Celebrating Edwin Morgan’s Centenary – Resources
This year we’re celebrating the centenary of Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), Scotland’s first modern Makar. How much we miss his inquiring, playful, passionate and optimistic intelligence! ‘When the times darken / will there be singing even then?’ asked Bertolt Brecht, in a four-line poem that Morgan translated. The reply: ‘There will be singing even then. / Of how the times darken.’
Morgan sang: of his times, of his loves, of his country, of the world and worlds beyond Scotland and beyond planet Earth. We hope that in this centenary year, people who have never read a Morgan poem will encounter and enjoy one – or more – and that those who already know his work will be surprised by a poem or a line that they don’t know. Here’s where the libraries come in – and Morgan loved libraries.
In partnership with the University of Glasgow Library and with CILIPS, the Edwin Morgan Trust is making resources available to any library or classroom that would like to make Morgan a focus in the centenary year, which stretches from his birthday on 27 April 2020 through to March 2021. So you might choose to mark it during Book Week Scotland, on Valentine’s Day in February 2021, during LGBTQ month… whenever it suits you.
We are offering a selection of downloadable/printable sheets, comprising: an outline info sheet about Morgan; a reproduction of ‘Oban Girl’ and ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in manuscript; reproductions of two poems in typescript, ‘Chaffinch Map of Scotland’ and ‘Space Poem 3’; and two more poems to display:‘Strawberries’, and ‘Seven Decades’, which takes the reader through Morgan’s life and times. There is also an information sheet about the poems which could be cut up as labels. We hope you’ll enjoy using this material, wherever you are.
A3 Introduction to Edwin Morgan
A4 Introduction to Edwin Morgan
A3 Oban Girl/Loch Ness Monster’s Song Transcript
A4 Oban Girl/Loch Ness Monster’s Song Transcript
Further EM resources may be found at the Trust site, which has some great videos up – see
https://edwinmorgantrust.com/category/hold-hands-among-the-atoms
and at the Scottish Poetry Library’s Edwin Morgan Archive:
https://edwinmorgan.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/resources/index.html
You might want to refresh your Edwin Morgan holdings. There have been some lively publications this year: https://edwinmorgantrust.com/2020/07/10/centenary-publications/