Peter Finch

Peter Finch (born 1947) is a Welsh author, psychogeographer and poet living in Cardiff, Wales. Early life Finch was born in Cardiff, Wales, in March 1947, son of Stanley and Marjorie Finch, a post office worker and a telephonist. He attended school in the city and took up his first job as a trainee local government accountant at Glamorgan County Council in 1963. He began reading and writing poetry after hearing a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl and then buying a copy of the City Lights Edition of this work at Cardiff's SPCK (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge) Bookshop in the Friary. His early work appeared in small magazines such as Poet's Platform, Breakthru and Viewpoints. 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. He failed. Second Aeon In 1966 he founded the literary magazine, Second Aeon which ran for 21 issues until 1974. The magazine grew in both content and stature to become the leading alternative lit magazine of the day. Peter Barry called it "The most prominent and best established avant-garde poetry magazine of the period". 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. In 1968 Finch founded No Walls, a weekly poetry reading series which ran until 1970. Eighteen issues of the reading series' magazine The No Walls Broadsheet were published. In 1976 at the height of the Poetry Wars he was offered the editorship of the London Poetry Society's The Poetry Review, a post he did not accept.