Contemporary Poetry

conclusion 215

could be read in Freudian terms as unheimlich, when a quotidian
over-familiarity is dispersed in a synchronous haunting. Finch
has systematically experimented with methods of rewriting origi-
nal documents, poems, essays and manifestos. These techniques
include fi lleting a government text such as the poem ‘Words begin-
ning with “A” from the Government’s Welsh Assembly White
Paper’, which introduces key phrases from cultural policy making.
Finch in the 1980 s went as far as to create a computer program that
aimed to create the archetypal Anglo-Welsh poem:

Back in the early 80 s when the best home computer in the

world was the BBC B with 32 k memory, no printer and a

cassette-tape A-drive I wrote a program in Basic which would

compose Anglo-Welsh poems for me. I set up a number of

word pools containing the sort of vocabulary the Anglo-

Welsh were famous for – sheep, stipple, cariad, hillside,

hiraeth, chapel, pit – and then a couple of rules for how these

words could be combined. Up it all came on screen.

slate fences on farmer’s hillsides,

shrouded cockles and grass-polished deacons,

the nation majestically watered.^21

Drawing from techniques of ostranenie or defamiliarisation, Finch
enacts a dialogue with earlier modernist techniques and experi-
mentation, which enables him, however randomly, to interrogate a
legacy of Anglo-Welsh poetry. It is this sense of a recuperated and
adaptive modernism which energises a reading of Welsh cultural
history and its evolution without retreating to struggles with poetic
precedents, and even in this early example of experimentation, by
using technology as an impertinent wordsmith. His ongoing cyber-
textual ‘R. S. Thomas Information Project’ relies for its formation
on the hypertext.^22 The work presents information on the Anglo-
Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, instructed by biography, bibliography
and Thomas’s own texts. Finch declares that Thomas’s vocabulary
is ‘broken down and re-ordered and fi lled with fi xed and random
links. There are side leaps into descriptions of some of his recent
mind-states and into critical coverage of his work (appropriately