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 

Guest Poet: Robert Taylor

RETSINA

If there was, running in its sweet bitter scent,
A thread of breeze playing the glint of sea’s glass,
Glare off walls needling tears, tongue’s tingle of wine,
That tress of air, light, memory, warmth, that taste;
If there was that and the linger of resin,
Fast against spoil like a loving drunk, 

I would reinhabit this and be that drunk
And recompound it with the heart-stop scent
Blown from the pine grove and its glue-gilt resin.
All afternoon, with every emptied glass,
Memory-tussled oblivion scud where we taste
Less hurt in the yellow clarity of the wine.

The gliding fish, the dolphins and the wine
We downed and downed until the sea seemed drunk.
The offal-coloured olives sheening wet began to taste
As acrid as the stony ground-weed scent
Where a throttled-sounding cockerel swallowed glass
In smashed throatfulls where light congealed to resin.

Its gurgle of blood mimed the sun that set as resin. 
A judder of bouzoukis coaxed more wine
Your eyes shot their decision, their green glass;
Your eyes of sea too clear for one so drunk
Shone with what couldn’t be thrown off the scent
Leaving the bewildering, unmanageable taste

As though fate transmitted in the mouth, a taste.
Somewhere a fly engulfed itself in resin.
Soon you receded to a ghost of scent. 
Speech foundered in the dregs of wine. 
And every night thereafter I was drunk. 
Pathetic; staring blankly in a glass. 

Now is an aperture the day seeps through, its glass
Bears no trace of that island’s sleepy taste.
The only constant is the being drunk. 
These days secreting no protective resin
Thought drifts back out on seas as dark as wine
When night falls and I topple to its scent.

Sweet bitter wine that soured in the glass.
Memory a scented resin bleeding out. 
How everything just tastes of being drunk.

                                                        Robert Taylor 2020 ("a sestina written with the further constraint that the title had to rhyme with sestina")