Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface
what they take, and good poets make it into something different.”
T.S. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’ (1920).

“Don’t leave me be. Don’t let me sleep”, wrote Simon Armitage in his last collection Book of Matches (1993). Well, in that case it’s about time certain things were said, to quote that great catechist of cliches Myles na gCopaleen: Armitage’s poetry is a compendium of all that is pseudo, mal-dicted and calloused in the underworld of the English language. And that’s his good stuff For Armitage is a poet whose career has marked a decline that is coterminous with his abandonment of common speech, cliche and catchphrase, and whose growing preference for literature over language has meant that he has lost touch with his audience.

Armitage justified his use of idiom in an interview with Jane Stabler in the magazine Verse in 1991:

1. It’s my voice: that’s how I speak.
2. It allows me to get nearer, or associates me more clearly with the speaker in the monologues.
3. Most idioms or catchphrases are images of some type, and whilst I’m not exactly “revitalising” them I am asking them to work a little harder, not just perform their common function, but introduce a second, sometimes literal or sometimes punning element.
4. They contain a good deal of music and rhythm which isn’t disharmonious with the way I’m trying to construct poems.
5. I’ve said before that I don’t hold with the view that cliche
represents a bias against the truth, in terms of there being only one truth, or poetry owning the franchise on truth.
6. I should very much like to coin an idiom. “Bored like the
man who married a mermaid” is forthcoming and probably my best shot so far.

This is an extremely bold and impressive defence of a method by a young poet, testifying to Armitage’s profound understanding of the moral implications of using cliche: as Christopher Ricks has remarked of Geoffrey Hill, “What lifts such effects above mere cleverness” is that “with a true poet, the linguistic concerns are a corollary of a way of looking at life”. But it also demonstrates a prophetic insight into Annitage’s own talents. He has coined original idioms - “I’m so hungry! I could eat a buttered monkey” from ‘Going West’, for example, and the clincher from his poem ‘Bus Talk’: “No, if that house hasn’t dropped a good two inches! this last eighteen months, my cock’s a kipper”. There is a frank recognition of his ambitions; at the time of the interview he had published just one collection with Bloodaxe, yet was already entertaining thoughts of biography - “Maybe if I get to the biography stage, I will have recalled or invented something for myself, or Peter Ackroyd will have invented something for me”. Above all, the interview extract shows that Armitage knows how a cliché - works; as he implies, it is usually a blunted metaphor made sharp by effects of rhythm and music - cool as a cucumber”, “fit as a fiddle” etc.

Cliches have seen something of a revival in recent years, having once been regarded as sure signs of insincerity or laziness and diagnosed as symptoms of a culture in decline: “Their ubiquity is remarkable and rather frightening”, wrote Eric Partridge, “Cliches are instances of racial inanition”. They are now seen as providing an opportunity for invention and play. In his Dictionary of Cliches (1940) Partridge classified four groups of cliches:

1. Idioms that have become cliches.
2. Other hackneyed phrases.
3. Stock phrases and familiar quotations from foreign languages.
4. Quotations from English literature.

In his best early work, from Zoom (1989) and a few of the poems in Kid (1992), Armitage excelled in the rewriting and the reinvention of idiom-cliches and hackneyed phrases; in his lamentable later work he has gravitated towards the Eng. Lit. quotation-cliche. Zoom, for example, began with the punningly titled poem ‘Snow Joke’, which proudly announced an allegiance to a particular language and a locale: “Heard the one about the guy from Heaton Mersey?” His latest collection, Book of Matches (1993) ends with a gesture towards Auden, and seeks approval and reassurance: “if you came to lay/I your sleeping head against my arm or sleeve... There! how does that sound?” The use of cliche in the early work is unembarrassed and suggestive: the allusions in the later work are snotty-nosed and apologetic.

Armitage’s early poetry was brimming with the bobs and tags of everyday speech - “I mean”, , “mate”,  “and things” - and he was the master of both the unexpected opening (“Of all the bloody cheek”, “Which reminds me”, demotic versions of the in medias res intro to the Cantos, “And then went down to the ship”), and the click-shut conclusion: “if you only pay peanuts, you’re working with monkeys”; “I could have scored. I could have contended”. He achieved his effects by compacting and compressing, incongruity (in ‘On Miles Platting Station’ the stichwort “has done well for itself’; in ‘Looking for Weldon Kees’, “American books were of a different kidney”) and elision (the poem ‘Fire’ relights the phrase “the extent of the damage” with the spark of a comma: “Pull up; let’s stumble over this rough ground! and look on it: the extent, the damage”). His methods were those of the cozener, the twister, the crafty lad; his poems a perfect expression of the heroic-pathetic.

Some of the early poems cascade with cliches like a champagne fountain, or in the case of ‘All Beer and Skittles’ like a shook-up can of lager:

He had a hair up his arse
at the best of times
and only stuck me on the payroll
as a long-forgotten family favour.

