Scottish Literary Review Edited by Sarah M. Dunnigan and Margery Palmer McCulloch Reviews Editor Rhona Brown Volume 4 Number 2 . Autumn/Winter 2012 (formerly Scottish Studies Review) ASSOCIATION FOR SCOTTISH LITERARY STUDIES Scottish Literary Review is published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies ISSN 1756^5634 www.asls.org.uk # Association for Scottish Literary Studies and individual contributors, 2012 Correspondence and articles (one electronic ¢le and two paper copies) should be sent to: Dr SARAH M. DUNNIGAN Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh George Square, Edinburgh EH89JX Email: [email protected] or to: Dr MARGERY PALMER McCULLOCH Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow G12 8QH Email: [email protected] Books for review should be sent to: Dr RHONA BROWN Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow G12 8QH Email: [email protected] Subscriptions and enquiries about publications should be sent to: DUNCAN JONES General Manager, ASLS, c/o Scottish Literature University of Glasgow, 7 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QH Tel/Fax 0141 330 5309. Email: o⁄[email protected] The Association for Scottish Literary Studies is in receipt of subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council The annual subscription to ASLS in the UK for Æ"Æ is »ª for individuals and » corporate. EU subscribers (outside UK) please add » p&p. Other overseas subscribers please add » p&p. In addition to Scottish Literary Review, this single subscription purchases Scottish Language, New Writing Scotland, ScotLit, and a major edited work of Scottish literature. Design by Neil Christie Scottish Literary Review Editorial Board Editors: Dr Sarah M. Dunnigan (University of Edinburgh) Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch (University of Glasgow) Reviews Editor: Dr Rhona Brown (University of Glasgow) Advisory Board: Professor Ian Brown (Kingston University, London) Professor Gerard Carruthers (University of Glasgow) Professor Cairns Craig (University of Aberdeen) Professor Robert Crawford (University of St Andrews) Professor Leith Davis (Simon Fraser University) Dr Robert Dunbar (University of Aberdeen) Professor Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley) Professor Nancy Gish (University of Maine) Professor R. D. S. Jack (University of Edinburgh) Dr Aaron Kelly (University of Edinburgh) Professor Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming) Professor Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh) Professor Glenda Norquay (John Moores University, Liverpool) Professor Alessandra Petrina (Universita'degli Studi di Padova) Professor Murray Pittock (University of Glasgow) Professor Alan Riach (University of Glasgow) Professor Richard Sher (NJIT/Rutgers) Professor Fiona Sta¡ord (Somerville College, Oxford) Professor Roderick Watson (University of Stirling) ASLS President: Professor Ian Brown Scottish Literary Review SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW (formerly Scottish Studies Review) is the leading international print journal for Scottish literary studies, committed to approaching Scottish literature in an expansive way through exploration of its various social, cultural, historical and philosophical contexts, and of literary forms, both traditional and new. We are interested in comparative work with literatures from beyond Scotland, the interaction of literature with expressive media such as theatre and ¢lm, and in encouraging debate on issues of con- temporary signi¢cance related to Scottish literary studies, so that SLR is both responsive to, and creative of, new readings and approaches. The journal is listed in the MLA International Bibliography. This issue of SLR is devoted to Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), celebrating, commemorating, and exploring the poet-makar whose lyric imprint emblazons every issue of this journal. This issue records his poetic imprint through a range of contributions which chart the indefatigable diversity of his writing life; its encounters (literal and artistic), friendships, in£uences, and embodi- ments. If there is an underlying motif, it is spun from the poem which Richard Price discusses ^ ‘The Ropemaker’s Bride’, a lovely paean to the Lyonnaise sonneteer, Louise Labe¤, la belle cordie' re, whom Morgan deeply admired. Just like the poem’s variously knotted ‘strings and strands’, the pieces in this issue interconnect or braid with one another. A signi¢cant number are concerned with processes of collection, transcription, and publica- tion, and with the unearthing of new kinds of material held in repositories in Glasgow University Library (the extraordinary ‘scrapbooks’ in particular), Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. This issue delves deeply in the archives in ways which remember