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

The only time I have seen my book on a shop’s shelf, it was propped between Armitage, Simon, and Ayres, Pam (the shop, being the university bookshop, must have had a recent run on Auden). And just that morning I had related to a colleague how the first poem I ever recognised in our resolutely non-literary household was by Pam Ayres. I was five or six, at my grandmother’s house, and Pam, much loved by granny, was on local radio, ‘doing poems’. There was one about a woman looking after her elderly mother on a ragged estate, and the line I still remember was, ‘Sink your teeth into that dripping sandwich, Mother’. Not knowing there was such a thing as a proper Dripping Sandwich, to me that sandwich was a thin-lipped flap of Mother’s Pride infected with rising damp, or melting sweatily by the bars of the gas fire, force-fed to a cantankerous widow by her depressed daughter, and it filled me with such a sense of revulsion and despair that I never wanted to grow up. Apt, then, that my first collection leant for a while against one of Ayres’, much as I dozed against granny while she puffed on Honeyrose cigarettes and settled down to listen to ‘her programmes’.

   Happy, too, that it was flanked on the other side by Simon Armitage, who played such a key role in my first forays into writing; though I doubt whether granny would have considered Armitage’s work ‘poetry’ – or mine, for that matter. I discovered contemporary poets rather late myself, despite reading English at university. Now that postmodernism has its funky feet so firmly under the seminar-room table, it’s easy to forget how traditional university literature courses were, even in the early 90s. For good or ill we kicked off with old Icelandic sagas, in old Icelandic, and marched stolidly forward to about 1930. As for writing poetry, it was either something you did privately, like diary-writing, similarly free from influence or ambition and always ‘just for yourself’, or something which had to dress up as Wordsworth / Hughes (for men), or Dickinson / Plath (for women) before it could leave the house. The day I joined the university writers’ group I couldn’t bring myself to own up to the poem I had submitted – a botched pentameter-job about the emotional impact of snow, entitled, imaginatively, ‘Snow’. Fortunately the group also organised a series of readings by live poets, where I subsequently encountered Anne Stevenson, Sean O’Brien, Selima Hill, Jo Shapcott and Andrew Motion, but first and formatively, Simon Armitage, whose first collection, Zoom!, was published by Bloodaxe in 1989, when he was just twenty-six.

   I wonder whether writers on the prowl for literary heroes learn more from the comfort of identification or the thrill of difference. Armitage and his writing were so many things that I was not: male, urbane, Northern, edgy, out-in-the-real-world, Bloodaxe-y. He delivered each poem like a pub raconteur, with a kind of off-hand linguistic intensity, drawing with relish on the kinetic rhythms and idioms of contemporary vernacular. For a nineteenyear-old still fresh from girls’ boarding school, an opening line like ‘Harold Garfinkle can go fuck himself’ takes some beating. But it was not pure pub poetry – it was ‘page’ poetry at the same time, the language compacted and intensified and hammered into shapes which reach well beyond the scope of everyday discourse. Most of what I think I know about free verse linebreaks I learnt from him, not Pound or Levertov, and by way of immersion rather than instruction: indeed, revisiting Zoom! recently I realise that my habit of using titles as first lines, a fondness for spinning clichés and writing-off with brisk concluding sentences are all trademark early Amitage. There is a percussive, addictive quality to his use of iambics which I still find hard to shake. Armitage phrasing lodges in the head. An example, from one of the expertly buckled sonnets in Book of Matches (1993), which describes an ill-advised piercing:

     It took a jeweller’s gun
     to pierce the flesh, and then a friend
     to thread a sleeper in, and where it slept
     the hole became a sore, became a wound, and wept.

   I think that my almost non-negotiable sense of the sound of a line, how its rhythm and beat often precedes or even, unfortunately, overrides its semantics, comes from my relish of Armitage’s rhythms, which, to my mind, can hardly put a foot wrong. But perhaps most valuably of all at the time, his poetry showed how apparently unremarkable everyday encounters are rich with inner story and disturbance if you only listen closely enough: again, a useful and democratic lesson for the beginning writer lacking a huge range of momentous experience, shy of grappling ‘world issues’ head on, but still perfectly able to eavesdrop, research perhaps, but most importantly, imagine.

   Armitage is only ten years my senior, and I suppose that what I am
describing began as a sort of literary crush, while the Dickinson-Plath axis operated – still does – more in the way of generationally-determined awe and deference. Despite the many subjective differences, Armitage’s work still felt closer to home than the great god-mothers of poetry against which the young Eng. Lit. student is bound, perhaps impossibly, to measure her own experience. Starting out in the looming shadows of writers like that is akin to the tale of the traveller who asks a passer-by how to get to such-and-such a place, only to be told, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here.’ What Armitage’s work suggested was a flexible mode of expression which might accommodate all manner of experience, perception and personae: in short, it felt OK to start from just where I was. And still does. Perhaps for this reason I find that his poems offer useful ‘templates’ for students to experiment with in their own work, and they almost always provide a corrective to the several who insist that they ‘just can’t do poetry’. Once they are hooked by the diction and the narrative, it becomes that much easier to discuss those questions of form, technique and crafting that apparently make poetry in the abstract so intimidating a practice.

   Since then, of course, Armitage has earned his own heavyweight
Faberish status, and I have followed his work – and others from that ‘New Generation’ period – with the vague sense that ‘new’ poets make good on their early promise by moving away from a popular engagement with local cultural texture to more explicit dialogue with the larger literary or political world. Armitage has done this most perceptibly via the literary route, drawing on an erudite involvement with historical texts – Ovid and the Gawain poet, for example. His translations foreground a relish for the language and narrative that revivifies rather than problematises the original text, and are perhaps the approach of someone ultimately more dedicated to poetry than to cultural criticism – the demands of the latter being ones which I imagine the New Generation poets, hailed as champions of the postmodern and ‘marginal’, might have felt especially keenly. Armitage probably does indeed qualify as a card-carrying postmodernist: knowing, witty, ironic, demotic, vernacular, formally irreverent, anti-elitist, as capable of citing Homer and football slogans in the same line as of passing oblique comment on the death of David Kelly by way of ‘Hand-Washing Technique – Government Guidelines’ (Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid, Faber and Faber, 2006), and so forth. But to me all this feels incidental to his chief concern, which is with the working parts of language: ‘this, that is so small/ and so very smooth/ but whose mass is greater than the ringed planet’ (‘Zoom!’, 1989). Only start with that, I keep telling myself, and the rest will, probably, follow.