Blog Post #33

Tom Leonard's "The Six O'Clock News" is very modernist, I think. The words are spelled phonetically and sentences are seemingly randomly broken up by the lines of the poem. I cannot tell what the structure is or what guidelines he is using to write it, and that is why it feels modernist (like Marianne Moore's poetry). Maybe Leonard was trying to make the poem appear long and skinny like a straw, and this is why there are never more than four words per line. I'm not sure what he means by "yoo scruff." Is it Scottish slang/terminology? I like the part about the BBC accent--it's ironic because the speaker is imitating the news reporter in his own heavy Scottish accent. There's a right way to spell and a right way to speak (very elitist), and common people are incapable of this kind of refinement. I like what Leonard is doing with this poem, because I dislike that sort of mentality as well.