IN THE NEWS
Oblique vision
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Edwin Morgan was recently appointed the poet laureate of Scotland. In this portrait of the poet, RENUKA RAJARATNAM says that it offers new and exciting possibilities of aesthetic transformations in poetry.
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K.B.JAWAHARR
Nothing Not Giving Messages
THIS is surely one of the most exciting times for Scotland. The 1980s and 90s witnessed an upward trajectory in Scotland's sense of autonomy, culminating most significantly in the successful referendum in May 1998 and perhaps more symbolically in the opening of the Museum of Scotland on St. Andrew's Day (November 30.). Poised now at the edge of a new and stronger sense of self-hood, Scotland today is looking for its coordinates both backwards into the past and forwards into the future in terms of re-shaping its cultural identity. One such attempt took place this February when Scotland's rich literary soil sprouted its first ever poet laureate. Edwin Morgan, now reaching out to his 84th year, was named poet laureate by James McConnell, the first minister of Scotland. The honour legitimises something that has been widely acknowledged for a long time; that Morgan is Scotland's foremost living poet. The move, of course, can be seen as designed to bolster a sense of both a national identity as well as a perceived continuity of "Scottishness".
The poet laureate's role is not new to Morgan in the sense that he has been the laureate of Glasgow city where he has lived most of his life and retired as a Professor of English at the Glasgow University in 1980. Authoring a large body of literature and translations from several languages including Russian and Hungarian, Morgan's oeuvre is a substantial one as his major volume From Glasgow to Saturn playfully declares. Edwin Morgan has deliberately displaced the poetry of place and undermined any possibility of his being defined as a "Glasgow poet" by self-consciously introducing exotic places and a strong sense of the "other". Morgan's versatility lies in his innumerable experiments in poetry unfolding an eclectic range of forms and subjects from prehistory to science fiction, sound to concrete and computer poetry. Through these subjects Morgan projects a view of Scottish life and culture, which may be set beside the work of cultural historians such as Roderick Watson, John Purser and Duncan Macmillan.
Juggling self-reflexively with language and by employing a vast range of forms such as the sonnets, ottava rima, the haiku, the Persian ghazals and free verse, Morgan's poetry is risk-taking in nature and has called into question the poetic form itself. Here is a comic monologue of a Chinese cat:
Chinese Cat
p m r k g n i a o u
p m r k g n i a o
p m r k n i a o
p m r n i a o
p m r i a o
p m i a o
m a i o
m a o
Morgan's poetic influences and affinities have come from different directions: among them are Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Poets, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russian poets Mayakovsky and Voznesensky. What he admired in these poets was their inventive use of word and sound in every device of onomatopoeia, alliteration, pun and palindrome. "I was attracted by the idea of someone taking risks in poetry, the very opposite of what the Larkin lot were doing in England" (The Guardian, The Review, February 28, 2004). While Larkin harped on the familiar in terms of place and experience, Morgan harped on the strange, inventing in his own imagined cosmos an experience beyond place and time. From his recent volume Virtual and Other Realities, here is a sperm narrating his voyage:
I swam strongly, up into the tunnel,
Learning that movement, quite as much as force,
Was what mattered... ... ... ..
... ... ... though I know my rivals
Whom I see coming and going, never far
From the front, recognizable - did you know that? -
Some male, as I am, some female, I can tell them.
There's one I call Michelangelo, a bruiser
And no mistake, thickset, dour, powerful,
Swims in quick bursts, shaking head like a dog,
Then there's Bonnie Prince Charlie,... ... ... .
Poor Charlie slipped, what frantic pirouettes,
But then he lost all sense of orienteering,
Diminished, vanished down the lurid adits.
Everything in his poetic creation is capable of speech: the Chinese and the Persian Cat, the devil at Auschwitz, the mummy of Ramses II, Rousseau's ghost, men on Mercury, a glass piece, a sperm and songs of the apple and the Loch Ness monster! To use his own phrase, Morgan revealed that when we look in the universe there is "nothing not giving messages".
Born in Hyndland, in Glasgow's West End in 1920, the future envisaged by his parents for their only son was in the firm of iron and steel ship breakers. Morgan's father worked in the Glasgow shipping and his mother he says wished he could go out and kick a ball instead of writing about it. He claims he was never given any particular encouragement and this is comically voiced in his "sound" poem, "Interview":
When did you start writing sound-poetry?
Vindaberry am hookshma tintol ense ar'er
Vindashton hama haz temmi-bloozma töntek
I see. So you were really quite precocious
And did your parents encourage you?
Zivya mimtod enna parahashtom ganna,
Spod zivva didtod quershpöt quindast volla'
Mindetta broosheh quarva tönch boh
Spölva harabashtat su!
Morgan's skilled ingenuity as a comic performer in verse is seen in the oblique ways in which he views things around him. Ranging himself against those poets (Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, Muir and Stevens) who condemn technology and exclude it from their work, Morgan has set out to be inclusive and to reflect as much 20th Century change as he can manage in terms of capturing the "spirit" of technology. Deeply influenced by Morgan are a group of new Scottish poets called "Informationists" who re-express Scotland through their fascination for information. Robert Crawford's Spirit Machines (1999) heightens the alertness to issues of value in the Information age. Morgan's "Clone Poem" is based on the conceit:
when you've seen them all seen them
all seen one seen them all all all
Offering new and exciting possibilities of aesthetic transformations in poetry, Morgan's laureateship, I think, acknowledges his poetic vision which shows how poetry can cope with change. Intellectual and carnivalesque in nature, Morgan's work crosses cultural borders, translating and sharing experiences which ring of universality and human community. In style, I feel Morgan seems less like reading and more like channel hopping. Here's how he presents an "outside" experience to his Scottishness and embraces it as his very own:
A grey-haired man half-runs,
carrying his white-haired mother on his back
along a dusty road from East Pakistan.
She is a hundred years old.
What they own
fills a knotted cloth at his hip.
Even to them
the hands of the dying are stretched out
from both sides of the road.
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