---

The Edwin Morgan Poetry Award was conceived by Edwin Morgan with the aim of supporting young Scottish poets to reach new heights. Morgan demonstrated this mission during his lifetime by mentoring and supporting emerging Scottish poets. He left one million pounds in his will to continue this mission, with specific reference to establishing an award to a young poet. 

The EMPA was inaugurated in 2014 and is held every two years. It has supported the work of over twenty young poets with a prize of £20,000, which up to 2020 was given to one poet but now may be divided between up to four poets. 

This year, five poets have been shortlisted for the Award. The winner(s) will be announced at a special event – ‘Future Poets: Celebrating a Decade of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award’, hosted by Michael Pedersen, which takes place on Tuesday 13 August as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. (Tickets were still available, at time of writing.)

Ahead of the Awards Event, the Glasgow Review of Books caught up with all of the short-listed poets, to ask them about their work and what Edwin Morgan’s legacy means to each of them . . .

We’re grateful to our friends at the Edwin Morgan Trust for facilitating this interview and to the poets themselves for taking part. [Some answers have been edited for length.]

Can you tell us about how your interest in poetry has developed, also what inspires, informs and drives your current writing practice?

Charles Lang: I first developed a real interest in poetry during my undergraduate degree . . . and have been writing ever since. I tend to find my way into writing through reading; and with that there’s conversations I have with my partner which seem to inform quite a lot of my thinking. I don’t know that I’m driven in any particular way, other than the need to get up in the morning and write something before I go to work. Whatever happens in that time is always unpredictable.

Dan Power: I try to surprise myself. Increasingly I’m looking at poetry as a form of improv, like writing a definition for something which doesn’t exist until it’s been defined. In the past I’d try to write a poem about something, I’d begin with an idea of what I wanted the poem to be, the feelings I wanted it to contain, and I’d try making something to fit that shape. It always feels a bit forced that way though.

So, now I’m writing without any intention, sometimes letting the computer or my immediate surroundings kick-start things and letting the poem reveal itself as it’s being written. It’s very freeing this way. You come across images or ideas you never would have reached if you’d confined your imagination with a pre-conceived plan.

Wendelin Law: When I first had the idea of becoming a published poet, I set out to write about the most pressing and troubling social issues, so my poems often focus on topics ranging from historical trauma, human rights, protests (e.g. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement), to environmental degradation (e.g. extinction and the climate crisis). More and more, I feel that poetry is essentially a way to make sense of life, like a self-administered therapy session on sadness, but also a celebration of tiny, everyday joys, or even a cathartic satire of our collective absurdity . . .

I just re-read my entry of this year’s Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and noted how all the poems are laments, which shouldn’t be surprising because this is part of the pun on the title ‘Whaling’, i.e. ‘wailing’; but still I was taken aback by how the titular poem was more vengeful than I remember. Perhaps poems are lively beasts that no longer belong to the poet once they are written down – this is what makes poetry writing so intriguing.

Gabriel Levine Brislin: My poetic practice developed directly out of, and in opposition to, my visual art practice. Studying art but becoming increasingly frustrated with what I saw as the limitations of visual representation, I turned to the written word as a way to navigate these feelings. The tension between the image and the word has fueled my practice ever since.

Harriet French: I came to poetry relatively late. I grew up wanting to be a violinist but I developed an injury in my late teens which prevented me from doing so. For a long time I was searching for something to replace music in my daily life, something that I could work on or ‘practice’ regularly that was meaningful to me. Over the pandemic I began writing poems . . . To this day, sound drives my writing practice. It often feels like I am led to meaning by following sound, rather than first figuring out a meaning to then construct sonically.

What does Edwin Morgan’s work and legacy mean to you?

Harriet French: When I first encountered Edwin Morgan’s work, I didn’t have to read many of his poems to realize how incredibly versatile he was as a writer. Such versatility arises out of a playfulness and a curiosity that I find it important to be reminded of and reinspired by time and time again . . . I also love how funny his poems can be. ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ has me in stitches.

More generally, I have enormous respect for Edwin Morgan as a socially engaged poet who was active within his community. That’s where, I believe, poetry should be operating . . . The survival and the flourishing of the arts within our culture, against the odds, is dependent upon individuals like Edwin Morgan. He has set us a great example.

Gabriel Levine Brislin: If I am ever stuck in the depths of a poem that has wound round itself so tightly that it seems to be suffocating, I open Edwin Morgan’s New Selected Poems. The complete disregard for a recognisable authorial voice, the flexibility with form and content, the ceaseless experimentation, the expansive, world-building imagination paired with a distinctly local scope of concern: all of these features of Morgan’s writing have been endlessly important to me.

Wendelin Law: Edwin Morgan’s work has a strong sense of Scottish identity and shows deep compassion to the people. These are the two things I look up to when I write poems exploring my own identity as a Hongkonger living in Scotland and writing in English, my third language.

