1 EDWIN MORGAN’S SF POETRY Brian J. McAllister “You’ll remember Mercury”: The Avant-Garde Worlds of Edwin Morgan’s SF Poetry All poetry is a journey into the unknown. —Vladimir Mayakovsky (353) In Edwin Morgan’s “In Sobieski’s Shield” (1968), a family escapes Earth and its dying sun, rematerializing on a distant planet. Having been reconstituted and reawakened, the father/narrator describes their new home: though we are huddled now in our protective dome on this harsh metallic plain that belches cobalt from its craters under a white-bronze pulsing gong of a sun it was all they could do for us light-years away. (Collected 196) The passage relocates readers from their current ontological positions to a new, textually constructed locale that requires interpretation of the work’s formal particularities. Enjambment (the poetic technique in which meaning runs on into the following line, with no syntactic break at the line’s end) combines with the absence of punctuation to disrupt and disorient a reader’s construction of this new world. While negotiating these characteristically poetic obstacles, they must also orient themselves to the text’s strange, science-fictional world, with cobalt-belching craters, a gigantic sun, and protective domes. Two factors complicate access to this world: the difficulties of the text’s discursive form and the strangeness of the new ontology. In other words, the passage contains both poetic and science-fictional techniques for constructing and disrupting access to the poem’s narrative world. This essay investigates interactions between these formal and generic techniques in several of Morgan’s poems, linking those techniques to early- twentieth-century avant-garde writing. Though I focus on his sf poetry here, Morgan is not an exclusively science-fictional poet. His work ranges from concrete poetry to found texts to computer-code poems to love poems. In 2004, he was named the first contemporary Scots Makar, or national poet of Scotland, and served in that position until his death in 2010. While most histories of sf recognize the genre’s conceptual innovations while slighting its “artistic” or “literary” technique, Morgan’s poetry, translations, and critical writings contradict this narrative, connecting science fiction’s ontological concerns with the aesthetic and political concerns of the avant garde, particularly the linguistic experiments of Russian Futurism. Building on Peter Hühn’s observation that “there are central dimensions in which poetry and narrative fiction are structured analogously” (“Reading”