If you ask what my favourite programme is it has to be that strange world jigsaw final. After the winner had defeated all his rivals with harder and harder jigsaws, he had to prove his mettle by completing one last absolute mindcrusher on his own, under the cameras, in less than a week. We saw, but he did not, what the picture would be: the mid-Atlantic, photographed from a plane,as featureless a stretch as could be found, no weeds, no flotsam, no birds, no oil, no ships, the surface neither stormy nor calm, but ordinary, a light wind on a slowly rolling swell. Hand-cut by a fiendish jigger to simulate, but not to have, identical beaks and bays, it seemed impossible; but the candidate--- he said he was a stateless person, called himself Smith--- was impressive: small, dark, nimble, self-contained. The thousands of little grey tortoises were scattered on the floor of the studio; we saw the clock; he started. His food was brought to him, but he hardly ate. He had a bed, with the light only dimmed to a weird blue, never out. By the first day he had established the edges, saw the picture was three metres long and appeared to represent (dear God!) the sea. Well, it was a man's life, and the silence (broken only by sighs, click of wood, plop of coffee in paper cups) that kept me fascinated. Even when one hand was picking the edge-pieces I noticed his other hand was massing sets of distinguishing ripples or darker cross-hatching or incipient wave-crests; his mind, if not his face, worked like a sea. It was when he suddenly rose from his bed at two, on the third night, went straight over to one piece and slotted it into a growing central patch, then back to bed, that I knew he would make it. On the sixth day he looked haggard and slow, with perhaps a hundred pieces left, of the most dreary unmarked lifeless grey. The camera showed the clock more frequently. He roused himself, and in a quickening burst of activity, with many false starts, began to press that inhuman insolent remnant together. He did it, on the evening of the sixth day. People streamed onto the set. Bands played. That was fine. But what I liked best was the last shot of the completed sea, filling the screen; then the saw-lines disappeared, till almost imperceptibly the surface moved and it was again the real Atlantic, glad to distraction to be released, raised above itself in growing gusts, allowed to roar as rain drove down and darkened, allowed to blot, for a moment, the orderer's hand.
― cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 18:54 (twenty years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 19:50 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 19:55 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 19:56 (twenty years ago) link
― the bluefox, Tuesday, 23 March 2004 21:28 (twenty years ago) link
― Michael White (Hereward), Tuesday, 23 March 2004 23:40 (twenty years ago) link
― aurora, Monday, 29 March 2004 11:20 (twenty years ago) link
Carcanet's New Selected Poems is an essential purchase. There's a tendency in Scottish Studies to overpraise writers for their, well, Scottishness, but Morgan really is a world class poet. And while he's identified with Glasgow, he's very much a cosmopolitan. He's an inspirational figure really.Generations of Scottish school children have been introduced to concrete and sound poetry via him. How wonderful is that? I've been reading and rereading his work lately as part of my masters dissertation. His Sonnets From Scotland from 1984 are superb. Having just read De Quincey's Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, Morgan's sonnett De Quincey In Glasgow really struck me. A visionary Glasgow poem - something Morgan, and sadly too few others, is a master at:
When afternoons grew late, he feared and longed for dusk. In that high room in Rottenrow he looks out east to the Necropolis Its crowded tombs rise jostling, living, throngedwith shadows, and the granite-bloodying glowflares on the dripping bronze of a used kris.
His love poems are beautiful. Deeply touching, but gorgeously sensuous too.
Of his concrete poems, this is a favourite:
Siesta of a Hungarian Snake
s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs Zs zs zs z
― Stew, Friday, 12 June 2009 21:59 (fourteen years ago) link
Interesting to see Crichton-Smith, Muir and Morgan come up on ILB. I read most of C-S and Muir's stuff many years ago, also some but less Morgan who seemed too wilfully cerebral for my tastes - admittedly an opinion based on a fairly superficial acquaintance. Strawberries is an obvious and very beautiful exception, although I know it from having heard it read more recently on tv or radio I think - I don't remember seeing it in print before I spotted this thread. In the end I thought CS a fairly modest talent tbh, and even Muir, though definitely more interesting, is a bit bloodless, going from dream-and-myth abstractions to moral abstractions without taking in much of the stink of life. His Autobiography is exceptional, more interesting than his poetry IMO, and he seems to have been an incredibly nice man.
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 21:55 (fourteen years ago) link
https://youtube/HyLqbTjSNoo
― The Vangelis of Dating (Tom D.), Friday, 8 March 2019 23:34 (five years ago) link
... didn't work, did it?
https://wwww.youtube/HyLqbTjSNoo
― The Vangelis of Dating (Tom D.), Friday, 8 March 2019 23:36 (five years ago) link
... or that.
https://www.youtube/HyLqbTjSNoo
― The Vangelis of Dating (Tom D.), Friday, 8 March 2019 23:37 (five years ago) link
... I know when I'm beat.
― The Vangelis of Dating (Tom D.), Friday, 8 March 2019 23:41 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyLqbTjSNoo
― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Friday, 8 March 2019 23:49 (five years ago) link
The boy done good.
― The Vangelis of Dating (Tom D.), Saturday, 9 March 2019 00:01 (five years ago) link
will gie it a listen when I'm hame (am at work at the mo)
loved reading edwin morgan in school. perhaps my favourite thing that i had to read for english class.
― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Saturday, 9 March 2019 00:38 (five years ago) link