Dan Power: I love how wide-ranging his work is, and how open he was to working in different forms and contexts. There’s a lot of generosity there, he shared lots of different pieces of himself. I’m particularly fond of his concrete poetry – and how he sees text not just as a container for information but as a material in itself, where the letters and the lines of a poem to have immediate visual impact as well as an intellectual intrigue.

Charles Lang: Being from Glasgow, Edwin Morgan’s poetry is way through which I can try to understand the city – and therefore the world. His engagements with it are something I constantly return to. In particular, when I came back to Glasgow after being away for some time, it was his poetry that helped me reimagine my appreciation of the place and its people. The impact of his work on writing here and across Scotland is immeasurable.

Edwin Morgan was known for his openness to innovation and experimentation in his poetry, to what extent does experimentation drive your work – how important is it to find the ‘poetic new’? 

Charles Lang: I believe experimentation is necessary for poetry to happen. Perhaps what that means to any poet will vary in terms of their ideas and aesthetic judgements. Hopefully in some way we are all working towards finding new ways of doing it, otherwise I don’t know if there would be much point.

Dan Power: I love shiny new things. I’m drawn to them, even when they might be dangerous. At the moment I’m fixated on AI – as a tool, as a collaborator, as a hyper-sized text itself – and all the new methods of writing it makes possible.

I do understand and agree with the concerns a lot of people have surrounding AI, and I believe its output should always be cultivated and adapted to such an extent that the human poet can honestly claim the words as ‘theirs’, but I’m not worried about Large Language Models replacing human writers. I think human readers will always prefer words with human intention behind them, and human work is fundamentally more surprising and engaging than an AI-generated text.

Gabriel Levine Brislin: When I started writing poetry in earnest, I was less driven by experimentation than I was by fundamental misunderstandings concerning traditional techniques . . . I wrote long dramatic monologues in what I thought was iambic tetrameter, only to learn years later that I had no idea what that meant.

These failures, far from being discouraging, taught me the value of setting your own limitations, your own structures, and letting that guide the poem instead of the mangled and misinterpreted rulebook that English inherits as authoritative ‘technique’. More recently, I have actively tried to destabilise my practice through the use of prose poetry, found text, performance and Oulipian restrictions in an attempt to shake off some of the lingering misapprehensions of my ill-informed ‘apprenticeship’.

Harriet French: I have never thought of myself as a particularly experimental poet. That being said, I feel like I am experimenting all the time by ‘trying out’ the styles of a variety of different poets as I endeavor to develop my own . . . To me, ‘imitating’ feels like experimentation in order that I can develop my practice and find my own way of doing things . . . One of our tutors on the MFA at St Andrews, Anne Boyer, recommended that we read Wong May’s recent translation of Tang Dynasty poetry. Reading the collection makes you realize the great vastness that is poetry. But it also connects you to striking similarities across time and space. I suppose I am trying to say that, more than finding the ‘poetic new’, I am interested in learning to write in the company of anyone who ever sat down to try.

How much of the energy, that you put into your work and writing poetry do you focus inward and how much is focused outward? How important is it for you, as a poet, to build relationships with ‘the world outside the window’?

Harriet French: I began writing poetry during lockdown, a time when (like most people) I felt isolated from other people and the outside world but also, somewhat paradoxically, inundated by media content. In poetry [I found] a way to shine a spotlight on and acknowledge my own lived experience, not a curated virtual reality, as well as to produce something and put it out into the world. In that sense, like meditation, it felt like going inward, but in order that I can be in the world and act, rather than passively consume.

So really, it’s hard to make the inward/outward distinction. In another sense, I often write poems about historical objects and sites. When I happen across something of historical interest, it is typically a word, fact, or unusual feature that captures my attention, which I then use as the heart of a new poem.

Gabriel Levine Brislin: I’m always wary of any ideas about poetry that rely too much on ‘expression’, in which feelings originating inside of the poet are propelled outwards via their mastery over language. I know this is a simplistic view of things, but it helps me to question how my language is influenced and inflected by sources coming from all directions, and how themes, phrases, rhythms and ideas from outside the realm of ‘poetry’ make their way into my work and the work of others.

Wendelin Law: The barrier built by the window might sometimes make us forget that what’s ‘inside’ the window is inherently a part of the ‘outside’ world. Communities are what make poetry flourish. As mentioned earlier, poems are beasts full of life – once published, they gain as many interpretations as there are readers.

That being said, the ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ focuses are equally important. I believe that great poetry is not restricted to my interiority, but is also the liberating imaginations extrapolated from my perspective – the propagation of subversive ideas that expand and link with other minds to form a wider web of societal change.

Dan Power: The majority of my energy is directed inwards, into the writing rather than the sharing, because that’s the part I enjoy the most. Likewise, I think if you’re focussing inwards, focussing on making your work good, then the computer will make sure it gets to the people who want to read it.

We’ve streamlined social interaction to a point where in-person communication isn’t essential for so many types of business – which means these days, when we’re talking to people face-to-face, we’re usually doing it for fun. Maybe that’s why I don’t tend to think of outward-facing things as work. I like meeting people and talking, especially when it’s about a shared interest.

