Back in 2019, Sidney Wood mentioned Tony Harrison’s poem “Them and [uz]” in a comment, but if I clicked through at the time it didn’t stick in my memory; now, having run across it again, I want to make a post of it. Here’s the text:
I
αἰαῖ, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes
gob full of pebbles outshouting seas —
4 words only of mi ‘art aches and … “Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!” He was nicely spoken.
“Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!”I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth.
“Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
‘s been dubbed by [ʌs] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [ʌs]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.”“We say [ʌs] not [uz], T.W.!” That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a’s (as in “flat cap”)
my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great
lumps to hawk up and spit out … E-nun-ci-ate!II
So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy
your lousy leasehold Poetry.I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones
into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones,
dropped the initials I’d been harried as
and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],
ended sentences with by, with, from,
and spoke the language that I spoke at home.
RIP RP, RIP T.W.
I’m Tony Harrison no longer you!You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhymes,
[uz] can be loving as well as funny.My first mention in the Times
automatically made Tony Anthony!
Of course, “mi ‘art aches” = “My heart aches,” the start of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (which everyone studies in school), and “leasehold Poetry” is a pun on “leasehold property”; you can get further annotations at the Genius page. You can hear Harrison reading his own poem here; I especially enjoy it now that my wife and I have been soaking in the Northeast accents on display in Vera (another season coming, but we have to wait until next year). I remember posting a poem by a Scottish woman making a similarly defiant choice to write in Scots, but I can’t seem to find it.
Len Pennie at LH in 2023.
but I can’t seem to find it.
Sigh. I too feel the reins slipping from my fingers. Just sit up straight and guide the steed with your thighs. When that doesn’t work any more, you can migrate to a motorised hobby horse.
I love Len Pennie but she’s not who I had in mind — this was probably at least a decade ago, and the post quoted a poem… oh, wait a minute, I’ve got it: it was Liz Lochhead!
A couple other annotations, with apologies to those who don’t need them: Keats was mocked as belonging to the Cockney School of poetry, and a company in the hands of the Receivers is bankrupt. I think “Tony” is italicized because “tony” once meant “high-toned, posh, suitable for le ton“. But would someone please tell me why the speaker was called T.W.?
Edit: And should [uz] be [ʊz]?
I think “Tony” is italicized because “tony” once meant “high-toned, posh, suitable for le ton“.
Excellent point! And I too was wondering why the speaker is called T.W.
The first edition of his first book of poems (says abebooks) Earthworks was published in 1964 under the name T.W. Harrison.
A JSTOR snippet in a search hit says: … re- assuming his name as Tony and repudiating his grammar school moniker T.W. ….
Harrison being taken down (“pulled up”, says on the can) in school for his accent: Tek care – lambs ont road.
Thanks for posting this; it’s brilliant!
At the risk of derailing the thread, one thing it reminds me of is this essay by Vershawn Ashanti Young, which is similar just in that it involves a defense of the right to write as one speaks at home.
https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/ijcs/article/29866/galley/138209/view/
o! the recording is so damn tasty! and i’m so glad it’s video, to have his gestures and expressions, too!
and following on from what Norvin wrote: i’ve been thinking a lot lately about june jordan’s essay on all this Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan, which i think i first read alongside linton kwesi johnson, kamau brathwaite zts”l, and patrick chamoiseau. and of course i always have zhargón in mind, which in some ways i prefer to “yiddish” as a formal term for mameloshn, to keep us out of the traps of standardization.
but a more proximate crossreference is john m. tait’s writing on scots, which i first learned about on here, through this post. and i’m sure i’ve mentioned harry josephine giles‘ brilliant bilingual Deep Wheel Orcadia in these parts before, but it bears repeating – she’s another brilliant walker between tongues that people pretend aren’t different.
@Stu Clayton: Thanks for all that.
T.W.
An irritating tutor once made an attempt to get me to answer to my first two initials as a form of address. It didn’t take.
Has anyone (Foreman?) recorded Wordsworth in W.’s own accent?
@Norvin: thanks for that. I’ve seen a fair amount of written AAVE, but not until now in academic register. It is a pleasure to read, even if the points he brings up seem self-evident, and the one he criticizes, an evident fool.
dear host, i seem to have packed too many links into a comment, which has been delenda’d…
We’re all linkistn here.
dear host, i seem to have packed too many links into a comment, which has been delenda’d…
Resurrexit!
kadosh! kadosh! kadosh!
the lord of hosts indeed!
Probably obvious, but “You can tell the Receivers where to go / (and not aspirate it)” is, of course, ‘Ell…
Mike
@Jerry Friedman: Maybe he was using the superseded small capital ᴜ.
On rewatching Frasier recently, I noticed that a [z] in us was one of the few giveaways of John Mahoney’s origins.
Can anyone comment on the distribution of /uz/ in N. America? I knew this poem before I moved to south western Ontario and so was surprised to hear that pronunciation from time to time around here. “Whilst”, too, but that’s another story.