My review of Nancy Perloff’s Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology (Reaktion Books) appeared in the Times Literary Supplement this week. The whole thing is behind the online concrete of the paywall — but here is the story it tells about Edwin Morgan’s appearance in the TLS in 1966:
Concrete poetry — which emerged almost simultaneously in central Europe and Brazil, and travelled as far as Japan — went down like a lead balloon with British readers, despite finding some of its liveliest practitioners among the Scottish avant-garde. When Edwin Morgan published “Message Clear”, perhaps the most memorable and moving of his concrete works, in the TLS of January 13, 1966, letters were sent to the editor.
“Message Clear” repeats the words of Christ from John 11:25 (“I am the resurrection and the life”) as a single line across the page, but removes different letters each time to make new phrases (“i am he”), until finally the whole “message” appears as the last line. “Sir, —”, wrote one reader, “May I congratulate Edwin Morgan on typing ‘i am the resurrection and the life’ — after fifty-four unsuccessful attempts?” Another doubted whether this was “really a poem”, rather than a piece of “graphic art”, given that “it has no linguistic reverberations”.
It took a third reader, Heather Bremer of Tunbridge Wells, to put the others straight. “Can it be that both your correspondents entirely missed the point?” she asked. “The purpose of the design is to suggest the fragmentation and fumbling search — infinite trial and error, perhaps — of all mankind before finally the Message is Clear.” She then demonstrated this reading by repunctuating Morgan’s lines to emphasize the “compelling force” of their lyricism: “Am I? / if / I am he, / Hero, / Hurt / There and / Here and here” etc.
Bremer was right: the genius of Morgan’s “emergent” poems lies in how they create a lyric voice with an audible coherence of phrase, rhythm and rhyme, which is then visually atomized by the mechanical grid of the typesetter. Readers familiar with the most record-scratching moments of T. S. Eliot (“Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn”) do not have to stretch their definition of poetry much further.
This was not the first time Morgan had appeared in the TLS with such experiments, though. On August 6th 1964, the magazine ran a double-page spread — laid out by the pop-artist Richard Hamilton — of visual poems created by various inventive methods. The whole section was jokingly titled with a series of typed anagrams of ‘avant garde’ (‘graven data / a danger vat’). Morgan reciprocated with a piece entirely comprising anagrams of ‘THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT’. The most apt of these is the first (‘SIMPLE MYTH LITERATURE PEN SET’), although ‘HAMLET ENEMY-PITIER SPLUTTERS’ nicely suggests the furious scholarly battles of the Letters page. But the most satisfying twist is the running head of the page itself: