Border Blurs by Greg Thomas: A review

Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland, Greg Thomas, Liverpool University Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-1802077087, £90.00/£27.99

Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs is a long overdue study of the impact and role of concrete poetry on the turn away from the Movement and towards the modernist legacy that stimulated an explosion of interesting British poetry 1950s, 60s and 70s. Thomas takes four of the most interesting of the poets involved as the spine of his narrative, two of them Scottish, two English: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing. From this grouping it is clear that one of the blurred borders is the English/Scottish one, but the title refers just at much to the blurring of boundaries across genres that typifies the work of the four.
Thomas opens with an introduction and background chapter on the early development of concrete poetry, focusing on the Brazilian Noigandres group and the German Constructivists including Eugen Gomringer. These early concrete poets were, he argues, rejecting Dadaist chaos and looking to create work that was both experimental and supportive of the new post-WWII ideals of social order. This is an important counterpoint to the narrative arc of the British adoption of the genre, which can be traced as a move back towards Dadaist disruption. They were also influenced by developments in the area of information theory, which seemed to point towards a potential universal language; for the early exponents of concrete, this reinforced the idea that they could produce work that evaded the communicative limitations of language as it is and create work that could be understood by anyone, anywhere. As an aside, one potential limitation of their thinking was touched on by Irish poet Brian Coffey, a mathematician who experimented with concrete modes himself, in a 1978 interview with Parkman Howe:

“poets do not write to communicate, And if they do put themselves in the position of being communicators, then they are propagandists…Now communication is not a wishy-washy word at the present time. It’s a word which has become familiar to students of literature who are doing the best they can to take up with the scientific gentry…and so they communicate at any costs.”

