Year 10 English - The Melting Pot
from Unrelated Incidents
Tom Leonard (born 1944 in Glasgow, Scotland) is best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect. He has been part of the Scottish literary renaissance for the past forty years. With Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, he has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University.
Published in 1976, his Glasgow Poems kick-started a literary counterculture. In 1984 he released Intimate Voices, a selection of his work from 1965 onwards including poems and essays on William Carlos Williams and “the nature of hierarchical diction in Britain.” It shared the award for Scottish Book of the Year and yet was banned from Central Region school libraries. Peter Manson, in the Poetry Review, claimed the poems, “speak so precisely and with such a fierce, analytical wit that they transcend their status as poems and become part of the shared apparatus we use to think with. I don't know any other contemporary poetry of which that is so true.”
BBC Bitesize - Unrelated IncidentsFollow the link to view a slide-show and listen to a reading of Tom Leonard's "Unrelated Incidents". Continue to explore the website to access a copy of the poem plus a range of related study materials.
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Unrelated IncidentsClick to view the YouTube clip of Tom Leonard reading his complete collection of "Unrelated Incidents" - "Six O'Clock News" is just one extract of the whole poem
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