash, innovative, prolific and always furiously up-to-date, Peter Finch has spoken of his ‘love of the experimental’. For this work he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of Architects of Wales in 2007.
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Peter Finch’s other non-fiction books include the Real Cardiff series (2002-2009). He has worked on various poetry and public Art projects and in schools.
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He also writes books about the poetry publishing scene such as How to Publish Your Poetry (1985), How to Publish Yourself (1987) and The Poetry Business (1994) and gives lectures and presentations on these topics. His latest collection is Zen Cymru (2009). His Selected Poems was published in 1987 and a Selected Later Poems in 2007. He is the author of many poetry books, including Poems for Ghosts (1991) Useful (1997) Antibodies (1997) and a bi-lingual collection in English and Hungarian – Vizet-Water (2003). From 1998 to 2011, he was Chief Executive of Literature Wales (formerly the Welsh Academi). He ran the Arts Council of Wales bookshop, Oriel, for some years, and was treasurer of the Association of Little Presses. In the 1960s and '70s he edited the literary magazine, second aeon, exhibited visual poetry and later became well-known for his performance poetry. Peter Finch lives in Cardiff and is a poet, critic, author and reviewer.
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