A plug - and a word of explanation

I've just stuck a new poem on Frankenstina. I haven't written much recently - it's a bit like getting up early to go swimming: once you're in the way of it it seems somehow easier, more natural, but if you've stopped for a bit it seems a totally unlikely thing to do. This one, however, occupied me in a hospital waiting room, where I was merely the chauffeur and not really involved in the reason for the visit. The room was full, most of the time - a swirling mix of Glasgow humanity, some obviously suffering, some quiet and staring into space, some flustered because they'd missed their names for whatever reason. We in fact missed the name of my friend, but that was because we were talking - four people for one appointment is far too social to be serious.

But when I was left alone, I couldn't resist a bit of the furtive note-taking of the "accursed observer", as Edwin Morgan would have it, and as the time passed I found it taking shape as the poem. The title is partly in amused homage to an old friend, who used to talk about the time he had once spent in what he called the Suffering General, in the old days when all the hospital was contained in the Victorian building that now fronts a building site where the new Southern General is rising among the chaos. However, it also reinforces for me the universality of suffering, and how we are all, from the most self-contained to the most vocally expressive, reduced to the same state of helpless passivity in the hospital setting, and how we will all, one day, arrive at the terminus that for now I am happy to forget.

Now - on with the journey...

Edwin Morgan: a farewell

Edwin Morgan: last rites
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

The Bute Hall, Glasgow University. I haven't been in this place since the late '60s, but it looks unchanged. I'm here for the funeral of Edwin Morgan, whose photo hangs above the plain coffin on the dais - a coffin on which lies a single thistle. The face in the photo is the one I saw when I was a student - the big, black-framed specs, the thick hair, the unmistakable smile. It doesn't seem real, somehow, that he is dead - but the blue ranks of seats are filled with people come to say goodbye to the man and to say his words and remember.

It's an entirely secular funeral, and as others I've been to seems longer than the average church ceremony. Maybe there is felt a need to say more, to let everyone contribute in the absence of set ritual; most of the contributions are more wordy than the poet would allow in his work. The best moments glow - David Kinloch reading Strawberries; Tommy Smith's keening saxophone and sudden wolf-howl in front of the coffin; John Butt's organ playing Maxwell Davies' Farewell to Stromness. I sit on the hard seat, and think of the lightness and unassuming grace of the man we're remembering, and some of the Chapel Choir sing A Man's a Man and I long for a less pedestrian setting.

We're all invited to take a dram and a bit of shortbread in the University Chapel. There are also hot drinks, but I stick with the whisky and sip it as I suddenly realise that's Bernard McLaverty over there, and see Alex Salmond and Jack McConnell - and George Reid who was Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament and who spoke at length ...

There are folk, mostly men, who look as if they should be important, in a literary sort of a way, and there are the quietly ordinary ones who turn out to be seriously important but don't seem to have realised it. Sir Kenneth Calman, the Chancellor, has mislaid Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay passes and smiles. I realise I've still not had any lunch - a cereal bar eaten in the sunny Arts Quad before the ceremony doesn't really count - and feel it's time to leave. I walk down the chapel steps to the Professors' Quadrangle for the first time since my wedding day forty years ago, into the warm sun that never seemed to shine in term-time. I think of being young, and uncertain, and of how the wind whistled round the quadrangles as we queued for classes, and how unreal university felt, that first year in 1964.

Life is very short, really - even for a 90 year old. Thank God for the poetry.

Edwin Morgan: taking it personally

The death of a famous person snags the consciousness, be they movie star, writer or monarch. But when that famous person is someone you've known, the news of their death is a moment of bereavement. And now Edwin Morgan has died, and the memories surface.

My first memory is one shared by hundreds of undergraduates at Glasgow University. I was a student in the huge Ordinary English class of 64-65, daunted by lectures on Extraneous Factors in Literary Criticism (what do you write down during such a lecture?), ignorant of anything beyond the school syllabus, in which we had studied nothing written after the 1920s. Edwin Morgan was the youngest figure to lecture to us, on 20th century poetry. His slightly breathless, undeniably Scottish voice was encouraging; I found something to write down. A friend produced a poem: look - he wrote this! And things began to join up.

Fast forward to the late '90s. I am no longer ignorant about 20th century poetry and have Morgan's collected poems as well as a slim volume or two. I have taught generations of children First Men on Mercury and In Central Station along with other gems, and they have loved them. Morgan comes to the school to talk to the seniors, and I am detailed to look after him - because you knew him. I am in awe - more than when I was 20 - and delighted. He wears a yellow jacket and reads his poems and the voice is still there, quieter but recognisable, and we can't get the kids to leave him alone at the end because it is obvious they love him as they loved his poems. He tells me he'll probably not make it to Dunoon again as he comes by public transport and the stairs on the ferry are getting to be too much for him. When he leaves, I write a poem about the visit. Later, I realise the librarian has sent it to him, for he sends a postcard in thanks.

In the years that follow, I presume upon my renewed contact with Morgan to send him poems - not just my own, about which he is encouraging, offers constructive advice, but also poems written by pupils. The best moments are landmarks for them: the very mixed bunch of S2 boys who write their own poems based on the form of Off Course and laboriously compose the accompanying letter which they dictate to the most literate of their number; the S3 girl who makes a speech about Strawberries for her Solo Talk assessment and sends him the script. Nothing goes unacknowledged, and each is the recipient of a personal reply - photocopied 27 times in the case of the boys.

My final memory, however, is mine alone. Morgan, by now already living in one nursing home because of illness, has to transfer to a second on the closure of the first, and comes to inhabit a room on the floor below the one in which my mother has lived for the previous 6 months following a stroke. Despite the stroke-induced problems with speech, my mother tells me that he has been visiting her on "her" floor, having been told that there's a lady who loves poetry there. He reads to her, and brings a new interest into her last months. The day before she dies, I take a breather from sitting in her room, ask a nurse if Professor Morgan is able to see a visitor. She doubts it, as he has been in pain that day, but checks - and swiftly comes back with an invitation. He is sitting at a desk in a room identical to my mother's, but lined with books. He is wearing a rust-coloured needlecord shirt. I thank him for what he has done for my mother, and tell him her end is near. He holds my hand, tells me I shall write about this experience some day, but not yet. I tell him there is one poem already, about nasturtiums. I love nasturtiums, he says.

I read the poem at the funeral the next week.

A real poet

I was rooting around in links the other day - probably chasing up accounts of +Gene's visit to Scotland last week - when I came across this on The Herald's site. Edwin Morgan reads some poems he wrote recently in response to some well-known paintings - the best known probably the Dali Christ of St John of the Cross, a painting I grew up knowing through frequent visits to Kelvingrove Art Galleries.

Though his speech is now slurred by the stroke he suffered last year, Morgan's voice is still recognisable as that of the first real poet I ever met, when he lectured to my Ordinary English class at Glasgow Uni in the 60s, and the poems are as telling as ever. I am indebted to this real poet for encouraging me in my writing, and heartened to realise he's as sharp as ever despite failing health and confinement in a nursing home.

Read and enjoy.