A Poetic End

Last week, if you recall, I mentioned in passing my predilection for the poet and all round literary lump of gorgeousness, Simon Armitage.  On re-reading that blog-post I realised that you may have thought my passion to be merely physical, rattling on as I did about his supernumerary chin and brooding windcheater.

Reconstruction of how Simon Armitage

could look in a windcheater

While Mr Armitage is undeniably easy on the eye if you're mindful not to view him side-on, he's also a rather excellent poet and it is because of this deftness with words that I love him, not because of Simon Armitage "The Man" who I've never met.   That would, quite frankly, pave the way to heartache and strong medication.

So anyway, I'm chatting to a friend who happens to read my blog and he sniffs, "Simon Armitage? Bit lightweight, isn't he?"

This friend's alma mater used to be a polytechnic and it always amazes me where he finds the confidence to express an opinion of any kind without fearing people will point and laugh at him.

After I'd finished pointing and laughing,* curiosity got the better of me.

"What d'you mean, lightweight?"  I said.  "His translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' is considered to be one of the most accessible and relevant to modern day."  (I'd read that somewhere.  Probably The Guardian, it sounds like something The Guardian would say.)  "Well," he scoffed.  "His poems rhyme, don't they?"

I had only one thing to say in response — well, technically I didn't say anything; as a supporter of equal opps I used sign language. 

Simon Armitage's poetry has a very strong sense of structure and rhythm, but not necessarily rhyming line-ends which,  I assume, is what Mon Ami Polytechnique meant.  And anyway, let's not forget poetry's literary tricks and devices lie in its oral origins.   After all, for something to be successfully remembered and passed on it has to have a distinct, repetitive — almost hypnotic — structure.   Take the lovely

Pam Ayres for example: 

I am very fond of hedgehogs
Which makes me want to say,
That I am struck with wonder,
How there's any left today,
For each morning as I travel
And no short distance that,
All I see are hedgehogs,
Squashed. And dead. And flat.

Ah Pam, Pam.  A woman who knows the value of a good rhyme.   Thirty years on and I still remember it.  Sorry, Whitman, you missed a trick.  For me, free verse is nothing but an exercise in imaginative punctuation. 

A thicko

But who cares?  It doesn't matter what kind of poetry you're into because there is no 'right  type' of poetry.  I know intellectual snobs would have us believe otherwise, but essentially reading a poem is an emotive exercise, our response to it subjective. 

Take my dearest friend, Mrs Rochester, for example.  She has tried converting me to the joys of Slyvia Plath.  Joys!  Slyvia Plath!  It's like saying the charm of Nick Griffin. 

Just.  Doesn't.  Go.

Mrs Rochester feels hurt by my failure to appreciate Ms Plath  — she somehow sees it as a judgment on her own taste of literature — and it doesn't matter what I say, I can't make her understand that when I pick up a Slyvia Plath anthology all I feel is the urge to run away screaming. 

So I've employed some help in the form of a luvvy am-dram chum and a camcorder.

Now, at first Luvvy-Am-Dram Chum said, rather grandly I thought, "I don't do television".  I pointed out that she didn't 'do' anything other than act like a tit in a nylon wig in a village hall from time to time.  Having this clarification allowed her to admit that "breaking into new territory" and "increasing her exposure" might be the way forward.

I've sent the resulting footage to Mrs R, hoping imagery will illustrate what words have thus far failed to.



I feel Sylvia herself would have applauded...





*Such is the power of a grammar school education.  I have no university education but being repeatedly told I was part of the educational top 10%  has left me with the unshakeable belief that I could run the country with only a curled upper lip and Teeline shorthand of 120wpm.  If I wanted.