Ian Hamilton Finlay ’ s Topographical Poetics at Stonypath / Little Sparta Calum Rodger

While Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden Little Sparta is often more readily associated with the sculptural and plastic arts, Finlay always took care to describe the works in the garden as ‘poems’. This article shows how this fact is far from trivial, but rather is fundamental to understanding the garden and its purpose. It defines the poetics of Little Sparta as topographical poetics, showing how the formal development of modernist and concrete poetry leads directly to the sculptural and site-specific poetry of the garden, and proposing a formal model of topographical poetics – considered as a compound of name, material, and environment – through which the garden poems can be read. It demonstrates this through close readings of ‘MARE NOSTRUM’, ‘signpost’ and other garden poems, showing how topographical poetics shifts the locus of the poetic from the voice to the place and, by extension, the self to the home, and goes on to examine some primary characteristics of the model, among them miniaturism, scalar oscillations and weather. It argues, moreover, that this poetic model was developed by Finlay to realise an ontological project (here defined as a tension between the ‘poetic’ and the ‘homely’) of realising a longing or homesickness for Arcadian and Utopian absolutes in order to become reconciled to their impossibility in the process of making a home in the everyday world. In so doing, it reveals how the garden realises tensions between culture and nature, classical and modern, absolutism and pragmatism, and art and life, and asserts Finlay’s singular contribution to twentieth-century poetics.


Introduction
Ian Hamilton Finlay is among the most singular figures of Scottish art and letters of the twentieth-century, with a body of work remarkable both in terms of volume and formal diversity. Most famous is his magnum opus Little Sparta, a poetry garden at the poet's former home in the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland. The garden covers five acres of ground and boasts several burns, a whole range of flora and fauna and Lochan Eck, the smallest body of water to appear on a Scottish OS map (dug by the poet, named after his son). Most remarkably, it is home to around 275 sculpted objects that make their habitat here. That it was voted Scotland's greatest artwork in a 2004 Scotland on Sunday poll 1 testifies to its singular achievement and international renown in the visual and plastic arts. But it is significant that the vast majority of these works feature text, with inscription and placing serving as the basic formal strategies. It is even more significant that Finlay described the works of the garden as 'poems', while his epitaph, with characteristic brevity, consists of one word: 'Poet'. 2 This suggests that Little Sparta is understood best not as an art garden but a poetry garden, and while this distinction may make little difference to the casual visitor, it is fundamental to any serious consideration of Little Sparta and, by extension, Finlay's sculptural work elsewhere. Little Sparta constitutes a radical development of modernist poetics in which the poem is no longer bound in the pages of a book, or tied to the utterance of a speaker, but rather given its own place in the world, entailing a shift in the poetic locus from self to home. This article proposes that this model be termed topographical poetics, arguing, moreover, that this model is not only one of formal innovation, but also ontological alteration.
The drive towards this alteration -to cast a poetics in terms of the home rather than the self -is present in Finlay's famous letter to Pierre Garnier of 1963, in which he gives the thinking behind his attraction to concrete poetry: I approve of Malevich's statement, 'Man distinguished himself as a thinking being and removed himself from the perfection of God's creation. Having left the non-thinking state, he strives by means of his perfected objects, to be again embodied, in the perfection of the absolute, non-thinking life…' That is, this seems to me, to describe, approximately, my own need to make poems… though I don't know what is meant by 'God'. And it also raises the question that, though the objects might 'make it', possibly, into a state of perfection, the poet and the painter will not. I think any pilot-plan should distinguish, in its optimism, between what man can construct and what he actually is. I mean, new thought does not make a new man; in any photograph of an aircrash one can see how terribly far man stretches -from angel to animal; and one does not want a glittering perfection which forgets that the world is, after all, also to be made by man into his home. 3 Finlay's development of topographical poetics, over the following decades, is one and the same with the poet's drive to make the world 'into his home', 'striv[ing]', like the Russian Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich, towards the 'perfected object', whilst in the same move recognising that this 'non-thinking life' is fatally out of reach and any 'glittering perfection' disingenuous. On the one hand, 'the perfection of the absolute, non-thinking life'; on the other, its impossibility, at least as far as regards that crucial component 'life'. How, asks Finlay, might one 'strive' for a homely 'perfection', both playfully and painfully aware of the impossibility of its realisation as 'perfection', in the space 'between what man can construct and what he actually is'? Arguably, thanks to its arbitrary nature, language, having no essential, ' absolute' connection to its referents, is the ideal -perhaps the only -vehicle for this necessarily compromised 'striv [ing]'. This is why Finlay is a poet, and the works of Little Sparta poems. The 'poetic' is the primary touchstone by which Finlay orientates his project, finding a 'home' for language in the topographical poetics of Little Sparta.
The question this article aims to answer is how such unconventional poetry should be read, and naturalised as an object of literary criticism. This is pursued by briefly tracing the formal development of topographical poetics from precedents in early modernist and concrete poetry, before turning to the garden poems themselves, drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller and other critics to define topographical poetics in formal terms that make it approachable via close reading. In so doing, it elaborates on the relationship between 'perfection' and 'home' of the Garnier letter (here termed the 'poetic' and the 'homely'), proposing an opposition between the two terms through which the numerous oppositions of the garden and Finlay's work elsewhere might be usefully framed and understood. This line of argument complements study of the poems' formal aspects and asserts the garden's continued relevance and significant contribution to twentieth and twenty-first century poetics.
Happily, Finlay's work is finally beginning to receive the critical and cultural attention it deserves, as demonstrated by the first international conference dedicated to the poet's work, 'Little Fields, Long Horizons' at the University of Edinburgh in July 2017, and Creative Scotland's Sharing Little Sparta project (2016-2017), which has widened access to the garden and supported a number of artist residencies. It is hoped this article will contribute to this sea-change and, moreover, encourage further work on Finlay within the field of literary criticism.

The Modernist Precedent
In the mid-1960s a solitary ash tree stood next to a dilapidated farmhouse on a barren moor in the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland, a few miles north of Biggar. It did not remain solitary for long. Finlay moved into the farmhouse in the late summer of 1966 with his wife and collaborator Sue and young son Alec (a daughter, Ailie, was born a couple of years later) and immediately began construction on what would become one of the most remarkable gardens in the world. It became so remarkable that when the tree finally fell over half a century later it was not only a tree that fell; it was the ocean.
The garden was Stonypath, adopting its more famous name Little Sparta in the late 1970s (for reasons described below, the garden will be referred to by its dual identity Stonypath/Little Sparta from here on). But the 1960s, so Alec Finlay tells us in his introduction to Selections: Ian Hamilton Finlay, was the 'golden age in the creation of Stonypath'. 4 Among the numerous garden poems composed, built and installed during this period was a stone plaque, affixed to the ash tree by the Finlays, and constructed in collaboration with stonecutter Nicholas Sloan. It reads 'MARE NOSTRUM' 5 -our sea -the epithet by which the Romans knew the Mediterranean.
Revisiting Stonypath shortly after the tree had fallen for the road north project, Alec Finlay quotes a letter from his father to Sloan describing the poem's impetus: Except on very calm days, (which are few, as you know), the ash fills the garden with its sea-sound. When people ask why so many poems refer to the sea, or comment that it is odd to find so many sea-references so far from the sea itself, I often point to the Ash Tree and say, That is our sea. 6 The 'MARE NOSTRUM' plaque asserts in language the implicit metaphorical relationship experienced by the poet in the garden, whereby the wind in the branches is felt (and, with the plaque, written and read) as the swelling of the ocean's waters. It thus establishes the fundamental metaphorical equivalence of an inland garden in which 'so many poems refer to the sea': that land is sea, and sea land. The ' content' of nature is rendered as poetic through name ('MARE NOSTRUM') and material (the stone plaque, the typeface) -that is, as metaphor and form. The formal operation of this equivalence is akin (but not identical) to the juxtapositional technique pioneered by the Imagists, especially Pound, and further explored by the concrete poetry milieu of the 1950s and 60s (in which Finlay was an active participant). Here is it possible to trace the formal modernist lineage of this most thematically classical of poems, and indeed the garden as a whole.
