Peter Stitt - Unoriginal Sins

15 Aug POTH (POOR OLD TIRED HORSE) NR 8. 1963. WITH ONE OF FINLAY’S EARLIEST CONCRETE POEMS.

Posted at 11:18h in Poor Old Tired Horse + Broadsides

Edinburgh; Wild Hawthorne Press, 1963
30 x 21cm, 4pp. The eighth number of Finlay’s poetry publication with contributions by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Peter Stitt, Yury Pankratov (translated by Edwin Morgan), Andrei Voznesensky (translated by Edwin Morgan and Anselm Hollo), El Lissitsky, A. Khlebnikov (translated by J.F. Hendry and Edwin Morgan), Spike Hawkins, Jonathan Williams, Alexander Tvardovskii (translated by J.F. Hendry), and Mary Ellen Solt.
This was the first number of POTH to publish Finlay's own concrete poems - the work is Homage to Malevich - where a text block made up of combinations of the words LACK BLOCK and BLACK create a rectangle which is reflected in a drawing below (by Peter Stitt from Finlay's instructions). This work is published in other books by Finlay including Rapel. A significant section of the pages in this number are dedicated to Russian avant garde writers - mostly translated in part by Edwin Morgan and the number is dedicated to the memory of those writers including Malevich.

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06 Jun PARTISAN GALLERY HANDOUT. 1963. AN EXHIBITION THAT NEVER TOOK PLACE.

Posted at 13:47h in Poor Old Tired Horse + Broadsides

Edinburgh: Partisan Gallery, 1963 23.7 x 36cm, 1pp, broadside and gallery handout for an exhibition of work by Peter Stitt, printing an original poem each by Ian Hamilton Finlay ("20 - a PS")and Jerome Rothenberg ("Call it Heaven). This is a very early Finlay contribution where he designed the broadside for a gallery that was released for an exhibition of works by Stitt and that was curated by Finlay's then wife Jessie McGuffie (but the opening caused a rift between the gallery owner and McGuffie as the latter had invited some guests who the owner thought crude.) The artist then withdrew his paintings and the show was cancelled. Lists the works exhibited by Stitt, one of which was lent by Finlay. Stitt was subsequently featured by Finlay in Poor Old Tired Horse issues #8 and #9, after which he moved to London. The Finlay poem is one of the very first that can be clearly identified as a concrete poem, it is a typescript where each work or small phrase is linked by lines to create relationships between the words and their positioning on the page and relative to each other. This is an extremely rare and important publication which has a very similar design style to Fish Sheet One but was never widely distributed because of the falling out between McGuffie, Finlay "and the posh lady who owned the gallery" (from a TLS to be found elsewhere in this collection that was sent along with this catalogue). Folded twice for mailing. VG+. ...