the ‘£owing serifs’ of Morgan’s distinctive handwriting and what Robyn Marsack in her essay calls the ‘sheaf or thrave of proofs’. They also gather up the annotations, comments, and inscriptions of his books to understand better his inter- pretative and creative responses to the texts and words which shaped his writing life. Hamish Whyte describes the methods and means of sifting and winnowing through the multitudinous box ¢les in Morgan’s Glasgow study when compiling the bibliography of his work. Whyte remarks how these let- ters, notes, ephemera kept ‘unfolding their life [. .] bit by bit of paper’; this process comes full circle in Jim McGonigal and Sarah Hepworth’s illumin- ation of the ‘16-volume, 3,600-page’ jigsaw of emblems, images, collages, and v EDITORIAL fragments aptly graced by the term ‘Morganiana’. All this unfolding comes full circle in Greg Thomas’s detailed account of the Poetry Library’s Morgan archive. Appropriately, a sheaf of patterns, con£uences, and congruences emerges out of these essays. What Price calls the ‘catholicity of [Morgan’s] technical accomplishment’ is mirrored in the catholicity of in£uences, inspirations, and readings which shuttle through the long, complex trajectories of his life’s work. McGonigal and Hepworth, for example, show how the visual and tex- tual emblems of the scrapbooks shift from Renaissance poetry (Labe¤is there again) to Dada to surrealism to the Brazilian Noigandres poets. Thomas explores some intellectual and artistic straits of Morgan’s work in the 50s and 60s which exemplify the currents of ‘social conscience and internationalism’. These, too, pulse through Morgan’s experimentalism of that 60s decade, as Eleanor Bell demonstrates in her essay on the concrete poetry; the poetic radi- calism of those spatial, material word-shapes becomes socially and politically transformative, and a source of cultural renewal. John Corbett shows how Morgan’s linguistic resurrection of Cyrano de Bergerac, that swashbuckling writer of seventeenth-century France, through demotic Glaswegian in his 1992 drama joyously parodies, subverts, and questions a variety of cultural assumptions and ‘systems of power’; Morgan’s twist in the cord of Cyrano reimaginings has a particular subversive brio. David Kinloch returns to the kaleidoscopic opacity of ‘The New Divan’ sequence (1977), with its apparent roots in fourteenth-century Persian litera- ture, to show how its lyrics ‘court a poetry of sensation’. Perspectives from the work of Gilles Deleuze and the context of post-war European aesthetic innovations (including cinematography) help to locate the critically elided importance of homosexuality and homoeroticism within the ‘Divan’ poetry. The threshold between the articulated and unarticulated, the voiced and unvoiced, also informs Chris Jones’s account of Morgan’s personal and imagi- native relationship with Old English poetry. Noting that this engagement de¢nes both the beginning and the end of his creative life, Jones traces an arc and journey which suggests how cathartic and restorative were Morgan’s read- ings, translations, and renderings of Beowulf and other sources. Through these texts, Jones argues, he negotiated the trauma of war experiences, the loneli- ness of his sexuality in 1940s Glasgow, and the vulnerabilities of old age; Old English, as Jones puts it, brought ‘the poet back into voice, allowing him to strain to unbind himself, to sweat to speak’. Eleanor Bell’s essay discusses Morgan’s concrete poem, ‘Pomander’, ¢rst published in 1973. Commenting on the object, and the text which mimics the shape and texture of this Renaissance artefact ^ which was ¢lled with aromatic vi EDITORIAL herbs and substances so that their soothing, medicinal fumes spiralled through its apertures ^ Morgan wrote, ‘I use this to bring out the theme of opening up the poem, opening it up spatially, and in a broader sense the theme of open- ing out life, life itself (or the round world) as a pomander, its secrets and treasures and rare things not to be hoarded but opened up and made visible’. We hope that this special issue a¡ords an opening up, or an opening out, of some new and ‘rare things’, in the writing life of the poet whose work re- imagined the possibilities of poetry, within Scotland and beyond, across seven decades of the twentieth and twenty-¢rst centuries. Sarah M. Dunnigan Margery Palmer McCulloch Editors vii Edwin Morgan, 4 May 2001 # Norman McBeath www.normanmcbeath.com Contents Editorial v James McGonigal and Sarah Hepworth Ana, Morgana, Morganiana: A Poet’s Scrapbooks as Emblems of Identity 1 Hamish Whyte Sustenance Provided: the Bibliographical Morgan 25 Robyn Marsack Publishing Edwin Morgan 35 Greg Thomas From Edinburgh to Saturn: The Edwin Morgan Archive at the Scottish Poetry Library 53 Richard Price ‘Is this a poem? Do not lose it.’ ^ Edwin