From Objective to Concrete:
Transnational Literary Networks and Midcentury Avant-Garde Journals

This project explores how experimental and avant-garde poetry magazines in the 1950s and 1960s influenced each other and shaped new poetic styles. It focuses on the connections between two American journals—Origin (edited by Cid Corman) and Black Mountain Review (edited by Robert Creeley)—and the Scottish journal Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (edited by Ian Hamilton Finlay). These magazines were more than just places to publish poems; they were hubs of exchange, where editors and writers shared ideas and experimented with form. By looking at editorial decisions, publishing choices, and correspondence among these editors, the study traces a path from the American Objectivist poets, like Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, to the rise of international Concrete poetry, which appeared in later issues of Finlay’s journal. In short, the project rethinks postwar American poetry as part of a broader, global conversation—one that includes a distinctly Scottish perspective.