Alec Finlay interviewed by Katy Wimhurst.
3:AM: You are interested in the idea of ‘imaginative or creative adaptation’. In a 2020 article, you wrote about when people develop chronic illnesses such as mecfs or long covid, they experience constraints, including in walking, but for some people: ‘The experience of adaptation and knowledge of the imaginative potential of limits is a resource. No-one wants to play the roles illness foists upon them, but chronic pain is a kick up the arse to be creative.’
You also observed in an article in Moving Mountains (2023), an anthology about chronic illness and nature, that the injustice of suffering from a misrepresented illness like mecfs became only bearable ‘through practices of imaginative adaptation in the forms art and poetry allowed’. Can you elaborate a little more on this intriguing idea of ‘imaginative adaptation’?
AF: Yes, I believe creative adaptation is intrinsic to everyone, but for those facing illness, a crisis of limitation, experiences of repetitive constraint, pain, severe fatigue, then it becomes essential. That doesn’t mean tying creativity down to a disability discourse.
Take Helen Vendler’s definition of ‘poetry’ as ‘the construction by consciousness of an apprehensible world’, with its echo of William Carlos Williams’ poem as ‘a small (or large) machine made out of words’, we know much poetry comes out of a crisis, or crack, in our collective experience of apprehensibility. A poem may be provoked when lived experience is thrown into question, when we lose our sense of belonging, our sureness in others, our access to common meanings. When a body is chronic with pain, or time is subject to the etiolation of the chronic clock, the apprehensibility of the world is exponentially more pressured.
The process of creative adaptation shares something with the way I understand poetics, but small acts of self-care, or radical rest, aren’t always poems. The cryptic nature of a crocked neuroimmune system, the fraying of the senses, the re-scaling of space, all the stresses chronic illness presses upon people, turn the mind towards the imaginative re-construction of a bearable world – one in which common understanding is, once again, possible, and – given the misperceptions and false descriptions these diseases are subject to – language is, hopefully, returned to a trustworthy state, through acts of share witness. As an example, I composed a found poem in which people with ME described ME, so that an accurate representation existed, and confronted medical prejudice.
Creative adaptation is more a labour of questions than answers – how can I not walk too far, stop relapsing, etc. – which, again, overlaps with poetry, an art of complex and free-floating meanings. I have comrades who have become artists and poets, out of necessity, when Long Covid erased their former life, their ability to work, their access to landscape. But here I also think of poets like Masaoka Shiki and Larry Eigner, who lived with limit, who show constraint can be generative, as ‘window poets’, producing such rich life projects. Their subject matter was rarely their own suffering: it was the apprehension of the world, even if that world was their dwelling and view of a street or garden. Another example, the creative adaptation of the agoraphobic and attunements in Emily Dickinson’s sense of space and gesture in her envelope poems, or my father’s garden-world-republic at Stonypath, Little Sparta.
My own work with a poetics of place-names began as a way to belong in wild landscapes, when walking led to relapses. But the poetics of names, and the philosophy of place-awareness that I evolved, is concerned with ecopoetics, ecological remediation, and how we belong in nature – it doesn’t present as a poetics of disability, but it is a project of creative adaptation. It proposes huts and viewing as alternative ways to experience mountain culture, for the non-hiker. In its ideal expression my poem becomes a hut, Sweeney’s Bothy, on the Isle of Eigg, where people can spend a week with their creativity.
I find comfort and liberation in the possibilities of poetry, in the way it adjusts our sense of scale, our experience of space and time, and defines an alternative measure of energy and outcome. On a bad day, I can still compose a poem and paint it in brush and ink: something exists, separate from pain and fatigue, and its meaning exceeds the minimal means – measures in the poetic equivalent of amps, joules, or whatever? – which it cost.
This awareness of energy slips the moorings of my own biography, and fatigue transforms into a fiction of poetry as a tidal form of renewable energy, riffing off Charles Olson and Velimir Khlebnikov. Dialect poetry contains more potential energy than standard prose, and on the fantasy spins. I see the creative adaptation of the chronically ill as a model for other requirements to adapt to limited resources, seek their fairer redistribution: that may involve putting the kinks back in a river, planting a wood, rewilding a hunting estate, building huts, or installing a community wind turbine. Taken in their essence, these are all expressions of energy and rest, ratios of the generative, and potential transformation. And that’s also true of the seedlings on my windowsill.
3:AM: You mention your own work with a poetics of place-names. One type of artwork you make in this context includes words or letters hand-written on paper labels or tags, which are then placed in a wild landscape somewhere — set down on grassland or tied with string to a branch. I think you call some of these word-mntns, which seem to be Scottish geographical place names written as a kind of shape poem. These are quiet interventions in the landscape, linked to place awareness. Can you say something more about these fascinating transient artworks? And do you place them in the landscape yourself? How long do they usually stay there?
