Contemporary Poetry

dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 175

dialogic site with a diversity of social speech types, and allows for
interaction between the multiple voices within the work. Bakhtin
frequently describes the novel as ‘saturated’, ‘impregnated’ and
‘contaminated’.
Bakhtin’s implication of a ‘contaminated’ language is evident in
the use of expletives which litter the text. The poem’s construc-
tion in iambic pentameter creates a space for the voice of a young
skinhead. As the epithet at the beginning of v. by Arthur Scargill
emphasises, an ideal of mastery of language dominates the opening
section: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says
your life depends on your power to master words’.^14 Harrison
admits that his linguistic knowledge has made him more aware of
his working-class background: ‘I thought that somehow language
would take me away, but – on the contrary – the more I became
articulate, the more I was conscious of what I owed to the goad of
the inarticulate’.^15 The footballing failures of Leeds United make
the vandals ‘lose their sense of self-esteem’ (p. 236 ):

and taking a short cut home through these graves here

they reassert the glory of their team

by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer (p. 236 )

Importantly, the remnant of heavy industry casts a shadow over the
burial ground since the graveyard ‘stands above a worked-out pit
/ Subsidence makes the obelisks all list’. The rhymes that are now
found are ‘CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!’ (p. 236 ).
The versus or v. of the poem’s title informs the divisions orches-
trated in the poem, the confl icts between football clubs, educated
and uneducated, workers and jobless, racist and ethnic groups,
British working-class ambition and post-industrial unemploy-
ment, poet and graffi tist. As Harrison puts it: ‘These Vs are all the
versus of life’ which also include ‘man and wife’, ‘US and THEM
/ personifi ed in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM’
(p. 238 ).
When the poet questions whether the graffi ti is ‘just a cri-de-
coeur because man dies’, another voice intrudes in the poem with a
vehement riposte: