@edmorgantrust.bsky.social
Trust of the first Scottish poet laureate, Edwin Morgan.
A poem by Edwin Morgan inscribed into a flagstone on Candleriggs in Glasgow, just outside the City Halls. Born in 1920, Morgan became the city's first poet laureate in 1999.
Cont./
#glasgow #streetart #poetry #edwinmorgan #glasgowcoatofarms #streetpoetry
But Glasgow days and grey weathers, when the rain beat on the bus shelter and you leaned slightly against me, and the back of your hand touched my hand in the shadows, and nothing was said, when your hair grazed mine accidentally as we talked in a cafe, yet not quite accidentally, when I stole a glance at your face as we stood in a doorway and found I was afraid of what might happen if I should never see it again, when we met, and met, in spite of such differences in our lives, and did the common things that in our feeling became extraordinary, so that our first kiss was like the winter morning moon, and as you shifted in my arms it was the sea changing the shingle that changes it as if for ever (but we are bound by nothing, but like smoke to mist or light in water we move, and mix) โ O then it was a story as old as war or man, and although we have not said it we know it, and although we have not claimed it we do it, and although we have not vowed it we keep it, without a name to the end.
... so that our first kiss
was like the winter morning moon, and as you shifted in my arms
it was the sea changing the shingle that changes it
as if for ever ...
โ from โThe Unspokenโ by #EdwinMorgan, published in The Second Life (EUP, 1968) ๐
Computerโs First Christmas Card: a Poetry/Coding workshop
Thur 4 Dec
Mitchell Library, Glasgow.
Free
An introduction to coding and poetry with Michael Mullen and Claire Quigley.
There will also be a chance to see some items from the Edwin Morgan collection.
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/computers-...
Computerโs First Christmas Card: a Poetry/Coding workshop
4 Dec, Glasgow โ free
Inspired by Edwin Morganโs poem, attendees at this Poetry/Coding workshop will code a festive poem & leave with a handmade Christmas card! No experience of coding or poetry necessary
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/computers-...
What was your wish? You wanted more?
Itโs granted! Up there is a store
Of light. Itโs breaking now in showers
Not of stars but meteors . . .
โจ โLeonidsโ by #EdwinMorgan, published in Cathures (Carcanet, 2002)
Call for papers for a special issue of the *Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry* on concrete & visual poetries. Edited by Colin Herd & Greg Thomas. 250-300-word abstracts to ConcreteAndVisualPoetries@gmail.com by 10 Jan 2026
poetry.openlibhums.org/news/867/
Please repost and share!
Horsemen It was late, a wintry evening, and I was in the old flat looking out at everything familiar, all the details of every neighbouring house quite clear under streetlights when are the corner by the lamp I saw them โ horses and their men talking together, their hoof clatter and whispering (the Horseman's word I'd read about but cannot speak), Their great flanks, fetlocks, ancient and out of place in Glasgow now, under the street lamp at my corner where they should not have been. And as I stared at them talking together all at once every light went out and I was left in darkness with that sound of hooves, beating, retreating โ
A spOoky poem from Edwin Morganโs final collection, Dreams and Other Nightmares. Happy Halloweโen!
โ โHorsemenโ published here in Centenary Selected Poems (Carcanet 2020)
Edwin Morgan Aberdeen Train Rubbing a glistening circle on the steamed-up window I framed a pheasant in a field of mist. The sun was a great red thing somewhere low, struggling with the milky scene. In the furrows a piece of glass winked into life, hypnotized the silly dandy; we hooted past him with his head cocked, contemplating a bottle-end, and this was the last of October, a Chinese moment in the Mearns.
Rubbing a glistening circle
on the steamed-up window I framed
a pheasant in a field of mistโฆ
โEdwin Morgan, โAberdeen Trainโ
published in CENTENARY SELECTED POEMS, @carcanet.bsky.social 2020
#poem #poetry
www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/inde...
In Translation: A Scottish-Slovenian Poetry Exchange
7 Nov @uofglasgow.bsky.social โ free
The @edmorgantrust.bsky.social brings together four poets working across Scottish Gaelic, Scots, & Slovene for a two-part exchange in Edinburgh & Ljubljana
events.bookitbee.com/smlc/in-tran...
Next Friday: In Translation: A Scottish-Slovenian Poetry Exchange โ poets working across Gaelic, Scots & Slovene will share translations of each otherโs work & insights into their creative process.
Register to attend in person: shorturl.at/6nNtz
Or email arts-cclt@glasgow.ac.uk to join online!
A picture of Ian Hamilton Finlay flying paper planes at his home, Stonypath.
100 years today since the birth of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Happy birthday IHF.
