Tag Archives: Edwin Morgan

Pies, Poute, and the Poetry Mills of Victorian Dundee

It might make some sense to resume this blog where it left off, with a further reference to the ongoing work on Dundee writing in the 19th century. At the Dundee Literary Festival the other week, Professor Kirstie Blair and … Continue reading

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Two Poems for Tom Raworth and an Instant Elegy

I’m indebted to Peter Manson who, on my posting a short elegy on Tumblr for Tom Raworth, suggested I reproduce here two poems he, Peter, and his co-editor Robin Purves, first published in Object Permanence, no. 3 (Sept 94). These … Continue reading

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From the Miniature to the Virtual: Informationist Dundee

Like several  Scottish and Northern cities which have struggled with their changing identity – are they, as formerly, principally provincial conglomerations, or can they become something more, something capable of rebalancing the stacked centre/region dichotomy? – Dundee has performed and … Continue reading

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A note on MacCaig

(This brief note arose from a Facebook chat with Alan Buckley, in which I suppose I was outlining something of what I think of as Secondariness – how certain writers, indeed certain literatures, are perceived as outside the frame of … Continue reading

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Blurbalicious

The art of the poetry blurb is such a particular thing, and, as I’m asked to perform it with increasing frequency, I find myself wondering whether or not I do so from a sufficiently principled stance. Below are the most … Continue reading

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From Mere Bellies to the Bad Shaman, 3

(If you felt the previous section jumped around a bit, you’ll love this, which tries to get from Nietzsche to Carol Ann Duffy in as few paragraphs as possible. Again the argument is trying to favour metaphor’s capacity for comparison … Continue reading

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Addressing Dundee

(These first few catch-up blogs are relatively straightforward posts in that they’re already done. Here’s the first of three commissioned or otherwise occasional pieces written between June and November of last year: the verse I delivered at the dinner, and … Continue reading

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Ed-Dorn-Burgh Review

Edward Dorn, Collected Poems (Carcanet), 995pp, £25 (This review of Dorn appeared in Edinburgh Review 139.) In several key ways Ed Dorn’s magisterial Collected Poems is a bridge between the late Modernist milieu of Black Mountain poetics within which he … Continue reading

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Procrustean Taste versus the Proust Crustacean

Usually what you want to do, creatively speaking, is so compelling and necessary an action, that you rarely know or think of why you’re doing it. Theory, in that flattened-out sense of the term which opposes it to practice, is … Continue reading

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Once Were Informationists

(This review of Peter McCarey’s collected pamphlets appeared in Edinburgh Review 132, and is a look at what some Scottish poets did post-MacDiarmid and pre-Internet.) Peter McCarey, Collected Contraptions (Carcanet), 173pp, £14.95 Truth is sunk in information (‘Variations for Richard … Continue reading

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