Hearing the inner voices of Asian English poets

Poetry is often, even if not always, thought of as a work to be read audibly. Literary analyses of each poem and biographical information of the poet aim at providing deeper understanding, but few students of literature actually attend seriously to the poet’s phonology. By first providing an analysis of the tonality Hong Kong English with side view glances to Singapore, this paper provides arguments for how much more exciting poetry can be not just for new Englishes, but for all languages in today’s world where so many languages and cultures are in contact.