EDWIN MORGAN AND CONCRETE POETRY

Headnote

Abstract: In my paper, I discuss Edwin Morgan, the Scottish concrete poet and make an attempt to define what concrete poetry is. While Morgan focussed on changes, transformation, and metamorphosis as the main targets of his representation, transformation is also the basis of form in his poetics. I will argue that his credo is based upon the conviction of all concrete poetry: there is no signifier that can exist without a signified.

Keywords: Bible, concrete poetry, inscription, performativity, reading, transformation

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)

1. Introduction

In a poem published in his volume Cathures, Edwin Morgan alludes to a well-known poem by Philip Larkin (2002:105):

The poetry of departures

Jolts, grinds, judders, whines, pounds, climbs -

And then you have, alone, to get on with your life.

Larkin's (1988:85) major poem, Poetry of Departures, written almost half a century earlier, makes this point:

We all hate home And having to be there:

I detest my room,

Its specially chosen junk,

The good books, the good bed,

And my life, in perfect order

Is it Larkin's poem that "Jolts, grinds, judders, whines, pounds, climbs"? In Morgan's reading, it is. Whereas Larkin declares that he has no choice but to accept his own "hated" home and life, Morgan transforms himself into a demon and looks upon the human world from a non-human perspective, dislocating the Movement poet's "perfect order".

Morgan was bom in 1920, which could indicate that he belonged to the Movement (or the Angry Young Man) generation but, as the two quotations indicate, his verse is very far from Movement poetry. Just like the Movement poets, Morgan also started his career in the 1950s (his first collection, Dies Irae, was published in 1952). This early book mainly contains translations and rewritings which, however, are also organic parts of his life work, anticipating that the main focus of the mature poet will be on change, transformation and metamorphosis.

This central role of translation in Morgan's poetry shows that his texts form an antithesis of Movement verse. As Ian Gregson (1996:150) remarks, the Movement poets in the fifties based their poetics on "ordinary language", whereas "Morgan's emphasis on the metamorphic [...] effectively calls into question the Movement's insistent attempts to impose stability". Gregson hits the nail on the head: although the best Movement poets, Philip Larkin in the first place, were aware of a postmodern world in which fixed referentiality no longer existed, they still made the hypothesis that language was reliable, and this hypothesis formed the basis of their aesthetic principles. (Perhaps the best example of this duality is Larkin's major poem Maiden Name, first published in 1955). In Morgan's aesthetics and social views, everything is the opposite of stability.

Transformation, both as subject matter and as a mode of writing, has been particularly important in his poetry since the publication in 1968 of a volume entitled The Second Life. Roderick Watson (1997:191) suggested:

In every collection since The Second Life, in poems which have been playful or dark, experimental or lyrical, Edwin Morgan has explored a most fruitful fascination with changing messages and messages of change.

This attitude has resulted in a multiplicity of forms and styles in Morgan, while multiplicity itself is one of his central topics.

2.1 How clear is Morgan's Message?

A poem in The Second Life, entitled Message Clear, is an emblematic text (1982:140). On having a first look at the page (importantly, the poem does not run over one page), the reader will probably only perceive a chaotic heap of letters with lines like these:

...

The reader, however, will soon catch sight of the last line, since that is the only conventionally arranged sentence of the poem: "i am the resurrection and the life" (141) (sic: Morgan only uses small letters in this poem), a well-known quotation from John 11:25. All the other lines are variations of this sentence: selections of letters without the change of location (like in a place value table in mathematics). The same letters are always in the same position under one another. A further important self-made rule for Morgan was that the selected letters must always form meaningful words and that these words need to add up to meaningful sentences. In the excerpt above, we see the words hero and hurt, the two lexical items constructing a phrase which is elliptical, but it is easy to recognize the subject and predicate of a sentence: the hero is hurt. In the second excerpt, two lines of the quotation above the letters construct two simple noun phrases: a tread and a throne, which can be interpreted as two Stations of the Cross.

