178 contemporary poetry
‘full’ range of reference; whether agreed value has been, or
can be, placed on works of literary art that use it as a medium;
above all, whether ways have yet been found of agreeing a
form of the language in serious dictionary, thus – more even
than fi xing meanings to words – fi xing pronunciations to fi xed
spellings.^21Both Harrison and Leonard recognise that class is displayed in
linguistic hierarchies.
Helen Kidd refl ects upon the relationship of dialect to the works
of women poets. Responding specifi cally to the work of Scottish
women poets, Kidd suggests that ‘Scots dialect is recognisable
by certain tropes whereas women do not have a language that is
specifi cally female, nor a specifi c set of dialects which are identifi -
able to women from other cultural contexts’.^22 In place of such an
emphatic dialect, she suggests that the subversive linguistic experi-
mentation is offered in the work of female poets: ‘ironies, digres-
sions, musicalities as well as a sense of the dangers of certain male
discourses which lace the female subject in a subordinate posi-
tion’.^23 In Liz Lochhead’s poem ‘Lady Writer Talkin’ Blues’, the
fi gure of the female poet asserts her voice through an intonation of
blues rhythm, but this appropriation of the blues is rendered more
complex by the intrusion of syntax and grammar which inscribe
a Scots infl ection.^24 Lochhead plays with the melodies of both
clashing intonations and the phonetic texture of colloquial speech.
The speaker is told by her partner that ‘Mah Work was a load a’
drivel / I called it detail, he called it trivial’ (p. 38 ). Substitution,
or the rewriting of the speaker’s voice, enacts hierarchies of power
and an enforced editing. The male voice intrudes upon the blues
rhythm to damn the speaker: ‘I was woolly in my politics / And
personal poetry gave him the icks’ (p. 39 ). Finally, we are told that
‘He couldn’t do His brainwork in the same house as me / Because
I screwed up his objectivity’ (p. 39 ). Lochhead’s redeployment of
the blues enables her work not only to present the intonation of a
Scots idiom, but to place the woman poet’s voice on a vast stage of
call and response, as well as humorously jostling with the ego of the
male artist.