Finlay's topographical poetics develops from two principles of modernist poetry: equivalence of form and content, and the juxtapositional method. Roman Jakobson formulates these dicta in structuralist terms with his notion of 'poetic function', constructing a theory that both naturalises the initial radicalism of these developments and allows the entire canon to be read cognisant of them. As poetic function is that which focuses ' on the message for its own sake', 7 it is defined according to two primary features, the first, aesthetic (or formal), and the second, metaphorical. In the first case, poetic function is concerned with 'promoting the palpability of signs', 8 therefore is dominant in any utterance where the emphasis is on the material qualities of the words themselves. The signifier is presented not as a transparent vessel for the signified, but a source of aesthetic experience in and of itself, through which likenesses in sound correspond to likenesses in idea. In the second case equivalence, which ordinarily exists only across the paradigmatic axis of language, is 'promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence', 9 so that any sequence of ideas potentially builds associative relationships or, as Jakobson puts it, ' anything sequent is a simile'. 10 The distillation of the poetic to these features -equivalence between form and content and the projection of metaphor from the connective to the entire sequence -is the theoretical legacy of the modernism from which Finlay's concrete poetry grew and the ground on which his topographical poetics is constructed. Nevertheless, poetic function in both of these modes is distinct from that conceived by Jakobson The poem is perceived as a visual structure, without the beginning and end points that mark linear verse. Existing in two dimensions, its boundaries are marked instead by a perimeter. This was the major breakthrough of the early concrete poets: to recalibrate poetic function in terms of a primarily visual 'palpability of signs'. In concord with Finlay's Malevichian 'perfected object', Gomringer describes the concrete poem as ' a reality in itself'. It is ' a play-area of fixed dimensions', an atemporal (insofar as it has neither beginning nor end) 'invitation' 12 of a poem, for us to join and leave when and however we wish.
This makes the concrete poem reader-centric to an unprecedented degree. As Mike Weaver puts it in a 1966 essay, 'the act of perception itself is the first preoccupation of concrete poetry'. 13 In the case of 'wind', we may recognise the darting movements of our eyes as a kind of kinetic metaphor for the movement of the wind, but only if we consent to engage with the poem for long enough. Its 'reality in itself' is justified insofar as the poem is not tied to the presence of a speaker, simply because such a speaker does not -and could not -exist. Its autonomy thus comes at a cost: poetry loses its ability to utter, that is, while the language still speaks in some sense, it has lost its voice, its status as (potential) utterance. As Finlay puts it, '[t]he Muse of concrete poetry reversed Mnemosyne's gift; depriving the poet of song, she gave him sweet eyesight'. 14 The poem loses its attachment to voice and so to presence; instead, it is a made object in the world, a clear prefiguration of the sculptural garden poems at Stonypath/Little Sparta -a poetry not of voice, but of place.
Ultimately, this cost proved too high for the early concrete poets, Gomringer contemporaneous with his letter to Garnier, are presented as loose-leaf poems on glossy card in dimensions much larger than the average poetry book, suggesting that these poems are designed for the mantelpiece rather than the bookshelf. 17 The same year Finlay published 'Pear -Appear -Disappear', later followed by 'First Suprematist Standing Poem' (1965), both of which are designed, as the name of the latter suggests, to 'stand' like a greetings card, on a table or mantelpiece. In conventional verse the 'palpability of signs' is an aural phenomenon. In concrete poetry, it is primarily visual, though it encompasses also what Weaver calls the 'spellingsound relation' 18 -language's phonetic echo -and our own kinaesthetic processes when reading. The astonishing formal innovation of Finlay's topographical poetics is to intensify and extend these processes to all the senses, using neither paper, ink nor voice but nature itself (and the materials it presents the sculptor) to engineer these responses. Nevertheless, these responses remain fundamentally poetic, depending upon semiotic and linguistic means. The invitation presented by the concrete poem develops, at Stonypath/Little Sparta, into a physically immersive encounter in which signs are made palpable in terms of not only sight but also touch, sound, smell and even taste. With this in mind, it is now possible to turn to the poems themselves, in order to determine the precise formal mechanics of topographical poetics in action.

