Thursday, February 28, 2008

Whaur Extremes Meet?

I know this is a bit behind the times, but there's an interesting post on "official verse culture" over at Eyewear, on the back of the result of the TS Eliot Prize. One wonders whether Edwin Morgan--one of those whom Todd Swift and other bloggers (well, Rob Mackenzie at least) hoped would win those laurels--didn't get the prize partly because he's always sat slightly athwart that culture. I've said this kind of thing before, but it seems to me that ability to straddle the mainstream and experimental is something that Scottish poets are particularly good at. I have no idea whether the proportion of poets from Scotland to whom that applies is any greater than that among the ranks of our English and other Anglophone brother and sister poets but, if it isn't, we certainly seem more readily able to recognise and celebrate them. Perhaps it's a function of size: oh, we can be a gey carnaptious lot, but sometimes we just stick together.

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