#Peter finch full#

So from a very early start, with David Callard and Geraint Jarman we started to put on poetry readings in Cardiff.Īlong the way Peter learned Welsh and even though he decided not to write in the language he found that acquiring the language was key to understanding the culture. When I found them then I wanted to do things together. Peter Finch: I’d always looked for the sort of literary environment in which poets flourished, as described by Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac in the Beat novels and many of the other Beat novelists – they seemed to occupy a world where sitting down over a glass of wine or beer and discussing literary matters was the norm: it wasn’t the norm for me in Cardiff so I asked where is this going on and I spend the early part of my career looking for it, hunting for this bohemianism, these fellow travellers, people who were the same as me, who liked the same kinds of things as I did. While there is a popular image of the poet as a solitary figure, composing in a garret Peter, was constantly collaborating with people, be they fellow poets or visual artists or musicians, sharing energy and creativity with them. Peter started performing in the late 1960s, when he also started to bring out a magazine called Second Aeon. Peter Finch: In school I was taught Walter de la Mare and I hated this and I couldn’t see what any of this was about at all.īut gradually I started to read, mainly science fiction as a teenager and reading obsessively and so I read the entire section of such books that were in the Roath Park Library, starting top left on the shelves and working my way right down to the bottom.Īnd I can remember standing in front of them once, staring at it and I must have been doing so for a long time because the librarian came over and asked if I could do anything to help me and I said I’ve read all of these, what else have you got? And that was a switch then and I had to go and look further in a wider field. One of the key moments in Peter’s life as a poet was discovering a copy of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl in a Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge bookshop but his delight in the vitality of language can be traced back much further.

I remember the people surrounding me, the circumstances that boosted me to do this, so it was quite an experience and an extremely lengthy experience, pulling together ghost pamphlets, forgotten pamphlets, books and booklets that hadn’t been opened for decades and decades, material that hadn’t even made it into the Selected Poems of mine from the mid 1980s.īut Andrew Taylor the editor of the Collected Poems was keen on reviving things that were even outside that frame – things which had appeared in small magazines that I had forgotten about and where the poems hadn’t survived, as I hadn’t kept them or sold the poem to the National Library of Wales and it had left my environment. The whole process was like getting into a time machine and travelling back to earlier decades, earlier eras of your life and reading things you haven’t looked at for, come on, for fifty years in some cases thinking did I really think that?

So I discovered how weak I often was, how inconsistent I was in the early part of my career. Peter Finch: It’s an eye opener when you look back over your career and do so in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise – being selective because even though these are called Collected Poems you kick out things that really aren’t going to make it.Īnd how whole books produce just one poem, one poem that is going to survive and it’s your choice if it’s going to do so. I had a cup of tea with one of the many Peters before we went on stage at this year’s Hay Festival where I suggested that the publication of the Collected Poems was a chance to take stock, to consider his work over five decades and see the evolution of himself as a poet:… His fellow poet Ian Macmillan, writing in the introduction to this landmark publication suggests that one way of explaining the enormous productivity which has produced, in turn, so many pulsating machines is that there is, in fact, more than one Peter Finch, indeed many of them working simultaneously.

#Peter finch full#

The great, restless, wildly experimental poet Peter Finch has just published his Collected Poems, two substantial tomes weighing in at a thousand pages, both full of the fizz and energy that so typifies his humorous, splendid and impossibly inventive work.Ī Finch poem has been described as ‘always a living object, a made thing, a pulsating machine made of words.’

Peter Finch Collected Poems vols 1 & 2, published by Seren Books.