Greg Thomas/Oo Press

📯 Crowdfunder alert 📯 A pay day announcement/reminder that @lhartbooks and I are collaborating on a book of interviews with, and written testimony from, people who worked with Ian Hamilton Finlay @littlespartaihf from the 1950s to the 2000s. This is the culmination of a five-year project supported by @fleming_collection to locate and speak to as many collaborators and creative acquaintances of Finlay as could be found: typographers, photographers, poets, visual artists, illustrators, prose writers, sculptors, woodcarvers, stonemasons, letter cutters, curators, and more. Part of the aim is to bring sidelined voices to the fore, revealing the diverse group of creative spirits that helped to shape Finlay's poetic universe. The second pic is a portrait of Finlay by photographer Antonia Reeve, while the Little Sparta propaganda poster is by Tom Bee and his graphic design studio. We're crowdfunding to cover part of the publication costs. If you can spare some funds to support the neo-Little-Spartan revival, please click on the link in my bio (or copy and paste here crowdfunder.co.uk/p/crafting-arcadia-hamilton-finlay-collaborations) Sorry about the audio, I couldn't resist.

⭐ 📯 PUBLICATION NEWS📯 ⭐ I'm delighted to share some pictures of my new box of poem postcards out this week with @zimzallapress . A collection of new and redesigned works, Colour/Grammar brings together a large selection of my work in two-dimensional, colour-coded eco-poetry for the first time. Each box contains two copies of each poem, allowing one set to be gifted to a diverse array of readers in the post. An homage to the aleatoric forms of mid-century modernism, a celebration of poetry as tactile domestic craft, and an exploration of the possibilities of colour as grammar and grammar as colour. This is a project of the strange, nerve-jangling, ecstatic days of early fatherhood. Something of the colour of that time seeps into the final sequence, which was created entirely at night, with a newborn asleep on my lap. I couldn't be happier with the job that Tom at zimZalla and the @tinyboxmaker have done on this. £40 plus postage from zZ.

COVER REVEAL! 🪐🪐 🪐 🪐 Julie (@essencepress ) and I are delighted to share the cover, title, and chapter list for our new book of Edwin Morgan's poetry and art. *A Home In Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry* is now available for pre-order from the Reaktion website (link below) for £25, and will be abroad in the world on June 1 next year. Here's a rundown of the contents: Introduction: Edwin Morgan’s Visions and Soundings, by Greg Thomas 1 Play of Imagination: The Scrapbooks 2 Verbivocovisual: Concrete Poetry in the 1960s 3 Between Poetry and Design: Little Magazines, Booklets, Prints and More 4 Chance Encounters: Newspoems 5 The Voice in Space: Sound Poetry and the 1970s 6 Rainbows in Concrete: Cursive and Colour Poems 7 Second Lives We're really excited to share this side of Morgan's work and world with you in new detail. The book contains lots of rare and unpublished material and is the result of many hours and days spent trawling through archives at Glasgow University @uofglasgowasc , the Scottish Poetry Library @splscotland , the Mitchell @glasgowlifelibraries , and beyond. @reaktionbooks have helped us to present Morgan's universe in all its visual-linguistic jouissance in ways that haven't been possible before. We have many people to thank, but at this stage, particular gratitude to the @edmorgantrust for their financial and practical support, and to Morgan's literary executors Jim McGonigal and Hamish Whyte for their amazing intellectual generosity and their enthusiasm for this project. /work/a-home-in-space

Had a great time delivering a concrete and collage poetry workshop inspired by Edwin Morgan @edmorgantrust at @paisleybookfest yesterday, ahead of the launch of mine and @essencepress 's new book of Morgan's concrete, visual and sound poetry from @reaktionbooks in the summer. Here's some of the amazing work folk made. Some of it reminded me of my other current research interest, the magnificent collage work of Kevin Hutchinson, which I'm exploring with @patricia_fleming_glasgow just now. Thanks to @glasgowzinelib and all who sail in her for the lend of materials Xx

The group exhibition *Disruptors: Fractures Images and Migrant Wordl* opens @benurigallery this evening, curated by Ana Milcic and featuring items from the Ben Uri and @william.allen.word.image collections. I'm really pleased to have contributed an essay to the catalogue, "Words at War, Words in Exile, Words Transformed: Visible Language and Legible Image in Migrant Art in Britain". Touching on Schwitters's works created in internment on the Isle of Man and other Jewish/German émigré artists to Britain during World War Two, as well as migrant word & image artists of the 1960s (Hansjörg Mayer, Astrid Furnival et al) and a new generation of text-image artists including my dear pal @heyastranaut . The show includes all this and more, with great contemporary works by @osmanstudio , @narielwalla and many others. Glasgow and baby means I cant make it to the launch tonight but it looks well worth it Xx