Topographical Poetics
Topography: from the Greek topos -place -and graphia -writing. As J. Hillis Miller observes in Topographies, it is ' a complex word'. 19  How does this etymology bear on the present use of the term, as topographical poetics? One of Finlay's earliest garden poems, 'signpost', 22  […] the idea came from long pondering the several sea-like denizens of the Stonypath moor, and the evening silhouette of an old signpost that stands there… I finally found that the poem had come to occupy the imagined ports, and I set about the usual gnome-task of realisation via joiners and signwrit-ers… When the poem is ready […] I will erect it within our fence, but perhaps some local authority will one day dignify its moor with a replica… It is a nice, or right, idea, isn't it? Naming the world with the right wee names. 23 Like the 'MARE NOSTRUM' plaque, the poem sets up a metaphorical equivalence by which land is named as sea so that it may be read as such.

The Poetic and the Homely
The play of scales and meaning described above is captured in the dual identity of the garden itself, and Alec Finlay's insistence on recognition of this dual identity -as  32 The same question has preoccupied theologians, philosophers, artists and poets since historical records began, and possibly well before that.
Perhaps the most formative in Western culture are the stories of Genesis, wherein 'whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof', 33

The Weather
Every garden is a contradiction. At once both cultural and natural, it is an extension of home that provides no shelter. Nowhere is the tension between art and life more present. This tension produces the topographical poetics of Stonypath/Little Sparta, and is expressed in another of the poet's aphorisms: '[w]eather is the chief content of gardens, yet it is the one thing in them over which the gardener has no control'. 42 This is both the strength and limitation of topographical poetics. As the gar-den's ' chief content', weather fatally compromises form and content's equivalence. It shows that even in the ' composed' garden the dominance of culture is not assured, that it must remain forever a battle. Such, however, is the thrust of Finlay's work. The garden is no idyll. Whether cast as a classical Arcadia, a modern Utopia or an Edenic correspondence of word and thing, the idyll is equivalent to the poetic impossible which remains, by necessity, out of reach. It is rather the 'striv[ing]' towards such an idyll and, in the very same process, becoming reconciled to the fact that it will never be reached, which constitutes Finlay's project. The limitation which weather places on topographical poetics, captured in Finlay's aphorism above, is the link between form and phenomenon which makes the encounter possible, making us aware at once of our distance from and proximity to both ' earth' and the 'non-thinking life'.
In The Rule of Metaphor, Paul Ricoeur observes that 'the "place" of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of the verb to be'. 43 If this is the case, how can we locate metaphor in a poetics in which the copula is absent? The answer is already there in the juxtapositional method of modernist poetry and its implications are fully explored at Stonypath/Little Sparta: it is made more palpable by its very absence, as the responsibility for it is assumed by the reader, not the poet. Ricoeur goes on: 'The metaphorical "is" at once signifies both "is not" and "is like"'. 44 Hence of the garden we should say a) the garden is not the sea, and b) the garden is like the sea. Of the garden itself, however, nothing is said. The garden simply is and we are present within it. Meanwhile, the sea is made imaginatively present by virtue of its physical absence from the garden, as language and material catalyse the environment to bring it to mind. Given that the 'palpability' of the topographical poem comes to a large extent from its environmental context, it can be argued that the weather plays the role of the absent copula. As the movement of the reader's eye awakes Gomringer's 'wind', so the wind itself awakens the sea in topographical poetics, acting as a kind of phenomenological guarantor for the imaginative activity of the poem as manifest in the mind and senses of the reader. It is by this method that the garden -or rather, the imagination of a visitor to the garden -is able to voyage so far whilst remaining palpably within its limits.
