dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 177The six o’clock news is as unlikely to be read by a working-
class Liverpudlian, London, Birmingham, Swansea, Belfast,
Portsmouth, Aberdeen etc etc voice as by a Glaswegian.
This has nothing to do with any diffi culty in understanding,
as audiences have no diffi culty understanding lower class
accents in phone-ins, gameshows, ‘Eastenders’ etc.
Why can’t someone with for example a strong East London
accent read the six o’clock news? The speaker of the poem
suggests the answer lies in an attitude about who and what is
considered to be ‘authoritative’, and this attitude is the hidden
‘news’ inside the six o’clock news itself. ‘Scruff’ means ‘scum’
or the muck gathered at the top of dirty water, and is used as
a term of social disdain. ‘belt up’ means ‘shut up!’^17Usefully, Leonard points out in an interview that he does not
see himself as a nationalist, but instead ‘I suppose I have to use
“-isms” – as a localist and an internationalist’.^18 Leonard’s move-
ment away from standardised dictionary spelling marks an attempt
to politicise his poetry. He requires a different form of literacy
from his reader, which is far more dependent on the simultaneous
translations and modifi cation of sound. As he writes in Six Glasgow
Poems, ‘Good Style’: ‘helluva hard tay read theez init’ while declar-
ing humorously a poetic power: ‘ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz so ah
um’.^19 Within these six poems we read a plurality of voices, from
the grumpy poet to the voice counselling his son in ‘The Miracle
of the Burd and the Fishes’: ‘thirz a loat merr fi sh in thi sea’, to
the raucous voices of women in ‘A Scream’: ‘o yi shooda seeniz
face / hi didny no wherrty look’.^20 Leonard’s poems take play with
audience challenging our expectations by stressing the phonetic
valences of linguistic use. Take for example ‘the burd’, which in
colloquial use points to female or lover, and ‘the scream’, not as
angst or fear, but as having a laugh. Leonard in a review declares
that it is important to acknowledge:
how a language is seen to have status according to whether it is
used by the governing or the governed; whether professional
linguists have published academic works on it; whether it can
be shown to have a grammar, a distinctive sound-pattern, a