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And Weaver adds, “Concrete poetry is a new metre. [Finlay’s] sense of form begins with words— no other way for a poet—and what he seeks is their relation to a new constructive principle of modulation, variation and repetition of constants, often a single word…. The poems stand in a precarious space, where art is, between the decorative and symbolic. A heart-breaking place to work.” But why is the calendar called The Blue and the Brown Poems? Neither Williams nor Weaver comments on the title, but it clearly refers to Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books, first published in 1958 as the “Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’.” In the Preface, Rush Rhees tells us that Wittgenstein dictated the “Blue Book” (though he did not call it that) to his class in Cambridge during the university session 1933-34, and he had stenciled copies made. He dictated the ‘Brown Book’ to two of his pupils (Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose) during 1934-35… the first lot was bound in blue wrappers and the second in brown, and they were always spoken of that way.”10 It was in these notes and drafts, that Wittgenstein first developed his important concept of language-games (see page 17 and following), and came to insist that the meaning of a word is its actual use in the language. Indeed, the Brown Book gives us the first version of Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustinian language theory—a critique that that the Investigations will carry out more fully. Finlay clearly had some familiarity with Wittgenstein’s teaching: the aphorism already cited, “That of which we cannot speak, we must construct,” for example, is a tongue-in-cheek response to the gnomic conclusion to the Tractatus: “Of what we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” I have already suggested that the poem “How blue?” alludes to Wittgenstein’s examination of the manifold contexts in which we ask such a question and how we accordingly answer it. But whereas Wittgenstein’s focus is on the difficulties of assigning meaning to such ordinary words as “length,” “read,” “pain,” and “light,” Finlay’s Blue and Brown Poems (which use blue sparingly and brown not at all) concentrate on the look of words—words we think we know and hence take for granted. Here is the Table of Contents: September October November December January February March April May June July August
ho | horizon | on ajar net / net cork / net acrobats wave |rock green waters you | me broken | heartbroken wind | wind ring of waves le circus
The link between month and subject is intentionally arbitrary: this is not a calendar that features pictures of little lambs for April or rainy skies for November. And the set of 12 prints [figure 9] begins with September rather than January, as if to say that, in a world of global communication, the seasons, so central to lyric poetry from Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Keats’s Ode to Autumn, to Wallace Stevens’s The Auroras of Autumn, no longer have a separate identity. Indeed, the twelve 10 Rush Rhees, “Preface,” Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2d. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), vii.