Scottish Writers' Centre In Process Masterclass with Tom Leonard

Tom Leonard first became known for his four phonetic poetry sequences published 1969-79, featuring uncompromised and exacting representation of working class speech in Glasgow and the west of Scotland. Following from Hamilton Finlay in Scotland and Carlos Williams in America this was the first time such language and its registers was presented by a poet for whom the spoken language was his own. The speakers were not “other”. He later referred to these sequences as being of “neither tribe nor nation but community and the music of its language pool.”

In the nearly fifty years since their writing he has published much poetry and prose, translated Chekhov and Brecht for the stage, written literary and political criticism, edited a reclaiming anthology of nineteenth century west of Scotland poetry, and published the standard biography of the west of Scotland poet James Thomson, author of “The City of Dreadful Night.” In the seventies he was involved in performative poetry using tape recorders, his own participation in and curating of the then Third Eye Centre’s Sound and Syntax festival of 1978 the subject of an interview recently taken for CCA archives. Performances from that festival can be seen in the CCA collection on Vimeo.

A few years ago Leonard used the occasion of a Scottish Writers Centre reading partly to explore philosophic themes in some of the work from which he read. This time he will again show some of his slide-poems, give a full reading, and explore some other aspects of the position of the language.