The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Hen Ogledd

  A song from one of my favourite albums of the year ("an ambitious, progressive, intelligent and experimental take on pop music"*) based on a richly sonorous sound-poem by Edwin Morgan. This was one of the first Morgan poems I ever came across and on rereading I'm sensing a Joycean multi-layering of possible and/or invented language-elements in Morgan's monster-ese, a polyglot speech-act reminding us through a bastardised, fictive symbol of Scottish nationhood of the cultural promiscuity and slipperiness of any state-imposed national language. How Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay operated as vivid components of the international Concrete Poetry scene during the late 60s and 70s while much of British poetry weltered in a parochial post-Movement conservatism is another story (and one that leaves out the underground streams of the "British Poetry Revival" emerging at the same time).

  I'm also drawn to the historically (and politically) resonant name of this "prog-folk" group: Hen Ogledd is Welsh for the Old North, the region of northern England and southern lowland Scotland inhabited by Celtic Britons who spoke an ancient dialect called Cumbric. It became a kind of mythic realm from which Welsh bards such as Taliesin and Aneirin traced their lineage. Like Morgan's poem, and in a year when the supposed "levelling up" agenda between Northern regions and the South-east morphed into a kind of managed impoverishment as the government imposed month after month of high-tier restriction on already stretched cities like Manchester and Liverpool, Hen Ogledd seem to speak of an undermining of southern, metropolitan hegemonies, a reaching for the "tentacular roots" of alternative cultural traditions.

* The Quietus 100 Albums of the Year 2020 - always a great place to discover new and overlooked music 

Scottish Roses

  On a visit to Glasgow at the end of the summer I chanced across the Scottish Poetry Rose Garden in Queens Park, just up the road from where we were staying. Walking around the pathways inlaid with the names and dates of Scottish poets from Henryson and Dunbar to Edwin Morgan and Carol Anne Duffy (as well as some lesser-known figures like Violet Jacob (1863-1946)), some of the stones decorated with fallen rose-petals, I was reminded of the astounding richness of this tradition and the vital contribution and influence it has exerted on the history of poetry in English, even as (like Scotland itself) it's had to continually fight for recognition of its distinctive voice and linguistic vigour. 

   It seemed fitting to find this craggy monument to Hugh MacDiarmid at the head of the garden, that dogged proponent of Scottish nationalism who argued for poetry as an ambitious, polymathic tool for change, very much with a modernist, internationalist agenda at its heart. The poem inscribed on the stone is a brief but resonant quatrain:

"The rose of all the world is not for me.

I want for my part

Only the little white rose of Scotland

That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart."

   MacDiarmid's white rose has become a symbol of Scottish independence, in fact, since SNP MPs took to wearing the flowers to parliament for the Queens Speech in 2015. As Scotland is dragged towards the fiasco of Brexit, an impending calamity which the majority of its citizens never voted for, it will be intriguing to see if they're given another opportunity to make a choice about their own independence and whether they will use it to finally break away from our increasingly disunited kingdom in order to remain a part of Europe.