My twelfth poetry collection, Rag Argonauts, has its fair share of long poems, including two rangy narrative sequences towards its end. One is a 19 page semi-confessional ‘Prufrockian’ outpouring drafted extensively over several years, ‘The Tempting of Parry Amphlett’. The other, which closes the volume as an experimental supplemental poem, ‘Margate Fragments’, is a 30 page numbered sequence of inter-textual response to Matthew Hollis’s exceptionally detailed The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber, 2022). I quote directly from Hollis’s compendious book throughout the poem (for which I had to seek official permission from the publisher), visually differentiating these excerpts by using two different fonts: the book’s standard Adobe Caslon Pro for my text (which includes much rephrasing of information from Hollis’s tome), and Schoolbook, which resembles old typewriter script, for the direct Hollis quotes and quotes from other sources within Hollis’s book. This is the first time I have used such a typographical technique to demarcate my lines from those quoted by another source—normally I just use single or double speech marks and italics.
In terms of its deep engagement with another text, ‘Margate Fragments’ continues in the vein of other scholastic longer works I’ve written in recent years, the most epic of which was my book-length poem Anxious Corporals (Smokestack Books, 2021), though that engaged with multiple bibliographical sources. There is a definite autodidactic aspect to these poetic works I produce through deep reading—and quoting—of other sources; there is an obsessive element, not only regarding in-depth information but also equally with regards to other authors’ styles and choice of language, it’s almost like intellectually swimming out into Koestler’s concept of oceanic consciousness, a communion with a universal mind. There is also no doubt much at play here in the realm of autism: I received a late diagnosis as being on the spectrum in 2022 aged 48.
And Rag Argonauts includes a number of long poems attempting to re-evaluate my upbringing, particularly in psychological terms, from the new vantage of this late diagnosis: ‘Liskeard Eighty-Six’, ‘Bruised Fruit’ (each 4 pages), and the 3 page ‘Desolate in Douai’ all explore different aspects of my coming of age under the clouds of poverty, psychological struggles, and, most relevantly, my then-undiagnosed autism. ‘Berkshire Leaves’ (7 pages) was actually written some years before publication and is primarily about my rather anomic time at university in my early twenties, but yet details many aspects of my personality and psychology that I have now come to understand as autistic—it’s a kind of poem-bildungsroman. The 11 page sequence ‘The Four Spoons of Phineus’ recounts the ordeal of a personal independence payment tribunal, using the Harpies-persecuted character from Greek mythology as an alter ego preyed upon by the Department for Work and Pensions. Mythology as a psychological metaphor crops up throughout Rag Argonauts (not least in its title)—in ‘Liskeard Eighty-Six’ I refer to my mind’s ‘mythology of worried gods’ which
Would go on growing outwards in morbid
Bloom of mouldy Gorgonic carageen
All along the walls of a Byzantine-
Patterned Carrara marble labyrinth
Of deepening imponderables
Moving away from the autobiographical, Rag Argonauts also contains several long or longish biographical poems of various artistic and literary figures that have fascinated me, mystics Hilma af Klint (‘Swedish Match’) and Helena Blavatsky (‘Blavatsky in Violet’), and Slovakian-born psychiatrist-cum-tormented protégé of Freud, Viktor Tausk (‘O Viktor’), among them—from ‘O Viktor’:
O Viktor had you lived you would have witnessed
An invention resulting from experiments by Boris
Rosing, Braun of the cathode-ray tube, Logie Baird
& “Stooky Bill”, an Influencing Machine manifest
As a filtering, infiltrating item of furniture
To alter all our realities from the vantage of our
Static-saturated settees: telephote, televista,
Finally settled as television—Jerry Irwin Mander
Would make the link more explicitly in his 1978
Jeremiad petitioning for its elimination…
Tausk is also the subject of a much longer poem I’ve drafted in recent times which hopefully will eventually find publication—once again, this work comes through a deep reading of a particular source, namely Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk by Paul Roazen. ‘O Viktor’, a complex 3 page poem made up of 3 line enjambed stanzas, details Tausk’s pioneering paper on schizophrenia which used as its case study the disturbed Welsh tea-broker James Tilley Matthews who believed a strange contraption he termed the ‘Influencing Machine’ was manipulating his mind. In my poem, this phantom machine is then juxtaposed with the later invention of television, itself a kind of influencing machine; and in turn, television is a leitmotif connecting with other poems in Rag Argonauts, particularly ‘The Fasters’ in which it is characterised as a portable two-way mirror, and projector of intrusive images.
The 8 page ‘Brilliant Blaze’ is a compendious poem on the literary career of American social novelist Jack London, and draws on a number of biographical sources excerpted throughout, as well as with his unjustly neglected social novel Martin Eden, the eponymous protagonist of which, a struggling working-class autodidact writer, is an alter ego of London’s. It previously appeared in LPM 27 (Spring 2022), my first of three appearances to date in the journal. But it is W.H. Auden who gets the lion’s share of my portraiture in two long poems, the 3 page ‘Young Wystan’, previously published in The Fortnightly Review, and its follow up poem, the 4 ½ page ‘Walnut Manhattan’, which appeared—along with an account of its compositional process—in LPM 31 (Spring 2024).
Both Auden poems engage to an extent with John Fuller’s A Reader’s Guide to W.H. Auden (1970). They were verse-vignettes harvested from an epic work-in-progress juxtaposing 21st century austerity with that of the Thirties and Forties (just as Rag Argonauts juxtaposes 21st century austerity culture with 1900s ‘ragtime’ into the 1920s), Odour of Devon Violet, started in 2014 and as yet unfinished—it is my most epic sprawling work to date and is quite possibly unpublishable (though it was awarded an ACE grant to develop it as a web-based work: www.odourofdevonviolet.com). Sometimes, in my processes, I plunder obscurer sources of my own unpublished material.
Rag Argonauts, Caparison, 2024/5, hardback, 148pp, can be ordered here: www.alanmorrison.co.uk/rag-argonauts or on the Caparison home page:
www.therecusant.org.uk/caparison-books
Special recordings made by Alan Morrison reading several of the poems from Rag Argonauts, including ‘Blavatsky in Violet’, ‘Young Wystan’ and ‘Walnut Manhattan’, can be listened to at: https://www.youtube.com/@ragargonauts