Reading the text backwards from the last line is only one strategy that we can apply to this poem. Roderick Watson (1997:175-176) recommends line-to-line reading; in this case, the reader will identify the speaker as Jesus only when hitting the last line. What links the two modes of reading (Watson's linear and my scanning method) is that, in both cases, it is the reader who needs to construct the meaning of the letters. In some lines, it is difficult to find the borders between the words ("am e res ect" does not immediately reveal "a mere sect", which was how Christianity was treated in the first century); some others can be interpreted in two ways ("a s t on e" can either be "a stone" or "as tone"). Taking these difficulties and ambiguities into consideration, one can read the title of the poem ironically: the message of the Bible is anything but clear. The reason is that God's messages sent to human beings are lost in a jungle of possible meanings. Although Jesus' conclusion in the same verse of the Gospel ("he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live") can be constructed on the basis of the text, this is only one of many possible readings.

The reader, however, may also argue that God's message can only be decoded by humans, and the poem is an outline or pattem of this decoding. The reader of this poem can enter a dialogue with the text in a number of ways. This is the first line:

am i

As Watson (1997:175) remarks, in this line (as well as in other similar lines of the poem) the visual gap is a significant part of the meaning. What would be a simple question of identity becomes a meditative phrase. Morgan was conscious of using typographical gaps as meaningful constituents in poetry. In an essay on concrete poetry, he claims that typography is just as important in poetry as metaphors are. He also mentions an example of distorting editorial practice. As Morgan observes, Ezra Pound's famous two-liner, In a Station of the Metro (published in 1913) is almost never printed in the way the poet intended:

...

Not surprisingly, Morgan has vitriolic comments on the editorial practice that ignores the visual shape of the poem designed by the author (1974:32). Of his own poems, it is particularly tme that typography is a part of the meaning. The meditative question opening Message Clear can inspire a theological response. The question "am i" can be found in the Old Testament as an affirmative sentence: "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14). This is the voice of the Father. In Morgan's poem, Jesus, bom as a human being, asks whether he is identical with the Father. In other words: is he identical with the verb that is a source of all existence? This is one possible reading of the first three lines: "am i if i am he?" Of course, the text can also be read ironically or as a parody.

The only certainty among these controversial readings is transformation, the constant change of semantic structures. The element (or principle) that does not change is metamorphosis itself. The reader's only chance to understand this postmodern paradox is by becoming an active participant of writing the text. Significantly, when Stanley Fish (1990:56) wants to demonstrate the activity of the reader in the reading/writing process, he mentions concrete poetry as an example. Only the reader can constmct a poem out of Morgan's heap of letters and create stanzas like this:

I am rent, I am safe,

I am sent, I heed,

I test, I read

A thread, a stone,

A tread, a throne,

I resurrect.

This is only one of those innumerable combinations that can be constructed in the process of reading. What we should remember is that every combination, every meaning and aesthetic value is created by the reader, who is always aware of further possibilities.

2.2 Do we understand animals?

It is also the activity of reading aloud that makes Morgan's shorter texts poems. One of his frequently quoted pieces, Siesta of a Hungarian Snake (1982:156), is particularly interesting to Hungarian readers. It is a one-line poem:

s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs Zs zs zs z

This snake is Hungarian because the combinations of letters are borrowed from the Hungarian alphabet. No other European spelling would refer to the hissing voice of the snake with the combination of s + z. Typography is also of primary importance here: this line shows a snake fully stretched out. It goes to sleep, since the hissing in the beginning is replaced by the voiced fricatives of snoring at the end of the line. By including this text in a volume of poetry in English, Morgan used elements of another language, this way ontologically enriching his universe. This is even more obvious in his poem entitled Hortobágy (1982) which only uses a Hungarian word (/ó, meaning horse).

Morgan relates himself to foreign languages in a number of ways. Chinese Cat (1982) is a text gradually reducing the onomatopoeic line "pmrkgniaou" to the final line "mao", this way signifying not only a particular animal in a particular country but also one kind of hearing: the manipulated hearing of a person living in a dictatorship. What is important in human culture is not what a cat "says"; it is what a human being hears in it. Another poem, Boats and Places (1982) represents a variety of water crafts by also imitating the language of the people using that particular kind of boat. Although it is a hilarious text, it is not at all satirical, or even ironic, of other languages and cultures. It is much more a playful reconstruction of the relationship that we often recognize between a people, their language, and the objects they make and use.

