Playing Games of Sense in Edwin Morgan’s Writing by Monika Kocot (review)

This rather awkwardly titled study is a welcome addition to the small but growing number of scholarly monographs on one of Scotland’s greatest modern poets. It flags its principal merits early in the introduction when Kocot notes how little real attention has been paid by critics to Morgan’s concrete poetry and it is this aspect of his work that is the main focus of her study and where she contributes most to our understanding of his work. Certainly no study of Morgan omits reference to the concrete poetry but often they shy away from in-depth examination and a thoroughgoing consideration is lacking. Reading Kocot one understands just why this may be so as her comparative approach – setting this work in the context of Morgan’s inspirations and enthusiasms and viewing it through the prism of linguistic and literary theory – reveals just how subtle and experimental it is. Equally useful is the way Kocot links Morgan’s concrete poetry to critically neglected texts such as The Whittrick: A Poem in Eight Dialogues. Key to her approach, as the title of that poem suggests, are Bakhtinian understandings of dialogue, carnival and heteroglossia, although Derridean dissemination runs a close second. This emphasis on the importance of ‘dialogue’ is used also to draw the late plays, A.D.: A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Jesus and The Play of Gilgamesh into the orbit of her study. These texts, she argues, might be seen as extended examples of ‘writing-through’ and thus related to Morgan’s citational aesthetic which plays creatively with already existing texts. While this is true in theory, the final chapters on the plays sat a little awkwardly with the material on the concrete poetry and her astute and often helpful examinations of linguistic anamorphosis. Here her readings seem less focused, although she does point helpfully to the ways these poetic dramas often play self-consciously with language and tradition.

The main reason for this lack of textual – and stylistic – cohesion, though, stems more from the fact that this study is composed of a series of articles previously published by the author in a variety of journals and collections of essays. She does well, via the introduction and linking passages, to stitch them together, but the process of converting articles into chapters that should seem seamless is difficult and not fully executed in this case. This impression is not mitigated by some rather careless copyediting which results, for example, in verbatim repetition of one footnote in a following chapter. There are quite a few typos and the English could have been proofread better. While, generally speaking, the level of discourse is appropriately sophisticated there are a number of tell-tale slips and omissions which occasionally lead to ambiguity that could foster misunderstanding.

These issues should not obscure the value of this contribution to Morgan studies however. There are useful close readings here of many of the most famous concrete poems. ‘Opening the Cage’ for example is more fully set within the context of John Cage’s own work and Barthes’s reflections on the latter although, as is often the case, I found Morgan’s own assessment of his purpose and methods to be most helpful. Jacobson, Foucault, Deleuze and others are all deployed to throw light on ‘Message Clear’, although I found the lengthy footnote which reads the poem through the prism of the New Testament apocrypha The Acts of John to be the most illuminating aspect of this discussion. There are sensible examinations of the import of Zdanevich’s and Khlebnikov’s zaum to the concrete poetry and Derridean readings of ‘Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath’ and ‘Lévi-Strauss at the Lie Detector’. It was when I came to Kocot’s discussion of ‘Shaker Shaken’, however, that I began to question the wisdom of abstracting these poems from the collections in which they first appeared and analysing them solely through the lens of...