Unrelated Incidents by Tom Leonard - review

My focus on “The voice: in my work Leonard has written, two buy products over the years. An involvement in performance “Sound poetry” and an increasingly explicit awareness of the political nature of voice in British culture.

“Unrelated Incidents” is a set of six poems each of which looks at some aspect of the way we use language it was written in 1976.

Vocabulary

Widney wahnt                  - Wouldn’t want

Wanna you scruff            - One of your scruffs

Widny thingk                   - Wouldn’t think

Tokn                                 - Talking

Yooz doant no                  - You don’t know

Yirsellz                             - Yourself

Canny                               - Can’t

What Is The Poem About

1. The poem seems to be spoken by BBC news reader
2. He/she explains why the BBC thinks it is important to read the BBC news in a BBC accent. No one will take the news seriously if its read with voice like/wanna u/scruff. It is not that simple though.
3. He/she speaks here in the accent of an ordinary speaker just the kind of voice the newsreader is rejecting.
4. A newsreader would never really reveal his/her prejudices directly to the viewer in this way. So what the newsreader says in this poem perhaps need to be seen, as unspoken message of the way the news is represented.

Structure & Sound

The poem is carefully written in a phonetic version of the Glasgow accent. If you pronounce it exactly as it’s written, it should sound more or less like a Glaswegian voice. Try to listen to Tom Leonard’s own reading of this poem, which is on the BBC TV programme Roots & Water: Poems form Other Cultures & Traditions. The lines of the poem are very short. What effect does this have (especially when you read it aloud)? Does it make the poem sound serious or amusing?

Language

The poet has played with language in a number of ways, apart from the phonetic spelling. There is almost no punctuation. There is lots of slang and colloquial words (scruff, belt up). The newsreader talks directly to the reader. Standard English is the language formed most usually used by educated English speakers and writers. Standard English started out as a regional dialect of South East England. Together with the accent in which it was spoken- Received Pronunciation- it spread outwards from the South East into all parts of England. This is now the language of status and authority.