28.10.2025 08:08 โ ๐ 7 ๐ 1 ๐ฌ 1 ๐ 0
Today is the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay: one of Scotland's most innovative poets and artists. In August the SPL collaborated with the Little Sparta Trust for an afternoon of poetry at Little Sparta featuring Christopher Crawford, Nasim Rebecca Asl, Nazaret Ranea & Janette Ayachi #IHFcentenary
28.10.2025 09:31 โ ๐ 6 ๐ 1 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
Today we celebrate the Centenary of the birth of Scottish poet, artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) by hosting a special screening of The Boat in the Writing Room: retracing the origins of Stonypath, Little Sparta tonight (Tues 28 Oct) 7-9pm
Free. To book info@pierartscentre.com
But when at last you come across the ship with eighty sails, oh what a sight that is to take to heart, with the white canvas flapping and the rigging snapping as she churns the ocean through a stiff breeze, and the sailors since out their seemingly inexhaustible store of shanties, and the dolphins slice and gleam and are ahead of the prow like protective things from a world that is not quite ours, and the playful captain out of sheer joy blasts his horn eighty times into the misty morning, and then with his blue eyes glittering he bangs the rail โ โSteady as she goes!โ
Nearly forty years later, in 2005, EM wrote another poem for Finlay on his 80th birthday, returning once more to imagery of the sea and ships that the two men loved:
โBut when at last you come across the ship with eighty / sails, oh what a sight that is to take to heart . . .โ
โต๐
Maker of boats, earthships, the white cradle with its patchwork quilt, toys of wood painted bright as the zebrasโ muzic in your carousel, patiently cut space cleanly! Thereโs dark earth underneath, not far the North Sea, a beach goes out greyer than Doverโs for ignorant armies. Scotland is the little bonfires in cold mist, with stubbornness, the woman knits late by a window, a man repairing
nets, a man carv- ing steady glass, hears the world, bends to his work. You give the pleasure of made things, the construction holds like a net; or it unfolds in waves a certain measure, of affection. Native, familiar as apples, tugs, girls, lettres from your moulin, but drinking tea you set for Albers his saucer of milk.
In his breakout collection The Second Life (1968), Morgan included a poem in celebration of Finlay โ โmaker of boatsโ โ and his careful craftsmanship as a poet and artist.
28.10.2025 12:52 โ ๐ 0 ๐ 0 ๐ฌ 1 ๐ 0
Happy 100th birthday Ian Hamilton Finlay โ poet, visual artist, gardener, and friend of Edwin Morgan.
EM & IHF met in the summer of 1961 & supported each other throughout the decade, both been keen experimenters in the field of concrete poetry ... ๐งต
[img: โFish Sheet Oneโ, pub. by IHF in 1963)
Weโre excited to launch the Open the Doors Fund, our new small grants scheme for poets + translators in Scotland seeking funding to support their creative/professional development.
Deadline: 10 Nov, 5pm
For more info please visit our website ๐
edwinmorgantrust.com/2025/10/13/t...
๐ฃ TODAY! Donโt miss Of Us & Others โ a powerful new film by Maya Rose Edwards ๐ฌ Screening 12โ5pm at Civic House (drop in anytime!). One day only โ Sat 4 Oct! AGAโs first visual art commission supported by @creativescots.bsky.social & the Edwin Morgan Trust
04.10.2025 07:42 โ ๐ 21 ๐ 8 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
โThe use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translatorโ
โEdwin Morgan on translating Mayakovsky into Scots
#InternationalTranslationDay
asls.org.uk/publications...
My Mother She would hold the mug in both hands, one Sunday as evening approached she smiled in her own peaceful way and sat a moment in the half dark A small saucepan held the super she brought home from the fine folksโ house we went to bed, and I lay thinking how they had a whole pot to devour โ This was my mother, tiny, early dead, a washerwomanโs lot is to die early, her legs shake from the loads she carries, her head throbs as she bends ironing โ And her mountains are the dirty washing! She has a tranquilizing cloudscape of steam, and as for pastures new the washerwoman has the attic โ She pauses with the iron: I see her. Her brittle body was broken by capital, grew thin, grew thinner โ think about it, proletarians โ She was bent, you know, bent from washing, I never knew how young she was, she wore a clean apron in her dreams, and the postman greeted her then โ
For #InternationalTranslationDay, Edwin Morganโs translation of โAnyรกmโ by Hungarian poet Attila Jรณzsef (1905โ1937)
Published in Collected Translations (Carcanet, 1996)
Second hand book sites discoveries !
