Peter Finch (poet)

Peter Finch (born 1947) is a Welsh author, psychogeographer and poet living in Cardiff, Wales.

He attended school in the city and took up his first job as a trainee local government accountant at Glamorgan County Council in 1963.

In 1964 he heard Howlin' Wolf and other performers at the American Negro Blues Festival at Colston Hall, Bristol.

There he met the bass player and performer Willie Dixon and tried to interest him in his home grown south Wales blues lyrics.

[4] The magazine generated its own publication series which ran to 80 titles and included works by Peter Redgrove, Kent Taylor, Geraint Jarman, William Wantling, Bob Cobbing, Doug Blazek, D M Thomas and John Tripp.

During the 1970s with Second Aeon magazine at its height Finch became deeply involved with experimental, concrete, sound and visual poetry.

He'd met Bob Cobbing in London and had been drawn to the innovative often anarchic styles practised in the capital.

Richard Kostelanetz called him "the principal innovator in Welsh poetry... Finch has favored a variety of tight sober structures, including parodies of other poets, visual poems, sound poems, and verbal imitations of Philip Glass' music... Finch deserves a Welsh knighthood".

Everyone from R. S. Thomas to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jackson Mac Low to Simon Armitage and Margaret Atwood to Derek Walcott read at the premises.

He put the annual Wales Book of the Year prize onto a visible and celebratory footing; created the role of Welsh National Poet; and helped smooth the way for innovations such as the poet Gwyneth Lewis' bilingual words built across the frontage of the Wales Millennium Centre.

These include Ysbwriel (2002) as part of Jeroen Van Western's Breathing In Time Out across the top of the Lamby Way landfill site; sections of R S Thomas Information[15] (2003) which have been incorporated onto the exterior and interior of the BT Internet Data Centre in Cardiff Bay; L'Alliance (2010) as part of Jean-Bernard Metais[16] public artwork in The Hayes, Cardiff; and The Ballast Bank (2011) as part of Renn & Thacker's[17] The Blue Light outside Butetown Police Station in Cardiff Bay.