Morgan's linguistic consciousness is closely linked to his Scottish cultural environment. Scottish culture exists at the crossing point of three languages: Gaelic, Scots, and English. The first is spoken only in a few villages today, but its elements are also extremely important for those who do not speak it: its lexical items are used as references to the past and as signifiers of national identity. The second, Scots, is basically the language used by Robert Bums in the 18th century. (It is typical that Irvine Welsh's postmodernist novel Trainspotting (1993) can well be read with the glossary that one finds in most editions of Bums.) It is a moot point whether Scots should be treated as a language in its own right or as a dialect of English. In either case, it is a version of the English language that is derived from British English and enriches the culture of the English-speaking world today (similarly to the languages/dialects used in Ireland, the Caribbean islands, or in various African countries). The importance of the three languages for Morgan is well demonstrated by what Caims Craig writes about modem Scottish poetry:

We do not live [...] within a language or a tradition, but between languages and traditions. It is those poets who have lived 'in between' who have made the most powerful contributions to the literatures of English in the twentieth century, (qtd. in Kimpel 1995:136)

Morgan's poetry is "in between" in this sense also. His life work of literary translations has more than one layer: he is a translator from several languages into two languages (British English and Scots). He also makes use of linguistic multiplicity in his own poetry; for example, in Glasgow Green (1982), he contrasts English and Scots.

In an interview he said:

... translation would have some moments perhaps-if everything was going wellwhen you could almost see, feel, or sense the poem like a vision in front of you, and then just find the words from your own language to bring it down to you. (qtd. in Dósa 2009:53)

Although he added that this statement "may be a fantasy", Morgan's wishful thinking still reveals an essential factor of his attitude as a poet and translator. As I pointed out previously, he tends to view the world as largely determined by language (more precisely: languages); nevertheless, this statement suggests that there is something in poetry that is beyond language. He uses the word vision to denote this "something", implying that the image in the poem is an autonomous entity and that there is always an element in it which is independent from language. This idea is the most important principle in his literary translations and becomes particularly spectacular in the translation of visionary poems, such as texts by the Hungarian poets Attila József and János Pilinszky.

Translation is also a manifestation of Morgan's most significant life experience: exploration. This is apparent in his credo:

I think of poetry partly as an instrument of exploration, like a spaceship, into new fields of feeling or experience and partly a special way of recording moments and events, taking the 'prose' of them, the grit of the facts of the case, as being in our age extremely important, (qtd. in Thomson 1986:1)

This is why the image of the spaceship is one of his central metaphors. Spacepoem 1: from Laika to Gagarin (1982) is a poem of exploration in more than one sense. Once again, Morgan uses onomatopoeia to represent (or imitate) Laika's and Gagarin's space journey, that is, the adventures of the first mammal and the first human being outside the gravity of the Earth. But the text is also a form of exploration. The lines of letters disorient and orient the reader simultaneously: one can interpret them as merely onomatopoeic combinations, but also as lexical units. The first line repeats the syllables ra ke ta seven times. The speaker is probably Laika, since the poem consists of two stanzas; consequently, the title can refer to Laika and Gagarin as the two sources of voices. The syllables of the first line may be read simply as a phonetic imitation of barking, but it can also signify that a dog is able to communicate with a human being. The opposite is also true: when Gagarin keeps on saying "putputputput..." at the beginning of stanza two, this is not only the obsessive repetition of a verb but also an onomatopoeic word. The text is a form of exploration since it explores the world of letters and, through them, the world of sounds and phonemes while it also makes a journey into a universe of possible meanings. In addition, a part of this exploration is translation: Laika's words "star! spot! sput! stop!" have already been translated into human language (otherwise they could not form a part of this poem). The translator is probably Gagarin, since the syntax of the title (from ... to) refers not only to the history of space travel but also to the direction of communication.

