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The title page reads "NEWSPOEMS by Edwin Morgan/Published on her Majesties Secret Service/WACY! 007" – it was the seventh book published by WACY!, in an edition of 58. As Morgan notes in a postcard to Hamish Whyte, the pages are in a different order for each copy.

"The Newspoems, which are cut from newspapers and other ephemeral material, arose out of noting an experience which most people have probably had – of scanning a newspaper page quickly and taking a message from it quite different from the intended one. I began looking deliberately for such hidden messages and picking out those that had some arresting quality, preferably with the visual or typographical element itself a part of the 'point', though this was not always possible. What results is a series of 'inventions' both in the old sense of 'things found' and in the more usual sense of 'things devised'."

Edwin Morgan, in Newspoems

"I 'wrote'/created these poems in the late 60s and early 70s and a fair number have been published in magazines during the 70s and early 80s, but they've never been collected or put into book form. I have lots more but have picked out the best 50, to give you an idea. (…) I think they do have a certain quality which emerges when they are seen en masse rather than in ones and twos in journals."

from a letter by Edwin Morgan to "Steve", 5 January 1987, included Newspoems.

Related resources

• Newspoems - Postcard

Newspoems

1980s

The title page reads "NEWSPOEMS by Edwin Morgan/Published on her Majesties Secret Service/WACY! 007" – it was the seventh book published by WACY!, in an edition of 58.

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