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Tom Leonard's poetry has been identified as one that has been nourished by Glasgow working class speech forms but in the present interview he outlines other contexts that have contributed to the creation of his unique urban voice - including a literary version of European avant-garde and American beat poetry. His work has been defined by an active interest in how linguistic markers of social difference break down readerly expectations and part of its significance lies in Leonard's constant search for ways to contribute to the initiation of democratic dialogues with the past.
Keywords: Avant-garde; Glasgow; dialect poetry; sound poetry; James "B.V." Thomson; Paisley
Tom Leonard was born in 1944 in Glasgow. Although he denies any special affinity with the place, it is a fact that he has never left the west-coast capital of Scotland, and indeed he has dedicated the greater part of his work to the representation of Glasgow working-class life. He was a dropout from the university but finally graduated there, after re-entering in 1971. He keeps fond memories of Edwin Morgan, his then tutor at the English Department. During the university years he became a member of Philip Hobsbaum's Glasgow Group, whose other members at that time included Alasdair Gray, Tom McGrath, James Kelman and Aonghas Macneacail. Leonard started as a sound poet in the Avant-garde movement of the 1960s Glasgow Renaissance but in the following interview he lays down a wider European framework for this aspect of his poetry.
Influences on his work are principally from America: the speech rhythm of William Carlos Williams was a formative stimulus, but perhaps equally important is the radical, Whitmanesque energy of the Beat Poets, most notably of Allan Ginsberg. However, his more wellknown works are the poems he composed in the Glasgow dialect. Leonard is not only proud of his working-class origin, but makes use of class antagonism as a constant source of emotional impetus. The phonetic transcription of Glasgow pronunciation looks strange in print not only for foreign readers but also for native speakers of English. One strategy to gain a better access to what, essentially, seems an alien language on the page, is reading the lines out loud. Leonard's much-discussed translocation of Glasgow idioms and urban speech into dramatic monologues...