(no subject)
National Poetry Month #7
Today's is by Tom Leonard. He's mostly familiar to anyone who sat an English Lit GCSE in the early '00s and had one of those grim AQA anthologies. I read one of his poems there age approx. 15 and promptly forgot all about him, and only remembered his name when getting quite into James Kelman recently-- they're part of the same Glasgow circle of writers deeply concerned with the connection between language, class and power. On which I could speak for days, but won't.
The Elect
Tom Leonard
one of those with quiet, naturally restrained, insistently monotoned voices
with that little selfcontained smile, always going on about Respect for History and the
Abiding Sense of the Traditional
who want all poets to have a sense of “basic form” and who are always quoting Yeats’s
“Under Ben Bulben” about poets having to Learn Their Trade and not be All Out of
Shape from Toe to Top
who think this has nothing to do with Yeats’s views on eugenics-"the better stocks have
not been replacing their numbers”-“The results are already visible in the degeneration
of literature”-
who complain of people with voices yclept loud, varied, opinionated, up and down,
showy, the insufferably “engaged”, the political johnnies, the performance crowd, the
“disastrous influence of the sixties”
who hate poets who carry electrical appliances and who cling fast to Aristotle’s dictum
that a poet is a poet insofar as they have a command of metaphor
who do not want to know all this stuff about “the page as a field of semantic tension” or
blethers about “the connection between lower case and democracy” or pontificatory
nonsense about “the punctuation of spacing” and “the reader being present at the shared
point of articulation”
one of them leant over and said to me quietly
do you know if the 44 bus still goes to Knightswood
Today's is by Tom Leonard. He's mostly familiar to anyone who sat an English Lit GCSE in the early '00s and had one of those grim AQA anthologies. I read one of his poems there age approx. 15 and promptly forgot all about him, and only remembered his name when getting quite into James Kelman recently-- they're part of the same Glasgow circle of writers deeply concerned with the connection between language, class and power. On which I could speak for days, but won't.
The Elect
Tom Leonard
one of those with quiet, naturally restrained, insistently monotoned voices
with that little selfcontained smile, always going on about Respect for History and the
Abiding Sense of the Traditional
who want all poets to have a sense of “basic form” and who are always quoting Yeats’s
“Under Ben Bulben” about poets having to Learn Their Trade and not be All Out of
Shape from Toe to Top
who think this has nothing to do with Yeats’s views on eugenics-"the better stocks have
not been replacing their numbers”-“The results are already visible in the degeneration
of literature”-
who complain of people with voices yclept loud, varied, opinionated, up and down,
showy, the insufferably “engaged”, the political johnnies, the performance crowd, the
“disastrous influence of the sixties”
who hate poets who carry electrical appliances and who cling fast to Aristotle’s dictum
that a poet is a poet insofar as they have a command of metaphor
who do not want to know all this stuff about “the page as a field of semantic tension” or
blethers about “the connection between lower case and democracy” or pontificatory
nonsense about “the punctuation of spacing” and “the reader being present at the shared
point of articulation”
one of them leant over and said to me quietly
do you know if the 44 bus still goes to Knightswood