22 October 2015, 6.30-8 pm, free
The Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Canongate, EH8 8DT
Scotland’s modern literary culture is celebrated both for the diversity of languages and for the ranges of formal experiment which it has sustained. At our second event, translator and critic Emma Dymock will consider the tradition of radical socialist politics in Gaelic poetry, focusing on the work of the Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean and his contemporaries. Greg Thomas will explore the very different connotations of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetic and artistic languages during the 1970s-80s, considering Finlay’s use of minimal linguistic and artistic forms to engage with authoritarian political ideologies.
The Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Canongate, EH8 8DT
Scotland’s modern literary culture is celebrated both for the diversity of languages and for the ranges of formal experiment which it has sustained. At our second event, translator and critic Emma Dymock will consider the tradition of radical socialist politics in Gaelic poetry, focusing on the work of the Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean and his contemporaries. Greg Thomas will explore the very different connotations of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetic and artistic languages during the 1970s-80s, considering Finlay’s use of minimal linguistic and artistic forms to engage with authoritarian political ideologies.
Emma Dymock: "At the age of 12 I took to the gospel of Socialism’: Sorley
MacLean, Gaelic Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century"
Greg Thomas: "Purity as Commitment: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Language, and Politics"
This talk will explore Ian Hamilton Finlay's poetry and art of the 1970s-80s, focusing on his new and challenging interest in the artistic and intellectual tenets of authoritarian political regimes during those decades. This partly involved a redeployment of the linguistic minimalism which he had learned from the concrete poetry movement, which Finlay evoked in terms of a movement from "purity as inconsequentiality" to "purity as commitment".
Biographical Note
Greg Thomas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, undertaking a three-year project on politics in the life and art of Ian Hamilton Finlay.
In the late 1930s and the early 1940s,
the Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean, succeeded in demonstrating an acute sense of
political duty combined with an awareness of landscape and Gaelic culture. He
was not alone in this self-perceived role of ‘poet of conscience’; Gaelic poets
from previous centuries had often acted as spokespersons for their community,
particularly during times of hardship and struggle. In this lecture, the legacy
of Gaelic political engagement will be explored and the work of MacLean and his
contemporaries will reveal the ways in which tradition and innovation have influenced the development of a strong element of revolutionary
opinion in 20th century Gaelic literature.
Biographical Note
Emma Dymock is affiliated to the
University of Edinburgh. Having completed a PhD on Sorley MacLean's
'An Cuilithionn' in the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies in 2008,
she currently teaches classes in Gaelic literature and culture in the
same department. She has co-edited Caoir Gheal Leumraich/ White Leaping
Flame: Sorley MacLean Collected Poems (2011) and is preparing both the
Sorley MacLean-Douglas Young Correspondence and Naething Dauntit: The
Collected Poems of Douglas Young for publication in 2016.
Greg Thomas: "Purity as Commitment: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Language, and Politics"
This talk will explore Ian Hamilton Finlay's poetry and art of the 1970s-80s, focusing on his new and challenging interest in the artistic and intellectual tenets of authoritarian political regimes during those decades. This partly involved a redeployment of the linguistic minimalism which he had learned from the concrete poetry movement, which Finlay evoked in terms of a movement from "purity as inconsequentiality" to "purity as commitment".
Biographical Note
Greg Thomas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, undertaking a three-year project on politics in the life and art of Ian Hamilton Finlay.
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