Including Edwin Morgan on Edwin Muir in The Review, February 1963
@edmorgantrust.bsky.social
#edwinmuir
#edwinmorgan
#scottishliterature
Announcing our new partnership scheme: The Canedolia Collaboration! We welcome applications from orgs in Scotland looking to deliver a 3-year programme focused on poetry and/or translation. Financial and in-kind support available.
โฐ Deadline: 2 Oct @ 5pm
edwinmorgantrust.com/2025/09/04/t...
Of Us & Others is the result of our inaugural visual art Creative Commission with Maya Rose Edwards, supported by @creativescots.bsky.social Open Fund & @edmorgantrust.bsky.social Edwardโs new film will screen for one day at Civic House, 04.10.25, from 12โ5pm, on a rolling loop so pop in anytime!
08.09.2025 12:21 โ ๐ 3 ๐ 3 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
John I Nothing will bring him back. I know that, of course I know that. The days When I do not think of him are few, but if I turn my gaze On a phantom, on a plot of earth, on a faded photograph of great times, I raise Nothing, nearly nothing, no, not nothing, it is the something of a pain that stays Ineradicable and only to be mitigated when I breathe the phrase I loved you. You must know It was truly so, although As clay in clay you cannot catch my thanks, my steadiness, my lateness, my praise.
โAs clay in clay you cannot catch my thanks, my steadiness, my lateness, my praiseโ
โ โJohn Iโ by Edwin Morgan, written in memory of John Scott, his partner for 16 years, who died in September 1978.
Published in Edwin Morgan Twenties: Love (Polygon, 2020)
Announcing our new partnership scheme: The Canedolia Collaboration! We welcome applications from orgs in Scotland looking to deliver a 3-year programme focused on poetry and/or translation. Financial and in-kind support available.
โฐ Deadline: 2 Oct @ 5pm
edwinmorgantrust.com/2025/09/04/t...
ESSAY
'Page Against The Machine: On the Poetics of AI Refusal'
Pip Thornton asks if AI technologies will "disarm poetry and creative writing as tools of refusal."
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/2025/09/page...
โโWhen the facts of our lives can never be fully known there isnโt just room for fiction, there is a moral imperative for it. To write it. To paint it โ to light a candle in the dark then pick up your pen or brush. Even, and especially, when the world is ending.โ
A wee essay
tinyurl.com/ct6w3ynf
A Crow The summer grows late, cool, ragged, precious. Clouds like ungainly brooms are sweeping showers across the slates. On a dripping lamp-standard a crow hunches, flaps, hunches. The young painter with his ring of white sings as he hops in and out of the rain. The sun bursts what it has been saving so suddenly, so brilliantly, we are smiling. It is August still. The leaves hang fast and glisten. If there were no seasons, who would be singing? If there was no weather, who would be painting? If there was no earth turning, we darkly, partly think, no crow would have a lawn to stamp on or Aristarchus any globe to dandle. As not to be born is worst โ a crow will tell you, a worm will tell you โ not to be created crosses galaxies like a shadow of horror. But created they are; born, I and the painter; really wet ruffled shiny black half-happy the feathers of the raucous-hearted clatterer.
The summer grows late, cool, ragged, precious.
Clouds like ungainly brooms are sweeping showers across the slates ...
โ โA Crowโ by #EdwinMorgan, published in Sweeping Out the Dark (Carcanet, 1994)
100 The dead climb with us like the living to the edge. The clouds sail and the airโs washed blue. For you and me, the life beyond that sages mention is this life on a crag above a line of breakers. Oh I canโt speak of that eternal break of white, only of memories crowding in from human kind, stealthily, brazenly, thankfully, stonily into that other sea-cave of my head. Down where the breaker was closes, darkens, rises, foams, closes; crates drift across, whirl round in the ghost of a gale; a shred of sailcloth relic of a gale that really blew slews to the resting-place the long tide goes out to leave it, bleaching on its bony rock. I pick it from the stone, Hafiz, to bind the leaves of my divan.
โOh I canโt speak
of that eternal break of white, only of
memories crowding in from human kind ...โ
Remembering dear Edwin Morgan, who died on this day, fifteen years ago.
โportrait of Edwin Morgan (1980) by Alexander Moffat
โโ100โ from The New Divan, publ. in Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990)
FLYTE NYTE!
Wed 20 Aug @ EIBF
๐ฅ Joelle Taylor versus Hannah Lavery ๐ฅ
๐ฅ Michael Mullen versus Ross McLeary ๐ฅ
๐ฅ Bee Asha versus Kate Ireland ๐ฅ
๐ฅ Amelia Baylor versus Darren Connell ๐ฅ
Hosted by Leyla Josephine, Colin Bramwell, Iona Lee.
www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival...