AF: I refer to the form as ‘poem-label’; they refer back to the Japanese tradition of the ‘tanzaku’, which you can see, for example, in Tosa Mitsuoki’s painting Autumn Maples with Poem Slips. I grasped the idea of the poem composed and presented in the landscape intuitively, and then gradually became aware of its pre-existence in the culture of Basho. I add a rubber stamp rectangle to the labels, which are small – luggage labels – as this helps define the space for writing.
In essence, my poetic practice evolved through, firstly, reviving Japanese renga – linked haiku composed by a group of poets –as a contemporary form, in 1999, and continuing intensively for some years. This was an experiment in ‘shared consciousness’, for which I created a transportable wooden platform that could be set up in the landscape – I’ve seen it described as a traditional Japanese renga platform, though no such thing exists. I invited a group of people to write over the course of a day, or even twenty-four hours, drinking tea. (I didn’t realise at the time, but this was a way for me to sit in a landscape when I couldn’t hike). While the poems that resulted weren’t necessarily memorable, everyone who took part found the practice to be radical, emancipating, and empathic, altering their understanding of writing. It was only after this collective and gently performative period that I became a poet in the sense I am now. It was almost as if I had to create the shared space, before I could then step into it, and, eventually, leave it as an author.
Later, I conceived and made a series of poetic ‘tours’, reviving the 18th century landscape tour of the Highlands, but also aware of other precedents, for instance, the first tour, the road north, followed Basho and Sora, using the oku-no-hosomichi as a guide to contemporary Scotland – where they saw a waterfall we would find one, where they visited a temple we’d visit a Neolithic dun, etc. It was on that year-long project that ‘place-awareness’ was founded. A second tour followed Samuel Johnson and James Boswell through the Highlands, reflecting on such themes as forestry, folly landscapes, renewables, rewilding, cultures of viewing, and Gaelic ecopoetics.
Partly because I couldn’t walk far, I had to devise several innovative forms and practices on these tours. The ‘poem-label’, upon which we wrote minimal poems – one-word poems, haiku, visual poems, or place-name poems – was a way to write in situ, in whatever paired landscape the Basho led us to. That fieldwork became central to my landscape poetics. I would photograph the poems – the tours were published as blogs, and later became audio, books, and exhibitions – and I came to realise that, as the landscape was there, in view and in the photograph, the text could be more allusive or minimal. These were projects of name, or nadokoro, as the Japanese day, not in the sense of famous places, but poetic. Basho’s Kagenuma, ‘mirror pond’, became the mill race of Dalchonzie, a 1950s hydro power station, where the socialist vision of renewable energy extends to beautiful landscaping and architecture. We were declaring this a place-of-name and site of poetic meaning.
The ‘word-mnth’ is the most minimal of the forms I devised: a visual poem, composed in a pyramidal hill-like form, using the letters of the names of hills or mountains. Again, here was a way to engage with landforms I couldn’t climb, and, using the photograph, to align myself with them; also to experience the ecopoetics of Gaelic landscapes – for instance, the Gaels use a different colour spectrum to describe hills – create a culture of viewing, in which the skyline features as a form. A hill doesn’t know that it’s a hill. I was interested in how the name, the prospect, the framing, create a minimal poetic artwork which is also distinctly Romantic, given the hues of the light, the heather, pinewoods, etc.
Ben Gulabin, beak mountain, for instance, is a numinous – if forgotten – site. The slope of the hill is seen as a beak, but also a snout, likened to a boar. This shape of hill is associated with various Ben Gulabin’s, in Ireland and Scotland, where the folk-myth of Diarmid and the boar is replayed and overlayed. Gaelic culture imaginatively used the physical shape, and place-names – there is a den of the boar, and a grave of Diarmid nearby – to compose this landscape, and others, as a kind of hybrid of the Romantic Fingalian ballad and a vast conceptual land artwork, which I term ‘The Fiannscape’. The minimal ‘word-mntn’ ‘poem-label’, in which the shape of the hill is clear to see, was an occasion for me to discuss the concept of these proto-‘found’ poems.
So, the practice of composing small ‘poem-labels’ within the sublime Highland landscape is a work of ‘place-awareness’, and the names connect to ecopoetics, language and landscape, myth, energy. A landscape can be conceived as an imaginative field, simply by using place-names and cultures of viewing. This offers an interesting alternative to monumental sculpture.
