Edwin Morgan

La poesia concreta e la poesia visiva sono due tra i movimenti artistico-letterari più significativi nel panorama della sperimentazione poetica della seconda metà del ’900. Il volume di Sauro Fabi si propone di mettere in risalto affinità e differenze tra i due movimenti, concentrando l’attenzione su uno degli obiettivi culturali più ambiziosi che accomuna le due esperienze poetiche, quello di creare una poesia che fosse altamente sperimentale, ma, allo stesso tempo, accessibile al cosiddetto “pubblico di massa”: una vera e propria “avanguardia popolare”. I poeti concreti e visivi ricorrevano a strategie artistiche diverse che convergevano nel proporre al pubblico testi in cui materiali verbali e visuali si fondevano incorporando elementi tipici della “cultura di massa” e puntando su un’impatto comunicativo diretto e immediato. Per valutare l’efficacia e la validità di tali strategie, l’analisi di Fabi parte da una ricognizione del ruolo svolto dal costruttivismo russo nelle poetiche dei concretisti e dei poeti visivi, per poi proseguire attraverso le sperimentazioni brasiliane, italiane e scozzesi in un percorso dialettico e comparatistico in cui le opere (e le ambizioni socio-culturali dei loro autori) vengono esaminate mettendo in risalto la loro diversa collocazione sia rispetto a quel pubblico di massa che volevano raggiungere, sia rispetto a quello che Bourdieu definisce come il “campo del potere”.

This article assesses some of the materials stored with the Scottish Poetry Library’s Edwin Morgan Archive. Initially recounting the story of the archive’s compilation from the mid-1970s onwards by Morgan's friend and publisher Hamish Whyte, it moves on to a discussion of some of the more peripherally published poetry stored in the collection, including unusually confessional work dating back to a number of adolescent contributions to the Glasgow University student magazine, and formally experimental pieces produced for small presses and journals in the 1960s. I also take stock of some of the more elusive critical writing of Morgan’s contained in the archive, including articles on W.S.Graham and Hugh MacDiarmid, considering what can be learned from such pieces about the chronological shifts and ethical scope of Morgan’s own poetics.

This book offers the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s to the 1970s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media, while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between the two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research, and will fill a vital gap in contemporary understandings of an important but much misunderstood genre, concrete poetry. It will also serve as a vital document for scholars and students of twentieth-century British literature, modern intermedia art and modernism, especially those interested in understanding modernism’s wide geographical spread and late twentieth-century legacies.

Edinburgh in the early 1960s has been described by literary impresario Jim Haynes as "a bubbling cauldron" of literature and art. Little magazines such as Sidewalk, Gambit and Cleft sought to inject new life into a Scottish literary scene dominated by Hugh MacDiarmid and his cultural nationalist followers.These magazines published emergent Scottish writers alongside the Beats, Black Mountain and other American 'schools'.
Written at an early stage of my PhD, this is obvious an imperfect piece of work, but it contains some good research which I'm happy to share so that others can build on it.

The question one wants to ask about Morgan’s poetry is: what are we to make of its variety? Some of his poems reveal warm personal feeling with a touching nakedness; others, such as the Instamatic poems, appear to withhold feeling altogether, and inflict on the reader the rather unpleasant experience of contemplating some wretched and painful event apparently without compassion.  Some, such as the Glasgow sonnets, describe misery in unflinching detail, determined it seems to make a political point; others, such as the poem about Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, express powerful emotion about someone known only through the fog and hype of media stories.  Others are science fiction; many are jokes; some are typographical arrangements, including one, ‘Message Clear’, which issues resonantly in Jesus’s great affirmation: I am the Resurrection and the Life. (But Morgan publicly proclaimed his dislike and rejection of Christianity.)  The question, what are we to make of all this?, inevitably shades off into the question, who is this guy?  Who is the person behind this enormous and extremely various output?  In this paper, informed by James McGonigal's excellent new biography, I attempt to look at some preliminary answers to this question.

The Kringel-Buch text corpus, consisting of all those remarks in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts designated by the use of a roughly circular shape as a mark at the beginning of that remark, is an intriguing proposal that brings together many of Wittgenstein’s most interesting writings from 1929-1931 in an unexpected way. It is unusually explicit and direct in its discussion of topics such as philosophical methods, understanding the culture of our times and our understanding of other cultures, and the nature of experience. However, we have no explicit record of Wittgenstein’s intentions in placing this mark in front of the passages in question. The paper examines some of the main problems which arise for a reader of this recent posthumous publication. I also propose that the explicitness and directness of so many of the remarks in the Kringel-Buch may explain Wittgenstein’s decision to leave them unpublished.

In this paper I will explore the role of little magazines in introducing avant-garde poetry to Scotland in the early 1960s. How much of a challenge did these magazines pose to the Scottish literary establishment and how important were they in disseminating new voices? Ian Hamilton Finlay's magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. (1962-67) championed concrete poetry and also helped establish literary correspondences between Europe and America, bringing together Black Mountain poets, Beats, new British writers and European writers in translation. But P.O.T.H. was not the first Scottish magazine to publish new international avant-garde writing. In 1959 an American number of the Edinburgh University magazine Jabberwock was published, featuring an excerpt from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and poetry from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Charles Olson and Michael McClure, among others. Editor Alex Neish would go on to publish the short-lived magazine Sidewalk, (1960-61) publishing young Scottish poets like Edwin Morgan and Finlay, alongside American and European avant-garde writers. Neish's aim was to put Scottish writing on an international stage and he set his magazines in opposition to the narrow, parochial vision of certain Scottish writers and their 'Nationalist lackeys'. Magazines like Gambit (particularly between 1961-3) and Cleft (1963-4) followed in their wake, publishing new writing and promoting an internationalist agenda. By the end of the decade a more pluralistic vision of Scottish culture had become established, with Morgan recognised as a major figure. Concrete poetry, once reviled in certain quarters, was featured in mainstream poetry magazines such as Lines Review, while in the 1970s and '80s, Finlay went on to enjoy success in the international art world. But does this represent a victory for the avant-garde or a more modest cultural evolution? And while they undoubtedly provided a laboratory for literary experimentation, did the magazines help to create a significant Scottish avant-garde?