Simon Armitage: a Poet Laureate who’s likely to shoot from the hip
Tristram Fane Saunders explains why Armitage is a good fit for the coveted post
When Simon Armitage was announced on Friday night as our new Poet Laureate, for most people – including Armitage himself – it felt like business as usual. It’s easy to imagine him as “The English Astronaut” in his poem of that name, who shrugs off his triumphant homecoming to settle down with a Little Chef breakfast and a crossword.
If the role of a laureate is to write poetry that aims to speak to country as directly as possible, Armitage has been plugging away at it for decades. On television, he has repeatedly given voice to the voiceless: Britain’s traumatised war veterans in The Not
Dead, the murdered goth Sophie Lancaster in Black Roses; a decrepit housing estate in Rochdale for Xanadu.
But if you were looking for a future laureate among the Britpoppy “New Generation” of poets of 25 years ago, Armitage was by no means the obvious choice. He didn’t have the debonair style of the late Michael Donaghy, or the lyricism of Don Paterson.
What his early work did have, apart from its cool demotic and bold use of cliché, was an electrifying streak of violent, deadpan humour. It’s there in the macabre Snow Joke, where a drunk driver dies in a blizzard, and
Gooseberry Season, in which the speaker calmly murders an unwanted houseguest. His gift was the ability to be simultaneously sharp and blunt.
Through the Nineties, Armitage’s poetic alter-ego might well have been his unflappable, unimpressed
Goalkeeper with a Cigarette, a man with “no highfalutin song/ to sing, no neat message for the nation”. But from around 1999 – the first time he was widely tipped for the laureateship – he has been taking public commissions with messages aplenty, working to
make his poetry, and poetry more generally, a part of the national landscape. Literally so in the case of his Stanza Stones, poems carved on rocks scattered across the moors of his native Yorkshire. As a laureate, he looks likely to have more in common with “flagwaver for poetry” Andrew Motion than with the more self-effacing Carol Ann Duffy, whom he now succeeds.
In the past five years, as Oxford professor of poetry, his preference for straightforwardness has hardened into an insistence on it. “Obscurity is a betrayal of [language],” he declared in his final lecture. “The greatest art requires the least explanation.”
His ideal poem is a bolt from the blue, like the electric eel in his poem “that keeps itself to itself for the most part, but when touched/ transforms a single thought into several thousand volts”. Armitage would agree with Emily Dickinson’s comment: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” It’s an ideal his own poetry sometimes struggles to achieve, but the belief that a good poem can strike sparks across the centuries is at the heart of his acclaimed modern renderings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other medieval poems.
That idea lies behind his finest sonnet, Poetry, which finds the perfect symbol for this often overlooked, seemingly purposeless art form in the jousting medieval automata of the Wells Cathedral clock, where
Every fifteen minutes knights on horseback circle and joust, and for six hundred years
the same poor sucker riding counterways has copped it full in the face with a lance…
It’s empty in here, mostly. There’s no God to speak of – some bishops have said as much – and five quid buys a person a new watch. But even at night with the great doors locked
chimes sing out, and the sap who was knocked dead comes cornering home wearing a new head.