One way of reading Thomas here is as a narrative of the move away from this idea of concrete as communication.
It seems that the beginning of British interest can be traced to a letter from Portuguese poet E.M. de Melo e Castro in the TLS on May 25, 1962, introducing the idea of concrete poetry to a British readership for the first time. This letter was read by Finlay, Morgan and Houédard and led them all to both contact the Melo e Castro and develop their own concrete practices. In the case of Finlay, the idea of a form that was intended to support classical ideals of social order certainly chimed with his own world view, and it is therefore no great surprise that his work was nearest to the work of the Brazilian and German poets he now had contact with.
Thomas makes much if Finlay’s propensity for ‘thematic duality’, the bringing together of disparate elements in ordered works of art as he moved form poems that combined language and image to works in which language functions as image. This is one expression of the importance of Imagism as a root of concrete practice (Noigandres being a reference to Pound’s Cantos), especially the dictum ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.’ Classical concrete, including Finlay’s work, sought to achieve this direct treatment as directly as possible.
It should also be noted that Finlay, and Morgan, were working against the grain of the Scottish Renaissance poets who had moved away from international modernism towards a more narrowly nationalist position. One consequence of this, perhaps, is the tendency in Finlay’s work to impose rather than discover order; unlike his predecessors, Finlay’s work is clearly acting against what he sees as disorder, rather in favour of order (to simplify hugely); it is, as Thomas indicates, an act of will, not of logic.
In the various Stripes series, the tension between language and the visual opens out to become something of a ‘whole body’ experience of sound, sense, visual and tactile immersion in the work. Eventually, this would lead to his open-air large scale pieces, where the ‘reader’ moves around Little Sparta, engaging with a curated landscape of order, which can be read as a direct rebuffing of the counterculture of the times in which Finlay began to create his classical Eden.
Edwin Morgan was also kicking back against the Scottish Renaissance poets, specifically their fetishisation of the rural and denigration of the urban Scotland that was his natural environment. This also fed into his rejection of Eliot and the Movement poets, who he also read as being anti-urban. Morgan was an admirer of Marshall McLuhan, who integrated his own version of information theory with a celebration of modern consumer technology, the material circumstances of modern urban living. Morgan’s work of the 1960s constitutes, in part, a kind of sardonic, satirical revelling in the new urban culture of materialism that McLuhan saw as the opening of a door to an oral culture.
The realisation of the fact that where, when and how you are moulds what and how you say, that poetry is not detached from its material circumstances, was and is key to Morgan’s ‘off-concrete’ work and to his interest in the Beats and Russian poets. He was, in effect, signalling a turning away from classical concrete and an embracing of aspects of 60s counterculture, unlike Finlay.
Morgan’s approach to and use of language is also quite distinctive; as part of his reaction to the Renaissance was to incorporate Glasgow dialect, in contradistinction to their synthetic, idealised ‘Scots’. He also experimented with other modes by introducing the voices of the non-human: animals, consumer goods, computers, even the voice of outer space. Interestingly, poems like ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ highlight the limitations of cybernetics at the time.
These experiments mark one of Morgan’s key shifts away from the classical concrete approach; he was introducing the individual into the mix. This is echoed in the political and social concerns many of his concrete poems encompass. This move towards individualism and political directness was, I think, decisive in the future development of concrete poetry in the UK.
We then cross the blurred border to England, in Thomas’s chapter on Dom Sylvester Houédard. Houédard was born in the channel islands but spent much of his adult life as a Benedictine priest in Gloucestershire. His writings are concerned with expressing the inexpressible, the incomprehensible spiritual state of union with God. As such, he can be read as an ongoing effort at “the erasure of semantic sense”. In this, he can, I think, be seen as representing a shift from the classical to the baroque in concrete verse.
His early, more conventional poetry was clearly Beat-influenced, as, I imagine was his interest in Buddhism, and he was certainly more well-disposed to 60s counterculture than Finlay. As he developed his concrete practice, he rejected ‘the limits imposed on poetic meaning by language and medium’. The problem being that this is perhaps not possible; we are meaning-seekers, and any text presented to us will be read as if it means something, or it will not be read. Houédard’s approach to this problem was to create visual texts using the numeric and diacritical keys on his typewriter to create abstract images, his typestracts. As Thomas writes, one aide to reading them is to look for sequentiality in their composition, and he ads that “[i]nterpretation is also aided by some pre-existing awareness of Houédard’s poetics and theology’. The problem as I see it is that for readers without this awareness, the typestracts can look like pound-shop versions of Escher prints, clever but ultimately slightly vacuous typewrite optical illusions. Despite Thomas’s reasoned and interesting championing, I find him the least interesting of the four concrete poets he discusses.
The same is not true of Bob Cobbing, Thomas’s final poet here, and the only one whose introduction to concrete was not via Melo e Castro’s letter to the TLS. Cobbing’s work is the polar opposite of Finlay’s, being performance-based, sonic as much as visual, political and embracing of chaos. His visual texts are more scores for performance than anything else and he eschews the solidity that the word ‘concrete evokes; he represents a shift from stone to sound. In fact, his mature work allows for multiple different performances of each ‘score’ as well as multiple variant instances of each visual text. The result is a powerful, mind-bending music that achieves much of what Houédard fails at. As I thought about the progression through Border Blurs, I returned to the Imagist basis of early concrete.
In Finlay, we see a real attempt at the direct representation of the thing.
In Morgan, the thing becomes material and exists here and now.
In Houédard, the thing is unknowable.
In Cobbing, there is no thing, only representation.
Cobbing’s work begins from the perception that our systemic abuse of language is a tool of oppression (again I’m reminded of Coffey, who wrote “The political use of words kills the capacity to use words to make poems.”). His work begins with a kind of playful phonic and visual punning but moves towards a concerted attempt undermine language to the point of abandoning it by using orthography as a means to create sound that is both full of meaning while abandoning conventional sense. In this, it moves away from the literary into the sphere of intermedia, a blending of text, visual, sound and physical gesture that defies definition. It’s an extraordinary body of work that deserves a full-length study of its own.
In his short conclusion chapter, Thomas discusses factors beyond reaction to the existing mainstreams that influenced the development of concrete poetry in Scotland and England, including a general post WWII move away from naturalism in the arts, the importance of Third Level educational institutions and the role of Arts Council funding in making publication, installation and performance possible. He also touches on the legacy of the 1960s concrete explosion, including “minimalist small press poetry practices as well as various types of experimental performance and sound art, and a whole range of alternative literatures making use of the new presentational formats of the internet.” I’m tempted to add a very active land art movement to that list.
Border Blurs is a welcome and long overdue study of what is a key component of the general turn of British poetry towards what we might loosely describe as modernism and experiment that began in the 1960s and continues to this day. Thomas writes well and clearly, not necessarily a give in works of literary scholarship, and has done anyone interested in poetry in all its variety an enormous favour. I highly recommend this book.