But I loved that switching about

But I loved that switching about.”Transcriptions of interesting dreams were placed in surreal and intimate juxtaposition with every kind of picture and newspaper clipping, as he snipped and pasted away from 1932 right through the war until 1966.Despite the tempting proposition of a job at a carpet factory, Morgan plumped for art college, then reconsidered and opted instead for an English Literature degree at Glasgow University. I hope it will get sorted out in the end – I suppose it must do, as it does come from one mind, after all.”Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920. His father was a clerk for a firm of ship-breakers on the Clyde, and Edwin grew up in suburban comfort as a cherished only child. His parents weren’t bookish, but they succumbed to their son’s craving for popular encyclopaedic part-works.”You didn’t get much every week, but in the end you got a good big fat book out of it,” Morgan remembers.

“Each part would have a chapter on a great variety of topics and you could switch from birds to the internal combustion engine to Ancient Egypt. It would be easier for critics to find their way around, certainly,” Morgan admits, “but you don’t write for critics. How else to explain this incredible prolificity and range of styles? He reinvents himself in each poem. Just how many Edwin Morgans are there? Is the much- anthologised sound poet who sang “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song” (“SSSnnnwhuffffll? Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl”) the same as the concrete poet who programmed “The Computer’s First Christmas Card” (“jollymerryhollyberryjollyberry merrychrysanthemum …”)? Quite possibly.But how about the sonneteer? The translator of Racine, Neruda and Mayakovsky? The tender love lyricist (“After you left, / your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray / and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey / I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal of so much love.”) or the Glasgow urban realist (“At Central Station, in the middle of the day, / a woman is pissing on the pavement.”)?Is the twinkly-eyed little chap in the jaunty pink jacket talking to me in London today really the same man who used to loom grimly out from poetry festival programmes in heavy-rimmed glasses like some Stasi arch- interrogator?”There’s a young girl doing a PhD on me in Dortmund and it really looks like she’s the first to pull all the different sides together,” says Morgan with relief.”If I was deliberately to say I’m not going to write any more science fiction poems or poems about Glasgow there would be something wrong. His latest collection, Virtual and Other Realities, shows him as inquisitive and wantonly versatile as ever.
“It’s extraordinary the way different layers of reality are getting mixed up now,” he chatters excitedly, discussing advances in new technology with an enthusiasm shared by few poets a third his age.”It’s got to a stage now where it will be quite possible in future to resurrect a dead actor and put him or her into a new film, and you wouldn’t know it was not the real thing,” he assures me. “It’ll be quite alarming, won’t it, to have a new Marilyn Monroe film to watch.”There has long been a sneaking feeling among poetry critics that Morgan might himself be the product of some weird sci-fi experiment.

“I suppose I always manage to renew myself somehow,” muses Edwin Morgan. “People always say that Glasgow has had umpteen social problems but keeps finding ways of getting over its difficulties and transforming itself. Maybe, belonging to the city I’m able to renew myself too, and keep extending out into some new area.”

Edwin Morgan, now 77, has been one of the most consistently important innovators in British poetry for nearly half a century. Even when Wallace has been nasty to Gromit, we know they’ll always end up having tea and biscuits together around the fire.”Altogether now: aah.`Wallace and Gromit Alive on Stage’, Sadler’s Wells at the Peacock Theatre, Kingsway, London, WC2 (0171 314 8800), until 10 January.. “Take Gromit,” he says, “I didn’t want to put him in a big dog suit, because then he’d just be a caricature He’d be like a big cuddly toy with no character In the films, Gromit is a teenager, a person.