Greg Thomas
Please see gregthomas.online for up to date info. I am a writer, critic, and recent British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based between London and Glasgow, with research interests in concrete poetry, mid-twentieth-century avant-garde movements, and overlaps between literature and other media, particularly visual art.
My book *Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland* (Liverpool University Press, 2019) offers the first detailed, context-specific account of the relationship between British poets and artists and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. It focuses in particular on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houedard and Bob Cobbing.
Between 2014 and 2017 I was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, undertaking a three-year research project entitled "Judgements and Sentences: Politics in the Life and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay". Between 2009 and 2013 I completed an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award at Edinburgh University in conjunction with the Scottish Poetry Library, on concrete poetry in England and Scotland, focusing on the work of Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Bob Cobbing and Dom Sylvester Houédard. I completed a BA in English Literature at Sussex University (2003-2006) and an MPhil in Culture and Criticism at Cambridge University (2008-2009).
I also work as a policy advisor in the third sector: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-thomas-2700a9181/
Address: gregthomas.online
My book *Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland* (Liverpool University Press, 2019) offers the first detailed, context-specific account of the relationship between British poets and artists and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. It focuses in particular on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houedard and Bob Cobbing.
Between 2014 and 2017 I was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, undertaking a three-year research project entitled "Judgements and Sentences: Politics in the Life and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay". Between 2009 and 2013 I completed an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award at Edinburgh University in conjunction with the Scottish Poetry Library, on concrete poetry in England and Scotland, focusing on the work of Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Bob Cobbing and Dom Sylvester Houédard. I completed a BA in English Literature at Sussex University (2003-2006) and an MPhil in Culture and Criticism at Cambridge University (2008-2009).
I also work as a policy advisor in the third sector: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-thomas-2700a9181/
Address: gregthomas.online
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Together with his friend the poet and folk-singer Hamish Henderson, and the Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, Finlay helped shape a Scottish avant-garde that was oddly homely, less a programmatic movement than a fey shoulder pressed against the wheel of the moribund Scottish Renaissance. (20)
The need for younger Scottish poets to strike out in new directions from the increasingly obstinate course ploughed by the advocates of the Renaissance – exemplified by the exclusion of many of them from the 1958 Burns bicentenary anthology Honour’d Shade – has in the last few years been fairly extensively emphasised. Indeed, the danger should be avoided of lumping together largely distinct developments in Scottish literature during the late-1950s to early-1960s in terms of the common hostility meted out on them by Hugh MacDiarmid, whose name often serves as a metonym for Renaissance principles. To some extent, Morgan’s concrete poetry and Henderson’s folk balladry represent two such developments. But what the selection of letters from Morgan to Henderson in this archive partly reveals – although their limited number perhaps proves Finlay correct in precluding any suggestion of a ‘programmatic movement’ – are some instinctive assumptions of common ground.
Book Reviews by Greg Thomas
Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell, eds. The International Writers’
Conference Revisited: Edinburgh 1962. [Glasgow]: Cargo, 2012. Pp. x +
244. £22. ISBN: 97819088851599.
Eleanor Bell and Linda Gunn, eds. The Scottish Sixties: Reading,
Rebellion, Revolution? Scottish Cultural Review of Language and
Literature Volume 20. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2013. Pp. x +
315. €67/$94 (ebook €60/$84). ISBN: 9789042037267.
Angela Bartie, The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-war
Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. x +, 272. £70
(paperback £20). ISBN: 9780748670307.
Lectures and presentations by Greg Thomas
Together with his friend the poet and folk-singer Hamish Henderson, and the Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, Finlay helped shape a Scottish avant-garde that was oddly homely, less a programmatic movement than a fey shoulder pressed against the wheel of the moribund Scottish Renaissance. (20)
The need for younger Scottish poets to strike out in new directions from the increasingly obstinate course ploughed by the advocates of the Renaissance – exemplified by the exclusion of many of them from the 1958 Burns bicentenary anthology Honour’d Shade – has in the last few years been fairly extensively emphasised. Indeed, the danger should be avoided of lumping together largely distinct developments in Scottish literature during the late-1950s to early-1960s in terms of the common hostility meted out on them by Hugh MacDiarmid, whose name often serves as a metonym for Renaissance principles. To some extent, Morgan’s concrete poetry and Henderson’s folk balladry represent two such developments. But what the selection of letters from Morgan to Henderson in this archive partly reveals – although their limited number perhaps proves Finlay correct in precluding any suggestion of a ‘programmatic movement’ – are some instinctive assumptions of common ground.
Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell, eds. The International Writers’
Conference Revisited: Edinburgh 1962. [Glasgow]: Cargo, 2012. Pp. x +
244. £22. ISBN: 97819088851599.
Eleanor Bell and Linda Gunn, eds. The Scottish Sixties: Reading,
Rebellion, Revolution? Scottish Cultural Review of Language and
Literature Volume 20. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2013. Pp. x +
315. €67/$94 (ebook €60/$84). ISBN: 9789042037267.
Angela Bartie, The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-war
Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. x +, 272. £70
(paperback £20). ISBN: 9780748670307.