Contemporary Poetry

dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 197

communication. For poets wishing to obliterate or overcome

such marks of difference, the choice of the conven tional liter-

ary language whether understood as mask or not, refl ects a

willingness to abide by the linguistic norms of a culture and to

negotiate within these norms. Nonstandard language practice

suggests an element of cultural resistance that has as its lower

limit dialogic self-questioning and as its upper limit secession

and autonomy.^71

It could be argued that Bernstein’s reliance upon multiplicity
may only promote an increasingly atomised resistance to the con-
ventions he wants to challenge. Paradoxically, Bernstein also argues
that the problematising of identity that an ‘ideolectical’ approach
provides may, in effect, ‘forge new collective identities’.^72 Already
we can see how a poet such as Tom Leonard challenges the central-
ising role of standard English in his language. Bernstein’s harness-
ing of an ‘ideolectical’ approach to an experimental poetics can be
seen as overtly idealistic. It perhaps acknowledges the development
of multiple Englishes, a process of devolution which the perform-
ance poet cris cheek acknowledges as a dispersal of ‘the sounds
of Englishes’ and the loss of a centralising authority: ‘I celebrate
that loss, as a positive sign that is a language in a turmoil of great
promise, opening rather than resistant to, that vibrant plethora of
infl uences and change which has enabled it to become so translo-
cal’.^73 Bernstein’s appeal to an ‘ideolectical’ poetics can also be read
in recent criticism’s fascination with establishing an aesthetic for
a post-national literature, or what Ramazani terms a transnational
literature: ‘a nation-crossing force that exceeds the limits of the ter-
ritorial and judicial norm’.^74 Key to Ramazani’s identifi cations are
the practices of creolisation and hybridisation which he reads not
only as essential to the ‘formal advancement or the growth of dis-
crete national poetries’, but as ‘cross-cultural dynamics... among
the engines of modern and contemporary poetic development and
innovation’.^75 However, Ramazani’s transnational poetics does not
advocate a vapid idea of a global aesthetic, as we are reminded that
given the complex nature of current poetic practice ‘the homog-
enizing model of globalization is inadequate for the analysis of
specifi cally poetic transnationalism’.^76