Edwin Morgan: Three Transitionary Poems

Edwin Morgan in front of a visual rendering of his poem, “A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss,” published in Proverbfolder (Openings Press, 1969). Photo by Marshall Walker, 1975, courtesy of Elsie Walker.

 

How disconcerting to find ourselves in a time of transition. Any confident sense of what happened formerly is now meshed with caution about what might come next. Wars, climate change, the desolate trail of migrants trekking toward border guards, the drift of viruses on our breath, or someone else’s—all create an atmosphere of tension, and poets are drawn to respond.

This selection of unpublished poems by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), and by some younger Scottish poets whose work he has advanced, comes from two different points of transition: from the start of the seventies and of the 2020s. In Scotland, this present centenary year of Morgan’s birth is the occasion of reflection, creative reinterpretation, and critical analysis of a body of work in poetry, translation, drama, and prose. His scope is, in retrospect, astonishing: a 600-page Collected Poems and a 500-page Collected Translations (actually a selected) in 1996 were followed by four major collections in the next fifteen years, besides award-winning dramas in the nineties as well as half a dozen pamphlet publications of poems and translations in the new millennium. Morgan’s inventive poetry seemed constantly in the midst of its own transitions, shifting from confessional to experimental to formal, from civic to revolutionary, from concealed to openly gay.

The three unpublished poems presented here come from the turning point between his sixties poetry—vibrant, avant-garde, emotional, celebratory—and his seventies work, which is more troubled, darker, and reactive to social turmoil in Britain as well as to Middle Eastern battles of that decade. The Yom Kippur (or Arab-Israeli) War of October 1973, fought across the Sinai Desert and Golan Heights, brought disturbing flashbacks in news footage of earlier conflicts over the same terrain in WWII, when Morgan had served as a medical orderly in Egypt and Palestine. Morgan was also attempting at this point to move on from his hard-won and prize-winning first full-length collection, The Second Life (Edinburgh University Press, 1968), toward his second volume, From Glasgow to Saturn (1973), published by Michael Schmidt at Carcanet Press, who would remain Morgan’s editor and interlocutor for the rest of his life.

Their relationship almost foundered on several occasions on rocky issues of political and national identity, Morgan being deeply and radically Scottish while Schmidt was decidedly, if diplomatically, not. But both men were committed internationalists and shared a love of poetry in translation from many languages. If we say that The Second Life established Morgan’s poetic reputation beyond question in Scotland, particularly among younger readers and writers, then From Glasgow to Saturn established his UK and international identity, selling in such significant numbers that it had to be reprinted.

This radical change of publishers, from an academic to a culturally activist press, coincided with a marked alteration in politics. Born at the start of the twenties, Morgan would view the new year of each subsequent decade with an expectant sense of new paths to follow. After his life-enhancing sixties, however, the seventies presented a selection of troubles, both personal with the death of his mother, and political with unrest at home and abroad. In the UK, there were strikes in key industries, power cuts leading to a three-day working week, and rampant inflation. In the Middle East, the Yom Kippur War led to a crisis in oil supplies. Psychologically, film footage and reporting of Israel’s swift desert campaign brought flashbacks of Morgan’s wartime service in North Africa and then in Lebanon and Palestine. These intensely visual and troubling mental experiences would soon issue in a vivid, 100-stanza-long poem called “The New Divan,” with an aesthetic partly based on Arabic poetry. This sequence would later provide the title for Morgan’s third collection, The New Divan (Carcanet Press, 1977).

At the start of the decade, Morgan was already showing an aesthetic fascination with news media and with imagined photojournalism in the series of poems which he called Instamatics. These are based on actual but unphotographed events which he came across in newspapers or radio news reports. Selections from these Instamatics would appear in Morgan’s Poems of Thirty Years (1982) and in Collected Poems (1996), but Ian McKelvie, associated with the “Cambridge School,” published an earlier, much fuller selection as Instamatic Poems (1972) in London. The news items treated to this imaging process vary from the ironic and intriguing to the bloody or grotesque, perhaps signaling Morgan’s uneasy sense of the trend of this darker decade.

So caught up was Morgan in this new series of poems that for a year or so he was less diligent than usual in sending out to journals other new poems that he was writing. Thus I have found three unpublished works that signal something of his poetic response to that time of transition. Some ten years later, on March 19, 1982, recordings of “Alienation” and “The Round” were heard on a BBC Radio 3 broadcast, The Sound of Edwin Morgan, with sci-fi tweaking from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. But no print text of the poems has ever appeared. The three poems here reveal the imprint of Morgan’s engagement with the concrete and sound poetry in the sixties. Scottish poets and readers reacted much more positively than English ones to this international movement, with Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay being major participants alongside German, French, Swiss, Brazilian, and North American practitioners. Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019) provides an excellent and full perspective on the theory and practice of the movement in its British manifestation. Thus we find in this selection that, in concrete style, the oppressive adjectival blocks set against lyrical open parentheses in “Alienation” can never quite close off their tiny, life-giving details. Coinciding with Morgan’s concurrent poetic interest in the language of journalism, “And the Exhibition Will Be Closed by Madge Wildfire” sets the demotic Scots speech of this untamed character in Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian against the deferential news reporting of a literary exhibition in class-ridden Edinburgh.

In this troublesome decade, Morgan would keep up his creative spirits with poems he called songs, giving individual voice to objects and creatures (“The Apple’s Song,” “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song”) as well as to persons (“Columba’s Song,” “Kierkegaard’s Song”). Songs make less sense, somehow, if only sung alone. They are themselves communal occasions of memory or celebration, and the act of singing in chorus can bring both text and singers alive in performance. “The Round” does this, even without a tune, and is a reminder of Morgan’s essentially optimistic approach to life and art, even in times of challenge. “We only sing divi-/dedly,” the poet admits, fragmenting that phrase in several ways, and yet, he asserts with increasing confidence, “and yet it is//a round comes out.”

Edwin Morgan was such an impressive poet that even these poems, left in his files until their single fleeting auditory outing on BBC Radio, and unseen thereafter, reveal the subtlety, honesty, and reach that were characteristic of his work, and the diverse forms in which he expressed his vision of what life and art should be.

 

Edwin Morgan with one of his sixteen scrapbooks of contemporary and historical culture, kept from the late thirties to the early sixties, and now in Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library. Photo by Marshall Walker, 1975, courtesy of Elsie Walker.