Abstract
Ideas of public space, adapted from the work of social geographers including David Harvey, frame a discussion of how public space is represented in Ernst Jandl’s poem ‘wien: heldenplatz’ [‘vienna: heldenplatz’] and Morgan’s ‘The Starlings in George Square’. Both poems model, through their experimental use of language, the polyvocality and polysemy which is a crucial feature of democratic public space, and represent the power struggles which take place there against the background of discourses of nation and national identity. In Morgan’s case, this includes gestures towards a queer remapping of urban public space.
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Notes
- 1.
For a fuller discussions of public space, see for example ‘Section 6: “Public” and “Private” Space’ in Gieseking and Mangold (2014). Note that discussion here focuses on public space, which is not necessarily cognate with the public sphere as defined and debated by Habermas, Arendt and others (Arendt 2013; Habermas 1991).
- 2.
The long battle to eradicate starlings from Glasgow’s public spaces can be traced in various articles in the Glasgow Herald (e.g. The Glasgow Herald 1955, 1965, 1970). The phrase ‘Cameron’s Repellent’ refers to the colourful figure of John Cameron, who proposed various methods for eliminating the birds (The Glasgow Herald 1971). The ‘Lord Provost’ in question is Dame Jean Roberts, the first female Lord Provost of Glasgow.
- 3.
Although MacCaig and Scott take great care to map variants of these three traditions across the space of the nation, from Edinburgh and Glasgow to the Highlands, Islands and Scottish writers in ‘exile’ in England, the notion remains unchallenged that it is primarily, or indeed only, through the choice of national language or dialect in which a poem is written that it is able to make a political statement. The inclusion of Morgan’s concrete poetry is explicitly described as ‘token’, as discussed in Chap. 6 (MacCaig and Scott 1970, 22).
- 4.
In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, for example, Hotspur threatens to torment his enemy by teaching a starling to say his name: ‘Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak | Nothing but “Mortimer”, and give it him | To keep his anger still in motion.’ (1 Henry IV, I.iii 559–61). Starlings also serve as a persistent image for poetry in Dante, Coleridge and Auden (Peter Anderson 2008).
- 5.
For the history of George Square as a space of civic power and popular protest, see Crawford (2013, 101–86). The twelve statues in George Square depict Thomas Graham, James Oswald, Thomas Campbell, Field Marshall Lord Clyde, Sir John Moore, William Gladstone, Robert Burns, James Watt, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Sir Robert Peel and Sir Walter Scott.
- 6.
This, and subsequent translations from ‘vienna: heldenplatz’ [wien: heldenplatz] are all by Michael Hamburger (Jandl 1997, 8).
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Thomas, N. (2018). Public Space and Power: Edwin Morgan’s ‘The Starlings in George Square’ (1968) and Ernst Jandl’s ‘wien: heldenplatz’ (1966). In: Space, Place and Poetry in English and German, 1960–1975. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90212-8_7
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