174 contemporary poetry
between classes, ‘our’ as opposed to ‘your’, mirrors the title ‘Them
and [uz]’. Roberts comments on how the title underlines phonically
working-class speech patterns, since ‘[uz]’ ‘represents the word
“us” as spoken with a working-class Leeds accent (long vowel,
voiced consonant) as opposed to the short vowel, unvoiced con-
sonant of Received Pronunciation’ (p. 157 ). The speaker queries
the proposition of uniformed pronunciation, allying his enun-
ciation ‘Littererchewer’ to John Keats and Wordsworth’s accented
rhyming of ‘matter / water’ as ‘full rhymes’.^9 The poet wages war
on all those who seek to limit English literature to the confi nes of a
perceived ‘properly’ enunciated speech, and promises to ‘occupy /
your lousy leasehold poetry’.^10
Harrison’s desire to inhabit the metrical structures of English
verse evokes a desire to affi rm regional identifi cations and negotia-
tions against a monolothic positioning of English language. Terry
Eagleton proposes that ‘No modern English poet has shown more
fi nely how the sign is a terrain of struggle where opposing accents
intersect, how in a class divided society language is cultural warfare
and every nuance a political validation.’^11 As a working-class
‘scholar’ trained as a classicist, Harrison’s work creates a space for
a variation of Englishes. This advancement of a poetic vernacular
as a democratising art is evident in Harrison’s attempt to promote
poetry to a more general audience. The poem ‘Book Ends’ portrays
an inchoate inability to express grief between son and father, since
education separates the ‘scholar me, you worn out on poor pay’.^12
His celebrated long poem v. ( 1985 ) caused controversy for a broader
audience when it was broadcast as a poem-fi lm in 1987 on Channel
4. Written by Harrison during the miners’ strike ( 1984 – 5 ) – which
arguably was one the most traumatic events visited upon post-war
British working-class communities – v. documents the poet’s visit
to a Leeds graveyard to pay his respects to his parents. The grave-
yard is vandalised: graffi ti on the gravestones proclaim tribal affi ni-
ties to football through expletives. This long poem attempts to open
a dialogue between the poet and the disenfranchised voices of the
unemployed. Harrison’s poem performs as a site of verbal interac-
tion which theorist Mikhail Bakhtin associated categorically with
the novel as heteroglossia, in comparison with the largely mono-
logic or singular language of poetry.^13 The novel he suggests is a