Out of the Mixer Colour-concrete poems are probably old familiar
stuff to the real lads, but I have just seen my first, and it's got me worried to death. It has been written, and published, by Ian Hamilton Finlay, the agreeable fanatic who runs the Wild Hawthorn Press in Edinburgh. In the hope that some other people may be as confused and frightened as I am, 1 will explain that this poem is a quarto page of good white paper, containing six little blocks of type (24 pt. Tempo lower case, I would guess offhand) in which the sequence Tree tends to recur, vertically, in a pleasant ochre ink. flanked by other letters in blue. There is also a green sequence. I am explaining this badly, 1 know, but even a bad explanation takes some courage because I am always haunted by the feeling that I have missed something obvious and essential, a simple code known to everybody else in the world. Anyway, it does look very pretty, and I think I am in favour of Mr. Finlay, because his poetry magazine, 'poor old tired horse' as he says, can print both Voznesensky (who also frightens me) and Bud Neill, the rogue elephant of Scottish cartoonists and wits. Bud Neill doesn't frighten me and I don't frighten him.
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