2.3 Messages of the city

Apart from interplanetary space, another place of metamorphosis in Morgan's poetry is the city. He can rightfully be called a regional poet. Geddes Thomson (1986:7) points out his affinity with William Carlos Williams, "whose long poem 'Paterson' gives an affectionate account of his home town in much the same way as Morgan has done for Glasgow in a series of shorter poems." This was continued in his late poetry: his volume published in 2002 is entitled Cathures, which is Glasgow's original name. However, Morgan is also interested in Glasgow as a metonymy of the big city in general: as he writes in an essay in 1996, "it is both heaven and hell at the same time" (qtd. in Barry 2000:232). One can add: it is also a place of exploration and invention, which is in a state of eternal transformation by definition. The most obvious meanings of "heaven" and "hell" in a city are building and destruction, which also stand for order and chaos. His poem London (1982) consists of three parts, entitled "St. James's Park", "Soho," and "The Post Office Tower". This tripartite structure, first of all, signifies the route of a tour of London, but the elements of conventional landscape poetry become parts of an apocalyptic vision. In the first part, time ceases to exist; as a result, existence in history also disappears: "When we have lost time we have lost everything" (1982:239). In the second part, there are no temporal relations, only the chaos of the Soho. After a heap of words (mainly representing the world of advertising), the persona concludes:

But to wash London

would take a sea

To want to wash it

History (1982:241)

History, however, has disintegrated; therefore, neither purifying fire nor water exists. After descending in the inferno of the Soho, the speaker catches sight of the post office tower, a solid point of reference in the city. The tower is both a part of the city and an object separated from it. It is the city's Doppelgänger, which turns against the place that it has grown from:

There is no other life,

and this is it.

Gold bars, thunder, gravity, wine, concrete, smoke. (1982:241)

The post office tower transmits the messages of the chaotic reality that it grows from. Nevertheless, this construct is the only reality. In the closure of the poem, the only existing entity is a dynamic medium:

It is its own

telegrams,

what mounts, what sighs,

what says it is

uncountable

as feelings moved

by hair blown over

an arm in the wind.

In its acts

it rests there. (1982:242)

This is a place of virtual existence in a world emerging from chaos; the tower is identical with "its own telegrams" and, as the last two lines suggest, it can take a rest only "In its acts". This is a vision of a new creation after the apocalypse (like God resting on the seventh day). Time no longer exists, history has collapsed. The place of history has been taken by the media, which can be seen both as chaos and as order. The closing passage, quoted previously, constructs a duality: the short lines, read separately, seem to be parts of the chaos; however, they are also syntactically related to one another, this way forming grammatical order. The reader witnesses how order gradually grows from chaos. For example, the line "what mounts, what sighs" sounds at first reading like an instinctive exclamation, but the syntax of the next line makes these phrases grammatical subjects. Not only does Morgan represent the duality of chaos and order, he also constructs it in the text. Consequently, the sight of the post office tower emerging from the city is selfreflexive: it is a metaphor of the poem.

As Roderick Watson (1997:170-171) writes:

Morgan's variations on the theme of message and change bring us to the roots of art itself, and in particular to that analysis of creativity which was redefined for our century by the Russian Formalists as 'defamiliarization'.

He adds that "Morgan has declared an interest in Russian Formalism" (1997:171). In the term "defamiliarization", Morgan probably recognized a basic feature of his own texts. In an essay (qtd. in Watson 1997:181), he offers some translations of the Russian term ostranenie (dislodgment, alienation, making strange) and calls it the most important element of creative imagination. Whichever English translation of the term we prefer, it is significant to bear in mind that the original word does not contain any privative modifier: it refers to a form of construction or creation. This is the point where Morgan deviates from the romantic tradition that recognizes the importance of undermining convention in literature. Although in Wordsworth's, Coleridge's, and Shelley's theories "the film of familiarity" needs to be removed in the process of writing a poem, to these Romantic authors it means distancing and defamiliarization. Morgan, on the other hand, does not have any belief in the existence of another world beyond everyday reality, which becomes visible as soon as the veil has been removed. As opposed to the romantic and neo-romantic tradition (but also to John Betjeman's light verse and the Movement), his basic conviction is this: an alternative world can only exist if the poet creates it. This is why language as a subject matter is so important to him: the problem of distancing is a linguistic problem (Jefferson and Robey 1992:28). This, however, also means that Morgan is very conscious of withdrawing attention from the referential function of language. As Geddes Thomson (1986:10) put it:

Poetry, Morgan seems to be saying [...] is often sheer delight in language itself, in the sounds we humans make, and delight also in the arrangement of sounds and in playing games with language. Sense, which is usually so important, should sometimes take a back seat.

