The Encyclopedia of Scotland was written during 1980 and 1981.  The following year I published a much-abridged chapbook version of the poem and performed that during 1982 and 1983 with several other readers, masks, costumes, and music by the improvisatory group Fiction Music Ensemble.  This edition is the first publication, slightly edited, of the full-length original poem.

              More than any other book I have written, The Encyclopedia of Scotland embodies 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 are intentional.

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch