INTRODUCTION TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCOTLAND

The Encyclopedia of Scotland was written during 1980 and 1981. The following year I self-published a much-abridged libretto version of the poem, the text of which I sang and recited during 1982 and 1983 with several other readers, masks, costumes, and music (blues, jazz, and bagpipe) by the improvisatory group Fiction Music Ensemble. The current edition from Salt Press constitutes the first publication of the original full-length poem, complete with its rightside-up and upside-down footnotes, diagrams, appendices, and other "scholarly" apparatus.

Though in one sense The Encyclopedia of Scotland seems the most abstract and experimental of my books of poetry, in another sense, it is the most grounded in a particular place, time, and community. It is a poem of the multimedia art scene based in the Lower East Side of New York at the beginning of the punk era, and also of a group of artists creating a community in an old house on a lake in the Maine woods without roads, electricity, clocks, or running water.

The poem is a pastiche of many voices, written under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Clifford Geertz, Frank O'Hara, the Greek Anthology, and a collection of victorola records. Some of the threads include found text, overheard conversation, my own earlier poems, poems I painted as visual art projects, works by other poets, and popular songs. One overarching goal of the poem was to create a performative, ritual innocence that didn't take itself too seriously, an alternative to irony in a time that presented irony as the most viable way for art to gain distance from the culture of technology and consumption.

—Annie Finch, June 2004

Note: All typos in this book are intentional.