Oo er missus! I think that's a bit harsh. Morgan's work doesn't grab me
particularly strongly either but I think that he's a tremendously important
enabling example when large areas of British poetry are still hung up on
ideas of finding and then sticking with a particular style or voice. Here's
what my mate Ian Gregson says; he's responding to Michael Schmidt's comment
that 'Morgan has an enviable facility, with all the implicit dangers of
facility':
"...taken en masse [his poems] demonstrate a twentieth-century sense not
only that experience may form itself into a bewildering number of patterns
but also that each pattern is likely to dissolve into an entirely different
pattern, or into chaos. Each poem within his canon, then, must be seen in
the context of the others - in context, they reveal their momentariness,
that they have issued into the brief shape of their constitutive subject"
- from 'Edwin Morgan's Metamorphoses', English Vol 39 Number 164 Summer
1990.
The article is reprinted and expanded in Ian's book Contemporary Poetry and
Postmodernism which, despite its rather off-putting title, has interesting
readings of people like Middleton and Fisher.
I also think that the Demons story is refreshing as opposed to an awful
revelation. The cult of originality can be a drag. Kenneth Koch has an
excellent phrase "I love to be inspired" to describe how encountering
another writer's work can make you want to have a go yourself.
cheers
David
-----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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