Dear Nate and all,

I've been meaning to write a reasonably expansive reply to yours below, but
can see that the time isn't going to arrive before we've all forgotten this
thread, so here's a quick thing. Anyway, I've scribbled more intelligible
stuff about him elsewhere.

After MacDiarmid (and just plain forgetting W.S.Graham and Frank O'Hara and
numerous holy others), I'd have to say Morgan's my master, so take the
following with the pinch of understanding that I'm an enthusiastic
apprentice.

I'm reacting to 'impressed' in your comments, I think. I'm impressed by him:
technically for his range and daring; subject-wise for his continual
reconfiguring of Scotland (and, metonymically, any culture which has
perceived itself however fleetingly and guiltily as a byculture of a
dominating other); referentially for the scale of his translation work,
which was frequently my first encounter with many European poets; and
emotionally, I'm continually engaged by his engagement, as it were -- I
always think he's trying to crowd his whole sensibility into a line in a way
that seems very Scots humanist to me. I'll try to be specific as briefly as
possible.

Technique: the limber bounce of the hendecasyllables in _Hold Hands Among
The Atoms_. That's his line: breezy and apparently breathless but
controlled -- he does this in formal, free, off-concrete, sound, whatever --
it's equally recognisable for me in the Instamatics and The Loch Ness
Monster's Song:

scale, sole, palm, tail, brow, roving, brushing, touching

songs that are not alien to the alien

the smart bright bold bad piring caring magpies

there is a blank you must not fill with monsters

(Listen, children. Listen, wind. Listen, curtains.)

The not quite nothing I praise it and write it

I got the same kick reading  _Byron at 65_ that I did reading _Message
Clear_, that I get from the drive of his lists or his sequences -- that he's
continuously starting again, finding another use for the form, or finding
another form for his use. I don't think he's written a long poem in his
life, in the sense of a poem full of longeurs.

The use of Scotland as a measure ('Scotland was found on Jupiter. That's
true.') that's sometimes big enough, sometimes small enough, sometimes a
book, sometimes a sonnet, seems to match up with his approach to himself as
apprehensible as opposed to apprehensive ('No philosophers darkened that
country.' Yeah right.). And when Scotland's too vague there's always
Glasgow. After WCW and Paterson, after O'Hara and NY, there's Morgan and
Glasgow (Clydegrad): 'the flyovers breed loops of light/in curves that would
have ravished tragic Toshy.' Only Roy Fisher compares with him in this
country for sheer urbanity.

Translation: Mayakonferensky's Anectidote helped me write in Scots. I'd read
MacDiarmid for ages without presuming to try, and once I'd begun it was
obvious I needed Tom Leonard. But as a catalyst -- I think Morgan is a
multiple catalyst when it comes to translation: Sandor Weores and Attila
Joszef, the bulk of work from Russian, the Montale. It's in translation that
the obvious facility with voices becomes invaluable, I think.

Emotionally I find Morgan a very direct and powerful poet: those two lines
in _Death in Duke Street_:'These were next to him when he fell/and must
support him into death' have always stuck with me or to me or something. And
he gets that note into loads of those monologues, whether it's people,
animals, things (_The Dowser_, _Jack London_, _The Archeopteryx's Song_ --
except for the last line). It's a clarity he transfers to the eye like in
Williams (that woman pissing in the street), and it's an attention he pays
to words ('and washed his hands, and watched his hands, and washed/his
hands, and watched his hands, and washed his hands.') It's here he becomes
most memorable and striking: in hitting that note again and again in poems
that can be directly related to his own experience ('The Coals',
'Trilobites') or equally remote from it (pick an Instamatic, any
Instamatic).

Did I say he was funny? Funny's good. If you go along with Kavanagh on that
point ("Great poetry is always comic in the profound sense. Comedy is
abundance of life." and "True gaiety of heart springs from the sense of
authority, confidence and courage of the man who is on the sacred
mountain." -- strip a layer of rhetoric off this, it still works), then
again he is a distinctive, communicating poet, making the esoteric easy and
the obscure entertaining without, I think, cheapening or talking down.

I'd like to point out I'm receiving no remuneration from EM Industries for
this effusion.

Best,

Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: Nate and Jane Dorward <[log in to unmask]>
To: Chris Goode <[log in to unmask]>; the moshpit
<[log in to unmask]>
Date: 05 April 2000 04:00
Subject: Re: [Re: editorial lines]


>Interested to follow the discussion on Morgan: he's an author I respect for
>the variety of his interests & styles, yet haven't really been strongly
>impressed by any individual poem--merely capable mimicry or quickchange
>artistry?  I might perhaps cite a correspondent of mine who expressed his
>impatience a few years ago about Morgan: "he's a fucking human SPONGE".
His
>instance was how Morgan had encountered Barry MacSweeney's poems from _The
>Book of Demons_ (actually, I think they may have done a reading together??
>someone fill me in), and promptly a few months later Morgan starts
>publishing Demon poems (I saw one or two in the TLS).
>
>all best --N
>
>
>Nate & Jane Dorward
>[log in to unmask]
>http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
>109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
>ph: (416) 221 6865
>
>
>



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