Life & Wisdom Quote by Ian Hamilton Finlay

Finlay’s line is a provocation disguised as a shrug: the medium doesn’t matter, until you notice he’s quietly expanding “poem” to include the entire world. “Neither here nor there” performs a deliberate dismissal of the fussy question artists always get - what are you working in? - and replaces it with a more radical claim: composition is an ordering impulse that can run through language, landscape, and lived incident alike. Words, “stone plants and trees,” “events”: he stacks them on one plane, refusing the hierarchy that keeps poetry safely on the page and everything else filed under craft, gardening, or life.

The oddest turn is the last: “the Sheriff’s officer, or whatever.” That “whatever” is not casual; it’s barbed. Finlay spent years in real disputes over property, planning permissions, and public authority around Little Sparta, his garden-as-total-artwork in Scotland. Smuggling a lawman into a list of artistic materials is his way of saying the state is part of the composition too - coercion, paperwork, and conflict included. The joke lands because it’s true: power intrudes, and Finlay insists on treating that intrusion as another element to be arranged, named, and pinned into form.

Subtextually, this is an argument for the poet as maker and strategist, not confessional diarist. If events can be “composed,” then art isn’t merely reflective; it’s tactical. Finlay’s genius is to make that claim sound offhand, as if the most audacious expansion of poetry’s territory were simply common sense.