POEMS
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 filmed BBC interview 1998 with Tom Leonard about the poem 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.
an style="color: #ff00ff" class="Apple-style-span">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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- Roxy Harris's Language and Power Review welcoming a great language teaching book
- Ezra Pound and Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky Review of two books concerning Ezra Pound
- Robert Browning The range and musical technique of Browning's 1855 Men and Women
- John Clare Clare and language
INTERVIEWS
Interview by Rosemary Goring Glasgow August 2009
- Interview by Dan Stephen Boulder Colorado Spring 1998[113KB PDF]
- Q & A interview Scottish Poetry issue Hungarian Literary Magazine 2003
ONLINE RECORDINGS
- http://www.archiveofthenow.com/ Click on "authors" and choose "Tom Leonard".
- The recordings online here are:-
1) "Three Texts for Tape" - three tape-recorder soundworks recorded in 1978 - 2) poem sequence: "nora's place" read by TL
- 3) public poetry reading lasting 17 minutes
- http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/archive/soundeye/Leonard-Tom/
- 17 online videos/mp3 files of poems being read at a Cork poetry festival in 2005
