Edwin Morgan was an incredibly prolific poet, which meant that there were many possibilities for what our exhibition on his work might look like. A focus on sci-fi? His scrapbooks? Translation? After much thinking, we decided to focus on Morgan’s concrete poetry and his contribution to the international concrete poetry movement, which took place between the 1950s and 1970s. This decision was aided by the extensive collection of concrete poetry we have at the National Poetry Library, as well as support from the Scottish Poetry Library in offering loans of other items, including Morgan’s own typewriter.

Morgan would go on to further extend these international links, writing concrete poetry in Hungarian and having his work published by the Swiss-Bolivian ‘father’ of concrete, Eugen Gomringer. Morgan connected Glasgow, Scotland and the wider UK with the international movement.

When the library reopens, The Concrete World of Edwin Morgan will celebrate Morgan as a connector of concrete poets, a communicator of concrete poetry and a questioner of what the genre was doing (and could do). If this sounds like he was something of a statesman for the genre, his own creative work shows a very different picture: here is a poet easily able to lose himself in the joy of creation, delighting in wordplay, invention and imagination. One of his most popular poems, ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’ can be seen to have his inventiveness as a concrete poet at its heart, through stripping language back to phonemes, exploring broken communication and moving – just as the movement did itself – into sound.