Charles Lang: Almost all of my writing practice takes place on my own. Sometimes this can happen around other people, in a library or coffee shop for example, but it is definitely an introspective activity. However, poetry is much more than the act of writing, it is about community – created through reading, sharing and talking about work. In this way building relationships is essential for the writing to continue. 

Given the trend in today’s ‘post-truth’ media spaces, for things to be only either ‘real’ or ‘fake’, how does your work engage with poetry’s necessarily shifting perspectives on ‘truthfulness’?

Charles Lang: Poetry seems to be an antidote to the heedlessness of social media. Quiet contemplation has almost become radical in a world where everybody seems to be shouting. Whilst I don’t think it can ever be representative of truth, nor do I want it to be, I think reading and writing poetry can help us get there, by encouraging us to make the world a better place.

Dan Power: I think a poem can only be true? I just can’t imagine a poem being false. Even if it contained statistics that were obviously wrong, or said something like “the moon does not exist” that wouldn’t make it untrue – it would just be a poetic choice. There’s truths you can’t access through language – I can’t name them of course – but you can trace their edges when you bend the truth in a poem.

Sometimes you have to be wrong to know what’s right. If I tell you the moon doesn’t exist you’ll be certain that it actually does, and you’ll feel the moon’s existence more acutely than you would have done otherwise. So the lie reveals a truth, which makes it not a lie, but more like a pre-cursor to understanding?

Wendelin Law: No matter how the perspectives on ‘truthfulness’ shift, it is important to always uphold fundamental values. Principles like freedom of speech and the right to protest should never be infringed, and poetry itself should be a manifestation of both free speech and protest.

Gabriel Levine Brislin: Poetry’s relationship to truth has always been of the upmost importance to me, and is one of the reasons I gravitated towards the medium in the first place. For me, poetry exists in the space between fiction and fact, containing elements of both but never quite falling into either camp. This is why the mid-century ‘life-writing’ poets like Lowell are so important to me.

These attempts at translating experience into art (bloated, morally questionable attempts that they are) seem to provide valuable lessons in both poetry’s incompatibility with truth and the ways in which it might (?) transcend it. Rhetoric and poetic technique will always distort the experience at hand, but this very fact opens up a space outside of fiction or autobiography which has an entirely different relationship to truthfulness. As Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Lowell (and Lowell later wrote/stole in his poem ‘Epilogue’): “Why not say what happened?”

Harriet French: Not everything I write in a poem is literally true. I write a lot about family and family, stories that have been passed down to me. Often, I’ve known these stories since I was young, so I’m not sure if they’re entirely true, or if my child-mind might have misunderstood something.

In one of my poems, I wrote about a dream my grandfather had when he was a child that, shortly after, came to pass in his real life. No one else in my family remembers him talking about this, so I have no idea if I made it up or not. But nonetheless, there’s something truthy about the anecdote. I think of poems not as
relaying facts but as more of an engagement with experience. They feel true even though I cannot always verify them factually.

Perhaps poetry is true in the same way that dreams can be true. Truth but of a different kind. Truth is a difficult topic. I attended a
lecture once delivered by the philosopher Crispin Wright on the post-truth era. He argued for a kind of truth pluralism that needn’t fall into relativity; rather, there’s just more than one way for something to be true. That seems like a persuasive idea to me.

Finally, what writing or other projects are you working on just now?

Harriet French: I am entering my second year of the MFA in Creative Writing at St Andrews, which means I am working on a collection’s length body of poetry . . . it’s a gift to be given the time to focus towards such an end. I also hope to apply for PhDs this winter to start the following year, so I’ll be working on an academic piece centered on prosody and the functions sound patterns play in poetry, apart from merely mimicking or illustrating what is being said semantically in the poem.

Gabriel Levine Brislin: I’m still working on the manuscript I submitted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, as I feel there is a lot more I could still draw out of that project . . . The project I am most excited about, however, is Votive, an itinerant gallery and curatorial project I set up with my partner and two of our friends. We opened our first show, ‘Thrills’, with Edinburgh’s Embassy Gallery at the end of July, and we are working on many more exhibitions, publications and events for the not too distant future. Keep an eye out!

Wendelin Law: I’m expanding ‘Whaling’ into a full-length collection, there are still so many related topics I can explore and play with, still many wailing voices that need to be heard – so hopefully you’ll meet the collection in a bookstore someday soon!

Dan Power: As part of my PhD studies I’m exploring the idea of ChatGPT as a ‘muse’, what it means to be ‘inspired’, and the blurry distinction between adapting ideas and plagiarising them. I’ve also recently started a journal – the AI Literary Review – to see what other poets are doing with AI tools . . . Issue one went online in July, and submissions for issue two will be opening very soon!

Charles Lang: I am working on a collection of poems which is to be published by Skein Press next year.

With thanks to all five shortlisted poets, for taking the time to answer our questions.

---