Poem Of The Week: Chicago May 1971 By Edwin Morgan (1920-2010)

Chicago May 1971

The elegant vice-presidential office of US Steel
is the scene of a small ceremony.
A man has placed a miniature coffin
on the vice-president’s couch, and in the coffin
you can see frog, perch, crawfish, dead.
They have swallowed the laborious effluent
of US Steel in Lake Michigan.
The man is poised ready to run,
wrinkling his nose as he pours from a held-out bottle
a dark brown viscous Michigan sludge
over the vice-president’s white rug. This is
the eco-man. On the table his card.
The Fox.

Image by Yogendra Singh from Pixabay

Scots poet Edwin Morgan’s series of ‘Instamatic’ snapshots of moments in time might seem anachronistic over half a century of time-lapse. Shining a penetrating light on odd backwaters where drama unfolds in the quotidian, and rendered in direct observational lines whose tone is detached, deadpan, deliberately sardonic, the reader is encouraged to make inferences from the simple actions of the protagonist(s).

‘Chicago May 1971’ could be a satire in a different temporal setting. The ‘eco-man’ whose actions are as direct as the narrator’s words, is making meaning through symbolic gesture: the ‘coffin’ containing poisoned lake wildlife, the ‘viscous’ and toxic ‘sludge’ chucked over the pristine rug, itself a metaphor for heavy industrial ‘probity’.

But to decontextualise the poem is to invite opprobrium in a world weary of the inconvenience occasioned by ‘corpsing’ on the M25, or the daubing of public property in the colours of protest. What sets ‘Chicago May 1971’ apart from the contemporaneous ‘protest’ poetry of, for example, Adrian Mitchell, is the subtly deflected exposition, the raising of awareness in signifiers whose markers do not allow anger to break the surface. And what remains is the voice in the wilderness.

‘Chicago May 1971’ is taken from Instamatic Poems, published by Ian McKelvie (1972).