As the strange title of Themes on a Variation (1988) indicates, instead of writing variations on a theme, he writes themes on the topic of eternal metamorphosis.

It follows that he also recreates the persona in each poem: the only constant element of his speakers is transformation. Morgan is a characteristically protean poet: the voices that we hear in his regional poems about Glasgow, in his concrete poetry and in his love poetry (to mention three examples at random) are very different. When he was asked about a Hungarian poet who influenced him immensely, Sándor Weöres, he said:

Sometimes in writers workshops [sic] teachers will say: 'well, you must find your own voice!' I don't agree with that. I think you can have many voices, well, I have many voices. I think Weöres also had many voices, (qtd. in Dósa 2009:51)

Instead of "finding his own voice", which he does not believe in, he wants to find those objects and events that fit in his poetry. This is why Watson (1997:173) finds him similar to the Modernists. On the other hand, Ian Gregson (1996:136137) is right when pointing out a difference:

Instead of staking out a carefully bounded poetic territory (like Eliot, Yeats, Stevens and Muir), Morgan has set out to be inclusive and to reflect as much of twentiethcentury change as he can manage...

If we read Morgan's life work as an organic whole, we find that the dynamism of transformation is the most spectacular signifier of his protean texts.

But when assessing his oeuvre, we also must reckon with a possible misreading: somebody could say that Morgan's poetry is the realm of poetic forms, linguistic virtuosity, puns and self-constructed games, while humanity as an ontological and epistemological centre is missing. This, however, would be a superficial reading (or misreading); Morgan himself remarked: "Our poetry needs greater humanity" (qtd. in Gregson 1996:138). In his study on Morgan, Ian Gregson (1996:138-139) draws the conclusion:

[this statement] reflects a genuine belief that the work of twentieth-century poetry should be to explore the interaction between human sensibility and its changing environment-that the real point is in the interaction.

He is also a writer of transformations in this sense.

It is not surprising that his style and diction also keep changing (and, of course, the very term "diction" cannot always be applied to Morgan's texts). As Gregson (1996:140-141) summarizes, there are two aspects of metamorphosis in Morgan's texts. One is, to quote Morgan's own words, "the quite real blurring, overlap, interchange, and evolution of forms which fast travel, cinema and television, modern art, and newspaper and advertisement techniques have made a familiar part of experience"; the other is "most evident in the way that Morgan's poems dismantle perception and representation, and so reveal that other perspectives exist alongside familiar ones". The first means writing about change as an experience; the second signifies change as a basic principle of textual construction both in Morgan's concrete poetry and in his more conventional lyrics.

3. Conclusion

Perhaps some readers will see Morgan as a basically conventional, classical poet who also wrote concrete poetry (possibly to relax or to expose the reader to a hoax). My reading is the opposite: I suggest that, as a concrete poet, he constructed a centre of his oeuvre which makes it possible for the reader to observe it as an organic whole.

As Julian Cowley (1994:197) writes:

From Dada, the concrete poets have taken an aesthetic base that is inscriptional and performative rather than expressive and symbolic.

The two poststructuralist terms, inscription and performativity, grasp the essence of concrete poetry and also signify that this kind of verse has much more affinity with conventional lyrics than most readers would think. On the one hand, concrete poetry undermines the tradition of poetic diction; on the other hand, it goes back to a tradition which puts the emphasis on the elaboration of the form instead of referentiality. The basic conviction behind this kind of poetry is that there is no signifier without a signified: concrete poetry always aims at finding order in chaos and constructing the meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. It is inscriptive since it is non-referential: it always manifests the autonomy of the letter and the shape, in contrast with the humility of description. It is also "performative"; as the opposite of "constative" in John L. Austen's terminology (qtd. in Kulick 2005: 122-123), instead of making a statement, it does something. Of course, these are also features that can be observed in many other poems, not only in concrete poetry. But concrete poetry is inscriptive and performative in a provocative way; as a consequence, it is a synecdoche of poetry in general.

I see this as the main reason why Edwin Morgan's concrete and non-concrete poetry deserves our attention.

References

References

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