In spring last
year Adam Piette asked me if I’d like to pull together a
memorial tribute to Tom Leonard for Black Box Manifold. Of
course I said yes, and was honoured to be asked to curate
such, however daunting. Tasked with finding six writers for
the tribute – a very small amount considering Tom’s
influence – I pushed it to eight, including myself. I
selected a mix of people I know – Dorothy Alexander, Jim
Ferguson, Jane Goldman, Peter Manson, Theresa Muñoz, Rodney
Relax and Gerry Smith – who were on good terms with Tom in
some way or other. The one thing that links us being the man
himself, who was a humanistic and poetic mentor, source of
inspiration and great champion of our individual endeavours.
I will let the tributes speak for themselves, but the range
of work is testament to the variety of Tom’s own output,
interests and world view.
I know Adam from
my time at Glasgow University undertaking a part-time
master’s in creative writing between 2001-2003. This is also
where I first met Tom, who would be my tutor. By that point
I had known Tom’s work for about five years but had never
met him. At the end of the master’s, after two years of
serious but enjoyable engagement with language and the man,
I remember timidly asking Tom if we could stay in touch, to
which he replied, of course, we’re friends now. And friends
we remained till his death on the shortest day of 2018.
The first, what
I call, proper poem that I wrote was in 1996, when I had
just turned twenty-one. It was a vernacular piece inspired
by the use of Scottish slang in books by Irvine Welsh and
James Kelman. I felt I had found a valid and true way of
expressing myself, so continued to write in this fashion for
a while, stopping not because I found ‘the use of phonetic
urban dialect rather constrictive,’ but as a result of
gravitating toward concrete and appropriative poetic forms.
These early poems, typically short, were mostly worked out
fully in my head before committed to paper (by hand, I
didn’t even have a typewriter at the time). I still know
some off by heart. This modest feat of memory allowed me to
annoy people I thought might be interested, at parties or in
the pub, by insisting I recite them a poem. One time a
reluctant friend of a friend said my poems reminded her of
Tom Leonard’s work, which I didn’t know. So I went to
Dalkeith library, where, miraculously, they had Intimate
Voices. This was revelatory to me and my real
introduction to modern poetry. You will notice that I didn’t
add the adjective Scottish, which I might have done at the
time, for Tom Leonard is an international poet, in
stature and outlook. He is simply a poet and should not be
constrained by any adjectives – Scottish, vernacular and all
the rest – which were often used pejoratively to dismiss,
patronise or pigeonhole him as being outside the narrative,
yet tolerated in that space, while alive. His body of
multi-faceted work holds its own against anyone you care to
mention and puts the boot in untold others. Heartening,
then, to see him make the top ten of Scotland’s greatest
ever poets in a recent poll in The Times.
There are quite
a few phrases that Tom said to me over the years, poetic and
personal, which I remember vividly. ‘The line as a unit of
semantic yield’ was a favourite of his. I remember telling
him a story – which I can’t relate here – where he laughed
so hard I thought he was going to have a coronary in my car.
One time when I was his tutee, after a particularly fecund
run of poems, he called me a ‘prolific bastard,’ humbly
stating that he typically wrote only a handful of poems a
year. But as Jim Ferguson details Tom was unbelievably
productive in his prime. After calling me a prolific
bastard, he looked at me with a little gleam in his eye and
said, by way of explanation, ‘it’s spring.’ Since then I
have indeed noticed a perennial springly surge of poems, but
it was also his encouragement and comradeship at that time.
Tom was an ally,
whom I miss having in my corner. He was the first of three
allies I lost in a year, the others being Graham Brodie and
Sean Bonney – within a week of each other! – at the tail end
of 2019. The last time I saw Tom was the night of Jim
Ferguson’s book launch for the delightfully titled when
feeling fully at home in the drifting living room of time,
in April 2018. Tom wasn’t going because it was at night, but
we arranged that I’d go round for my tea before I went along
to the reading. I mention this not only as it was our final
meeting, but also to illustrate Tom’s brilliant command of
language, in this case swearing – he was definitely one of
the best swearers I’ve met or heard. One of the shelves in
his study was a bit shoogly when he was putting a book back,
that he’d got down to show me. As he tried to replace it the
shelf came away from the wall, which he caught before it
fell, emitting a hearty ‘for fuck sake,’ closely followed by
‘come oanty fuck.’ The latter phrase is one of my
favourites, I use it all the time and was so glad that Tom
used it too, I’d never heard him say it before. Together we
engineered a makeshift solution for the shelf. After this
encounter we exchanged a few emails, some of which wound up
in my elegy.
I created the
elegy from email replies from correspondence with Tom, which
I copied into a Word doc that was thirty-eight pages in
length and edited down to the poem here. Unfortunately,
these emails only stretch back as far as 2004, even though I
remember some specific phrases from emails sent in the two
years before then, when our correspondence began. No doubt
they have been archived somewhere unbeknownst to me by
Microsoft. As I searched through our emails I found a
sequence of four unpublished poems of Tom’s that he called
‘Zero Minus One.’ A response to ‘branding being so
pervasive,’ he sent me these in 2015 – although written
years before – as he felt they were relevant to my own work
at the time, as well as the political climate then current.
I am delighted to be able to present some of Tom Leonard’s
unpublished work here for the first time.
It’s now spring
and all as I write this, well, summer in Scotland, which is
basically like spring, and much has changed in the world
since Tom died. I am in lockdown, the coronavirus is in
spate – the UK second in the league table of death – the far
right is strategically entrenched worldwide and
environmental catastrophe looms. But there is hope. First
with global climate strikes, and now with Black Lives Matter
protests taking place across all fifty states of the US with
demonstrations spreading and converging around the world.
The optimistic side of me dreams of a systemic reset
resulting from these interlinked issues of neoliberal
capitalism and I think Tom would also be buoyed. You pinch
yourself.
[nicky melville’s latest book is ABBODIES
COLD : SPECTRE (Sad Press); THE IMPERATIVE
COMMANDS will be published with Dostoyevsky Wannabe in
2021. He recently started making demos under the name Fuck
This: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVvRwpoHwx5R5aPAThlEP4w
]
Copyright © 2020 by Nicky Melville, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
