Join St Mungo’s Mirrorball in celebrating Edwin Morgan’s Centenary on National Poetry Day, October 1, 2020 from 7-9pm.
St Mungo’s Mirrorball will celebrate the centenary of our former and first Honorary President, Edwin Morgan, on National Poetry Day. The event will be virtual courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library Zoom account and will take place from 7.00-9.00 pm. To join the event, email Jim Carruth: jimcarruth63@gmail.com.
The Programme
7.00 – 7.30 James McGonigal — The Prosaic Mr. Morgan
7.30 – 8.00 Members reading their favourite Morgan poems
8.00 – 8.30 Greg Thomas — Concrete Glasgow: Edwin Morgan, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and Irrational Obscurity
8.30 – 9.00 Members reading their favourite Morgan poems
James McGonigal is a poet, editor, teacher and a long-time member of St Mungo’s Mirrorball. He has a particular interest in the life and work of Edwin Morgan, who taught him as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, and then supervised his part-time research on modernist poetry through the 1970s. As Morgan’s friend and latterly his carer and a literary executor, he wrote a prize-winning biography: Beyond the Last Dragon, A Life of Edwin Morgan(Sandstone Press, 2010), and co-edited Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence 1950–2010 (Carcanet Press, 2015). His Scotnote introduction to Morgan’s work for school students (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2013) has recently been translated into Chinese. In Touch with Language, a co-edited volume of Morgan’s uncollected prose 1950–2005, appeared in April 2020 from the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
Greg Thomas is an independent writer and critic based in Glasgow. He is the author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and the article “Concrete Poetry and Scottish Women’s Writing: The Case of Veronica Forrest-Thomson” (Contemporary Women’s Writing, forthcoming). His most recent creative publications are Cloud Cover (Essence Press, 2018) and the poem-essay “Book 1: 1931-53”, for The Centenary Collection: Edwin Morgan (Speculative Books, 2020). He currently contributes to a number of art magazines including Aesthetica and Scottish Art News and is working on a short film on Ian Hamilton Finlay for BBC Scotland.
Edwin Morgan Trust 