Peter Finch (born 1947) is a Welsh author, psychogeographer and poet living in Cardiff, Wales.
Early life
Finch was born in Cardiff, Wales, in March 1947, son of Stanley and Marjorie Finch, a post office worker and a telephonist. He attended school in the city and took up his first job as a trainee local government accountant at Glamorgan County Council in 1963.
He began reading and writing poetry after hearing a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl and then buying a copy of the City Lights Edition of this work at Cardiff's SPCK (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge) Bookshop in the Friary. His early work appeared in small magazines such as Poet's Platform, Breakthru and Viewpoints. In 1964 he heard Howlin' Wolf and other performers at the American Negro Blues Festival at Colston Hall, Bristol. There he met the bass player and performer Willie Dixon and tried to interest him in his home grown south Wales blues lyrics. He failed.
Second Aeon
In 1966 he founded the literary magazine, Second Aeon which ran for 21 issues until 1974. The magazine grew in both content and stature to become the leading alternative lit magazine of the day. Peter Barry called it "The most prominent and best established avant-garde poetry magazine of the period". The magazine generated its own publication series which ran to 80 titles and included works by Peter Redgrove, Kent Taylor, Geraint Jarman, William Wantling, Bob Cobbing, Doug Blazek, D M Thomas and John Tripp. In 1968 Finch founded No Walls, a weekly poetry reading series which ran until 1970. Eighteen issues of the reading series' magazine The No Walls Broadsheet were published. In 1976 at the height of the Poetry Wars he was offered the editorship of the London Poetry Society's The Poetry Review, a post he did not accept.
1970s and experimental poetry
During the 1970s with Second Aeon magazine at its height Finch became deeply involved with experimental, concrete, sound and visual poetry. He'd met Bob Cobbing in London and had been drawn to the innovative often anarchic styles practised in the capital. He became treasurer of the Association of Little Presses (ALP), the Welsh representative of Poet's Conference, the poets trade union, and a council member of the Poetry Society in Earl's Court.
In Wales he had been elected a member of the English Section of Yr Academi Gymreig, the Welsh Academy, the august association of writers, and was regarded by some as its an enfant terrible.
His work, often in the form of extended sound poetry innovations, was performed at venues throughout the UK. His visual poetry was exhibited in the company of that of Peter Mayer, dsh, Cobbing and others both in the UK and further afield. He was awarded a Welsh Arts Council bursary for visual poetry. The University of California exhibited both his concrete poetry and Second Aeon magazine artefacts.
Richard Kostelanetz called him "the principal innovator in Welsh poetry... Finch has favored a variety of tight sober structures, including parodies of other poets, visual poems, sound poems, and verbal imitations of Philip Glass' music... Finch deserves a Welsh knighthood".
The Oriel bookshop – 1973–1998
Following his appointment in 1973 Finch managed the Welsh Arts Council's Oriel bookshop, a specialist bilingual (English and Welsh) arts and poetry retailer for twenty-five years. This included the original first floor operation in Charles Street, Cardiff until 1989, the more commercial shop on the ground floor at The Friary until 1997 and, briefly, as manager of the HMSO Oriel take-over until 1998. The shop became a centre for writers, small publishers, innovators, poets and performers. It was a home to Welsh-language culture in the capital as well as a venue for numerous poetry readings and other literary events. Everyone from R. S. Thomas to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jackson Mac Low to Simon Armitage and Margaret Atwood to Derek Walcott read at the premises. The ALP mounted bookfairs. Writers groups gathered.