Sometimes I leave the poem-labels; sometimes I bring them home; sometimes I photo a hill from different viewpoints. The ‘poem-labels’ are sketches, which I can assemble a longer piece of writing around, and the photos are a way to share ‘place-awareness’, for instance, on social media. The book of the road north is a long poem, composed with my tour companion, Ken Cockburn: the same journey exists as journal style site-specific wee poems, and a carefully shaped tour narrative. These practices are also preparatory work for creating larger artworks installed in the landscape, or equally, for my work with access, of using ‘place-awareness’ to help the disabled and vulnerable to feel they belong in wild places.
3:AM: You said that you composed a found poem in which people with the illness ME described ME, so that an accurate representation existed and confronted medical prejudice. A sound version, read by Mark Bonnar, is also available here. The incredible 45-page poem comprises a collage of words and phrases about the experience of the disease from numerous sufferers, which you collated. Can you say something about how this poem came to be and about your choices when putting the words together?
AF: One role of art is to describe, and thereby to represent – through framing, materials, and context – and this representation includes experiences which have been erased, or repressed from shared consciousness. This becomes especially acute in a time of identity politics and the fraying of trust in the collective. The book, descriptions, is an act of witness: ME has never been represented in an accurate way, and this has been deliberate. The consequences stymie research and potential treatment. I composed the poem from 300 people’s answers to a series of detailed questions; it was the hardest, most painful project I’ve worked on, and the most personal, though only five words are mine. It’s a work of poetic collective biography. While prejudice persists, no-one can deny a truthful description exists. I think of it like the truth-telling of Derek Jarman, and others, in the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, where to speak out was itself a cultural act.
3:AM: You like combining visual and verbal forms of art. I love the bee-related poem-objects you have made, such as the series of poem-beehives installed at an orchard in Langdale. On the side of each is a different haiku-like poem: ‘quince in bud/cherry in bloom; primal motion/schwirrlauf’. The language you use is simple and immediate. Can you talk a bit about the inspiration for these poem-beehives and what it means to install them somewhere they will be used by living colonies.
AF: Firstly, these artworks are ‘living sculptures’, like my poem nest-boxes, orchards, and book-nests for solitary bees. They speak to our expanded sense of culture/nature, where, in a rather Romantic way, we feel, or imagine, that woods speak. As a poet I drift between different bodies of specialised language – ecology, renewable energy, organ donation, ME, apiculture – which each relates to human specialisms, different rooms in the home of culture, each representing a different conceptualisation of society, economy, nature.
These are also site-specific artworks. For instance, ‘primal motion/schwirrlauf’ is a quote from Martin Lindauer, who followed on from Karl von Frisch, helping to establish the modern scientific understanding of bees, the bee dance, and so on. ‘Schwirrlauf’ is a (German) notation of the specific sound bees make when the swarm has decided to take to the air. It has come to be associated with other natural dynamics, like flocking, imagined as a model of social interactions and, in the terms of Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy, how insect behaviour and language relate to politics.
The hive is in an orchard, at Cyclinders, the Lake District market garden where Kurt Schwitters worked on his final and incomplete Merzbau artwork. In this context, the bees’ sound poem becomes a remembrance of Schwitter’s innovations in terms of sound as primal material; the artist arrived in the nearby town towards the end of the war, the year after the orchard was planted by Schwitter’s friend Harry Pierce. The trees are still there, still producing apples, still holding his – their – memory, and orchards are one of my favourite models of the culture/nature dynamic. The problem for Cylinders is that the remains of the Merzbau were removed long ago, by Richard Hamilton, to preserve them. But, if one sees the orchard, and the signifier of the beehive, as invocations, then the landscape is translated, rather in the manner of the Fiannscape. The gift of art: to use a few words, a minimal text, a simple found object, a historical and natural setting, to weave together so many associations – and these include Pierce’s innovative market gardening.
The beehive poems came from close reading of books on beekeeping, and the lore and science of bees. After I read them, the books were converted into nests for solitary bees – the open book forming a roof-shelter. The resulting surplus of meaning, the concentration of the book into a poem, is kind of honey, or potential energy. This relates to my experience of fatigue, energy, and limit: creating, producing, such a conglomeration of meaning using poetry and art reaches far beyond most of the equivalent things I could achieve within the constraints of chronic fatigue. And so, we return to the idea, the truth, that culture and the products of the imagination, modest as they may be, are the finest means by which we can creatively adapt to limit, in a planet where resources are finite.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Alec Finlay (above) is a poet and artist, whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. In 2020 he was awarded a Cholmondeley award for services to poetry. He is currently artist in residence with Paths for All and recently completed I remember: Scotland’s Covid Memorial. His publications include I remember (2022), descriptions (2022), a far-off land (2018), and gathering (2018). A selected collection of short poems, play my game, was published by Stewed Rhubarb in February 2023.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories was Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and her second collection Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She sometimes writes essays on speculative fiction.