Come hear about Edwin Morgan's concrete poetry and experiment with your own concrete and collage poem designs. Part of the @paisleybookfest , next Friday 15 May, from two til four, at Paisley Town Hall. Check the book fest bio for details. Ahead of the launch of mine and Julie Johnstone*A Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry*, by Edwin Morgan, from @reaktionbooks , coming soon. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

At length, there is a new Oo poem-object in the world. *plant-pot poem (greenisland/landisgreen)* is a poem-object in sealed sea-green Jesmonite (colour varies quite a bit depending on the pour) cast from a 3D-printed original. Detail in white acrylic paint pen. A run of 20. £40 including postage. A poem for late spring and the blooming of the flowers. It began with a thought about the rapid greening of arctic landscapes & emergence of tundra vegetation. But evolved into a more formal supposition about the relationship between the island and the (near) palindrome. A walk around an island road might take you back to where you started, &c. The magnificent @tinyboxmaker has worked on the packaging again, in sea-green with a linen finish (17.5cm x 7.5cm x 6.5cm). Get it via my story or the Oo highlights blob or DM me BYO plants and soil Xx

One month til @essencepress and I publish *A Home in Space: Selected Visual, Concrete, and Sound Poetry*, our new collection of Edwin Morgan's experimental poetry and text art, which we hope will cast the much loved former Makar in a whole new light @edmorgantrust . Here's our final lovely publisher review from Prof Drew Milne. Get your hands on some avant-garde mischief on 1 June from @reaktionbooks 🚀 🐒 🐕

🖼️ This week's Fleming Collection highlight: Ian Hamilton Finlay's Le Silence Éternal de Checkpoint Sandy (1986) Le Silence Éternal de Checkpoint Sandy by Ian Hamilton Finlay places a photograph of a road winding through a hilly countryside, with a french title and a short text description by Finlay. The description describes his land as 'Little Sparta' and references a battle occurring in 1983, using a modern subject and viewing it through a classical lens, characteristic of much of Finlay's work. Greg Thomas’ (@oopressgregthomas ) forthcoming book with Lund Humphries (@lhartbooks ), brings together interviews and testimonies from those who worked with Ian Hamilton Finlay (@littlespartaihf ) from the 1950s to the 2000s. A culmination of a five-year project, supported by the Fleming Collection, it foregrounds the many collaborators, across disciplines, who helped shape Finlay’s poetic universe, giving long-overlooked voices their due. 🔗 Crowdfunding is currently open to support publication costs and contributions can be made via the link in bio. - 1. Ian Hamilton Finlay. Le Silence Éternal de Checkpoint Sandy (1986). The Fleming Collection. © Courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

News of a crowdfunder! Help me and Lund Humphries create the first book centring the voices of Ian Hamilton Finlay's creative collaborators. (And please repost!) Over the last few years I've been interviewing as many people as could be found who worked with the great twentieth-century Scottish artist, poet, and avant-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay @littlespartaihf . This work was kindly supported by @fleming_collection . I'm now working with the excellent Lund Humphries @lhartbooks to turn this collection of interviews and written accounts into a book. Crafting Arcadia: On Collaborating with Ian Hamilton Finlay will include many previously sidelined voices, including an account of working and creative life at Little Sparta from Sue Swan, Finlay's long-term partner and primary collaborator from the 1960s until the 1990s. We're hoping to raise £5,000 to support publication costs. I know there are lots of Finlay enthusiasts and modern art and lit afficionados out there who'd love to help us bring this project to fruition. So please help out if you can. You will get a personal thankyou in the publication. I'm going to pop the link in my bio, and an Ian Hamilton Finlay book highlights bubble. You can also copy and paste the link below: /p/crafting-arcadia-hamilton-finlay-collaborations Thanks from me and Lund Humphries. Hope we can make this happen. Arcadianly, Greg xx

Swimming in the disused slate quarries on Easdale this weekend 🏊 Seasky/Skysea Worth a landscape format I reckon 🏞️ Avec @saskiamccracken @eloweese Doug & Falco. Xx

"That simple act of naming the elements of the path evidently stirred a sense of how natural environments could be transformed, emotionally and intellectually, by assigning language to them: the containment and elucidation of space through words, and of words through space...On a wet and wintry afternoon in January, with the Braan in spate, licking the edges of the lower walkways, the work brings a kind of mammalian warmth to the dark and damp." I visited @corbenic_poetry_path in January and wrote about it for @artukdotorg A lovely place, suffused with a spirit of collaborative creativity and generosity, steeped in the Scottish tradition of landscape poetry. I'm afraid I don't have author names for all these works. But the lead image is @gezasallai and the beehive is @alec_finlay 🐝 Read the whole thing at artuk.org, specifically here /discover/stories/the-rhythm-of-feet-walking-scotlands-corbenic-poetry-path (Thanks for the gig @rachel.ashenden 🙏)