I have delved a little into the Armitage biography and it quite worrying.
He has received just about every award and opportunity it possible to get including four Phds (Honourary of course no laborious referencing required).
So when Martin Stannard in his review of Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 raised the possibility that this was a sheep in wolf’s clothing I decided to dig a little deeper.
For a poetry workshop tonight I have selected four poems from across ‘Rhymin Simon’s’ illustrious career to see if Stannard was just a sour-puss and lo and behold this is what I found.
THE TYRE (from Cloudcookooland 1997)
A poem from his middle period I guess. Displays the usual ‘prosaic’ subject matter in first stanza, skips to ‘what might happen’ in stanza 2 and then drifts off into transcendental hogwash in the third stanza although I am sure there are readers who find it sublime. I don’t.
In fact I find the whole thing confected and unbelievable. He has obviously never done a labouring job or worked on a farm because his ‘tyre’ is made up. No farmer would leave an expensive bit of kit like that lying around and secondly it would if containing water be too heavy to lift. Anybody who close to the land would know that. Further there is no ‘real’ location nor identifiable others..in other words it fiction.
No this is a typical Armitage confection. Take an object and build a’narrative’ around it (like the penny.etc etc). This fitted in well with the Glyn Maxwell school of narrative poems that Poetry Review editor Peter Forbes (New Generation maestro and who put them both on the cover -see above) was engineering. Back in the late 1980s he came to a workshop I attended in Islington raving about Maxwell, himself and Byron as all parts of the new longer poem movement…Armitage fitted in well and indeed pretended to be Auden to Maxwell’s Isherwood.
Now this is where things get interesting. If one takes the poem and simply let the sense determine line-break we find a far shorter and far more conventional poem ‘chopped’ into a longer form. Stannard is spot on Armitage is obsessively iambic and 10 syllable to line then plods duly on. Here the original and my edited version.
THE TYRE Just how it came to rest where it rested, miles out, miles from the last farmhouse even, was a fair question. Dropped by hurricane or aeroplane perhaps for some reason, put down as a cairn or marker, then lost. Tractor-size, six or seven feet across, it was sloughed, unconscious, warm to the touch, its gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin nursing a gallon of rain in its gut. Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots, it had to be cut. Stood up it was drunk or slugged, wanted nothing more than to slump, to spiral back to its circle of sleep, dream another year in its nest of peat. We bullied it over the moor, drove it, pushed from the back or turned it from the side, unspooling a thread in the shape and form of its tread, in its length, and in its line, rolled its weight through broken walls, felt the shock when it met with stones, guided its sleepwalk down to meadows, fields, onto level ground. There and then we were one connected thing, five of us, all hands steering a tall ship or one hand fingering a coin or ring. and edited...
THE TYRE Just how it came to rest where it rested, miles out, miles from the last farmhouse even, was a fair question. Dropped by hurricane or aeroplane perhaps for some reason, put down as a cairn or marker, then lost. Tractor-size, six or seven feet across, it was sloughed, unconscious, warm to the touch, its gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin nursing a gallon of rain in its gut.
Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots, it had to be cut. Stood up it was drunk or slugged, wanted nothing more than to slump, to spiral back to its circle of sleep, dream another year in its nest of peat.
We bullied it over the moor, drove it, pushed from the back or turned it from the side, unspooling a thread in the shape and form of its tread, in its length, and in its line, rolled its weight through broken walls, felt the shock when it met with stones, guided its sleepwalk down to meadows, fields, onto level ground. There and then we were one connected thing, five of us, all hands steering a tall ship or one hand fingering a coin or ring.
It is a very dull iambic pentameter with very basic rhymes nothing more…and I think he got it from Auden…..it is
‘As I walked out one evening’…ba de dum ba de dum ba de dum ba de dum.
I have tried this with all four poems and it works on all.
He seems incapable of avoiding this constant beat…or using any other register.
Most worryingly even the mock Sonnets of Book of Matches which so beloved of our schools worksheeting teachers has exactly the same plodding inevitability. He himself did not claim they sonnets they just aped the 14 line length BUT…..they have nothing of a true sonnet about them at all…Wyatt would turn in his grave..there no subtlety here at all..Professor of Poetry? What for?
This is what the poem ‘POEM’ actually made of…..
Ba de dum ba de dum ba de dum ba de dum….
when he cannot find a full rhyme a half rhyme will do it seems……
Poem
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive he took a spade and tossed it to one side. And always tucked his daughter up at night And slippered her the one time that she lied. And every week he tipped up half his wage. And what he didn't spend each week he saved. And praised his wife for every meal she made.And once, for laughing, punched her in the face. And for his mum he hired a private nurse.And every Sunday taxied her to church. And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse. Here's how they rated him when they looked back: sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
Once you hear this dull rhythm it hard to get out of one’s mind which I think why Stone Stanzas so successful. Because he was working with a shorter line and one which had to be sculpted in stone which he could not drag on ad nauseum he had to change rhythm perhaps for the first time and break the Armitage Stomp….
From Stone Stanzas
The sky has delivered
its blank missive.
The moor in coma.
Snow, like water asleep,
a coded muteness
to baffle all noise,
to stall movement,
still time.
After testing his theory I can wholeheartedly agree with Martin Stannard that we have a leaden fairly unimaginative Poet Laureate elect on our hands but how he got to be in that position is far more about poetry and politics than any fault of the man himself.
He is a good performer, a very good and media savvy spokesman for poetry but as a poet…he just isn’t that good in my opinion and I think Stannard amidst the rancour has finally found him out which is what good criticism does it makes you look again.