Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. On the stage and also on the page, it constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole to commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, whilst others adapt Jamaican Creole to celebrate folk culture and explore the postcolonial metropolis. Using modified forms of Guyanese Creole, Grace Nichols frequently constructs gendered voices and John Agard celebrates linguistic playfulness. The emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ indicates that borders between linguistic varieties are neither absolute nor static. Daljit Nagra’s heteroglot poems frequently emulate ‘Punglishd’, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Nagra’s mainstream success also indicates the clout of vernacular voices in poetry, which can connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, record linguistic varieties, and endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. These double-voiced poetic languages are also read here as signs of resistance against monologic ideologies of Englishness.