Some poems contain just slops and overflow - the magnificently laidback early ‘Ivory’, for example, and the disastrous later ‘Judge Chutney’s Final Summary’ - whilst in others a splash of cliche is artfully rubbed in to the pattern of a line (“no fish: no birds: no shit” concludes ‘The Peruvian Anchovy Industry’). Still others follow a trickle of ideas: “one standpipe doesn’t make a summer,! the lead in a gallon of petrol wouldn’t fill the teat1 of a baby’s bottle, which is small, though you wouldn’t want it! as a wart on the end of your nose, sprung up overnight”. Or they merely suggest other senses and sources of amusement: “Later, in the men’s room of The Coach and Horses! he revealed the extent! of his other intentions”.
 
There are of course instances even in Armitage’ s early work of flat-pack idioms seemingly brought from some dodgy creative writing workshop, yet for all its faults his style deservedly proved popular, and his poetry became a natural accompaniment to a late twentieth-century lifestyle, as described by Geoff Hattersley, another of the so-called Huddersfield mafia, in his poem ‘Simon’s Book’ from his 1989 collection Slouching Towards Rotherham:

The football was boring so I switched it
off but the magazine I picked up was
no better and by then the football was
over and John Wayne was busy wiping

out anyone who got in his way. So
I opened the wine my brother had bought us
for Christmas and settled down with it
and the headphones and True Stories and then

Beefheart’s Safe as Milk loud in my ears I
thought about old what’s-his-name picking up
Simon’s book and getting none of it. Quite
pissed by the time I went to bed I

stumbled over a pile of junk and woke
Jeanette. ‘Sorry, love’ I said, ‘You feeling
any better?’ She said ‘Will you cuddle
me?’ I said ‘Uh, sure, sweetheart, anything.’

So what went wrong with Simon’s books? Two things: firstly, Armitage moved away from experimenting with the surface structures of language and ideas towards an interest in exploring deep meanings, with the result that the natural exuberance of the earlier poetry has given way to the embarrassing intimacies and clumsy philosophising of the later work; and secondly, where the early poems were composed of kaleidoscopic elements of everyday speech, the later poems tend to be written in a language shadowed by books.
 
In the early poems Armitage’s mixing and matching of cliches created rich layers of suggestion; the texture of the later poems seems thin in comparison, with nothing beneath their verbal dexterity but a laboured sincerity, a weakness that became apparent in the 1992 poem-film Xanadu, where cliche was used indiscriminately as a kind of bulking-agent: “on standby, on hold, awaiting the order”, “I was a rookie / just out of college, / finding my feet, / out of my league”. Armitage’ s increasing emotional attachment to his subject matter has prevented the free-play of his humour, and his wordplay has been reduced to making serious points: the best parts of his long poem ‘Reading the Banns’, from Book of Matches, tap into a rhythm and a linguistic history of some kind (as in the section dealing with “the issue of the guest list”:
“Who stops, who goes, / who stays at home, // who shall have roast beef, / who shall have none”), while the worst parts are merely portentous, such as the attempt to play on the idea of “till death us do part” in the description of the zippered-up morning suits as “body bags”.
 
Where Armitage was once at the cutting edge of idiom he is now deaf as a sword, prepared to settle for the loud, the easy and the obvious: in ‘Looking for Weldon Kees’, for example, he allows himself an easy substitution (“There was too much water under the Golden Gate”), while in ‘Never Mind the Quality:’ he can’t come up with an opening line any more imaginative than “feel the width”, and in ‘Not the Bermuda Triangle’ he lets go a leaden phrase about “the melt-down of a cast-iron relationship”. Even his jokes are now just flip or quips where once they were flights of fancy:

General Studies, the upper sixth, a doddle, a cinch
for anyone with an ounce of common sense

or a calculator
with a memory feature.
           (‘You May Turn Over and Begin’)

The folk wisdom of the early work has fossilised into banalities “there will always be! that square half-inch or so of unscratchable skin! between the shoulder blades, unreachable! from over the top or underneath” - and literary references have begun to crowd out other material (allusions to Heaney in ‘Wintering Out’ and ‘Act of Union’, Auden in ‘Look, Stranger’, Stevens in ‘Eighteen Plays on Golfing as Watchword’, not to mention the Weldon Kees poems and the numerous nods and winks in the direction of Craig Raine). Armitage has become possessed with a sudden desire to struggle with his literary precursors, a boy wonder who would be a man:

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
            (Larkin, ‘Sad Steps’)

At 6 a.m., full of booze, I lumber
into the bathroom. Declined, top heavy,
they have lost height, jettisoned their petals,
the tight-incurved cusps - lifeboats below them -
evidence of weeping. They surprise me.
              (Armitage, ‘Untitled, with Flowers’)

Inevitably, he has also started to write poem-sequences, which are to poetry what concept albums are to rock music - at best an indulgence, at worst a travesty - and one yearns for the brevity of his early pop classics.
 
In the second poem in Book of Matches Armitage considered his achievement:

At twenty-eight
I’m not doing great,
but considering I came from the River Colne
and its long, lifeless mud,
I’m doing good.

The boy may have done good, but you can’t help thinking he could have done great.