The Socio-poetic Soundscape of Geraldine Monk

Abstract

THOUGH WELL-EDUCATED, Geraldine Monk decided quite consciously not to let education smooth over or erase texture of her Lancashire accent and local dialect. In an interview with Leonard Schwartz, she comments that when come over to America it's not evidently clear that actually speak with a very broad northern English working-class accent. A lot of people think talk Queen's English, which amuses me greatly, and it's very very nice to be away from England, people think talk posh, which don't. I've never got rid of my accent, because realized that wanted to use it. So think in that way it's almost a political statement--that might be educated, but I'm not going to betray where come from and my class background. Monk thus creates in her work a socio-poetic soundscape where place and class and gender are matters of rhyme, quantity, pitch, and pronunciation. Both physical dimensions and mutability of as sound units are highly important in her poetic practice I do love sound of words she notes to Schwartz, the way you can manipulate them, and tie them in knots--and kind of malleability and physicality of word is very important, as well as sense of it, connotation, denotation of it Her sound ranges from musical playfulness of a piece like 'Angles (with its fractured words, percussive finale, and references to musical terms) to daily journal pieces like Sky Scrapers sequence (luxuriating in Lancashire diphthongs, speech rhythms, thick consonantal clusters, and slowed syllables) to intense, sensuous, and political articulations of Interregnum and Escafeld Hangings that grab us by neck and rattle our bones. To insist on speaking in a manner labeled accented in privileged arena of literature (traditionally open only to wealthy classes) is immediately to establish a cultural space that acknowledges social realities, including reality of gender-based or class-based marginalization and whitewashing by normative, schooled modes such as BBC or CBC or Oxbridge English. Monk's defiance has a precedent in poetry of John Keats, who as part of Cockney School of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, was vilified for his low-birth accent and liberal politics. In whitewash of page, Keats's accent is mostly forgotten, but Monk has taken pains to score her work so that reader can't avoid it, as in lines Mary Queen of Scots banged-up in slimmer in Sheffield. // Lizzy mi Luv call off yr creepsy guards (Airport Security, Escafeld 27; see also recording on CD track 9). Or following from Katherine Hewit Replies: E was newt budda Jimmy-bum-licker. E lived down't lane in a big owse wi iz porky fatted fingers drippin rings and blottin copy after nervous copy--and for what? A right royal smile? The patronising smirk of ultimate noble birth to charm iz drab and impotent circle (Interregnum) Interregnum and Escafeld Hangings explore compellingly voices of condemned women--in first case voices of so-called witches (but actually very poor and disadvantaged people) and their associates who were hanged at Pendle Hill in 1612, and in second case voice of imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. By extension these texts explore condemnation of all women to second-class status; in these texts, however, women speak back to power structure that imprisons them, just as Monk's northern English dialect challenges southern English power structure represented by Queen Elizabeth II. Men and women in her cotton-mill town of Blackburn, Monk recalls, actually spoke different dialects: Generally speaking women spoke more slowly and deliberately than men because they spent their days word-miming and lip-reading in deaf-out of weaving sheds. …