Abstract
Asked about his international reception, Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard said: “The same linguistic politics of colonisation and countercolonisation occurs in different and many parts of the world, throwing up the same stratagems that the locally mainstream will put into some little locally marginalised classification-box. My phonetic dialect work nowadays is sometimes bracketed—outside Scotland that is—with counter-colonial Black writers like John Agard, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m happy enough with that.”1 His qualification—”outside Scotland that is”—is crucial: at once the poetry responds to the intricate particularities of local context, and reaches beyond that context to attain solidarity with other poetries embedded in and shaped by different histories of colonization, but whose “linguistic politics” offers up the same truths. An oppositional politics against a colonizing “locally mainstream” becomes a poetic praxis, a series of stratagems whose politics lies in its continual probing of the possibilities of poetic form.
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Notes
Tom Leonard Intimate Voices: 1965–1983 (Newcastle: Galloping Dog Press, 1994), 86.
EA Markham “Random Thoughts” in Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies & Britain (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 1989), 13–42, 15.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (London: New Beacon, 1984), 30.
Charles Olson, Call me Ishmael (New York: Grove Press, 1947), 11.
Oku Onuora cited in Mervyn Morris, Is English We Speaking (Kingston: I Randle, 1999), 37–38.
Anthony Joseph, Teragaton (London: poisonenginepress, 1997), 18.
Linton Kwesi Johnson Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2002), 29.
Kwame Dawes, “Black British Poetry, Some Considerations,” Wasafiri 18.38 (2003): 44–48, 44.
The original is in Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay, eds., Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: Norton, 1997), 1267.
Tom Leonard Reports from the Present: 1982–1994 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 193.
David and Christine Kennedy, “Poetry, Difficulty, and Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum,” in The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk, ed., Scott Thurston (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), 11–27 (16).
Chris Goode, “Speak and Spell: Geraldine Monk’s Voiceprint,” in The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk, ed. Scott Thurston (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), 150–175, 172–173.
Geraldine Monk, Interregnum (London: Creation Books, 1994), unpaginated.
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© 2015 Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith
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Smith, D.N. (2015). Langwij a thi guhtr. In: Lang, A., Smith, D.N. (eds) Modernist Legacies. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488756_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488756_11
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