One last reading, of the relatively late garden poem 'ECLOGUE', 45  The poem sets up a subtle contrast between the modern and the classical. Its name, of course, is classical (recalling Virgil); so too its material, especially the drystone wall. But despite this, its form is modern: topographical. A poem resembling a sheepfold is not a sheepfold but expresses an ' antique yearning' for a sheepfold.
There is also -and probably not coincidentally, given the profound influence of the painter on the poet -a striking formal similarity to Malevich's first 'perfected object', his seminal painting Black Square (1915). Finally, as it invites physical activity from the 'reader' for its completion, so it recalls Gomringer's 'wind', and indeed the poem may be considered a realisation of Gomringer's 'play-area' by other means. As a poetic construction it is a 'field or force' for which the poet 'suggests […] possibilities', according to which 'the reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play and joins in'. 46 Most remarkable among these 'possibilities' is that of opening the gate, and stepping inside the poem.
Before we do so, we will have approached the poem from either the Lochan Eck

Conclusion
There is a great deal more to be said about 'ECLOGUE', and the workings of Finlay's topographical poetics in general. Notably, the source of the text 'FOLDING|THE LAST|SHEEP' is not from a pagan but a Christian tradition, coming from the title of an engraving by 19 th century artist Samuel Palmer, suggesting some of the complex and allusive ways in which Finlay uses the materials of tradition to strive towards a bridging of the gap between the classical and modern in a way analogous to his 'striv[ing]' towards the poetic Little Sparta from the homely bearing of Stonypath.
There is a great deal more to be said too about the 'level of "being"' engendered by Finlay's work at the garden and elsewhere, not least how the oscillation between longing and reconciliation is rendered in the poems' content -a question especially pertinent to the poet's deeply and often unsettlingly ambivalent use of militaristic themes and imagery. This is beyond the scope of the present article, but perhaps there is a clue in the Garnier letter, not knowing 'what is meant by "God".' Galvanised by his battles with bureaucratic and cultural authorities, by the 1980s Finlay was railing against what he describes as 'secularisation of all forms of life'. 48 In a dispute with Strathclyde Regional Council over his Temple of Apollo he goes so far as to describe the Temple as ' a non-secular space', 49 and so due the same tax relief accorded to a religious building. Of a piece with its Stonypathian playfulness, this term helps to frame the oscillations of topographical poetics, with the 'non-secular space' an aperture for both Malevichian 'striv[ing]' and ' antique yearning'. Malevich The obvious, possibly kneejerk question to ask is whether we should long for such things (and there is of course a very strong argument that we shouldn't, given the terrors of History both ancient and modern). But topographical poetics, voiceless, site-specific and prone to the vicissitudes of weather and decay, accepts longing as a given, and so according to Finlay a better question would be to ask if longing for a Rousseau is also to long, inevitably, for a Robespierre. For in the last analysis, this longing is never resolved by the garden (as if it could be), but is realised and preserved in the ' constant flux' of the poems therein. Such is the reconciliation of the homely, whereby the miniaturism, scalar oscillations and meteorological palpability of Stonypath/Little Sparta opens a 'non-secular space' -a space of longing and recuperation -for these questions to be contemplated in the garden's relative safety. Even, that is, if we do not know 'what is meant by "God"', and even as we are aware, and as the poet elsewhere reminds us, that '[i]dylls end in thunderstorms'. 50 After all, we are under no obligation to open the gate and enter the sheepfold of 'ECLOGUE'. If we do consent to open the gate, however, it arguably realises a 'level of "being"' unlikely to be found in any of the libraries or art galleries of our contemporary metropolises.