Tom Leonard

Glasgow, Scotland

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Selected Work

 

POEMS

 

  the case for lower case   

Being a Human Being   a kind of credo, ideally

Epithalamium  written when asked by one of my sons to write a poem for his wedding 

Litany: Blair's Britain    - and Brown's too

The Fair Cop   the "War on Terror" comes home

 

Six o'Clock News Poem  - 1976  (with note and link for GCSE students)

Six Glasgow Poems (1969) First of my four phonetic sequences written between 1969 and 1979

 

 

On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait with postscript to 3rd printing, 1993

The text of a pamphlet against the First Gulf War (1991) 

 

Introduction to Radical Renfrew (1989)

An introduction to a nineteenth century anthology of forgotten Scottish poets that discusses why a poetic

literary culture and popular ownership of that culture has been lost in Britain 

 
 
  

ESSAYS AND ESSAY-REVIEWS

 

     James Thomson (B.V.)    The background to James Thomson's 1874 masterpiece "The City of Dreadful Night".

This essay was written in 2009 as a final valediction to Thomson after years of research that saw the publication of the biography Places of the Mind.

        Charles Reznikoff's poetry   Essay on the great American Jewish twentieth century poet by way of a guide to the contents of Reznikoff's work and its overall structure. 

Robert Fergusson   This essay takes issue with the usual rather dreary attempt to picture Fergusson as a "tragic" figure, and suggests he remains unsurpassed as a poet of Scottish urban social life. 

Poetry, Schools, Place     Because educational institutions take to do with literature this does not mean that literature has itself anything to do with educational institutions. A story is told of a boy growing up in a housing scheme who names the cultural significance of the parts of his own place; and who is finally taught the importance of literary art.  

  The Common Breath    An article published in 2009 in the Edinburgh Review outlining some of the American twentieth century prosodic tradition in  lower case and spacing. Argues the democratic nature of this tradition as against much of the taught British mainstream, and  the undue neglect of a great visual-musical poet like Paul Blackburn. 

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  INTERVIEWS

 

  Interview by Rosemary Goring Glasgow August 2009

 

ONLINE RECORDINGS

 

  Occupation Times Three (2008) - Images from the Occupied Territories from the net with audio voiceover of thrice-repeated poem (from the Cork festival above) "The Proxy Badge of Victimhood"