Simon Armitage - A Vertical Art

 Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art (Faber)

The prompt arrival of this book was most welcome. I'd been waiting for it since long before it was even a forthcoming title having heard the podcast of the lecture on raptors with special reference to Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. But there's plenty of us want the book, to have the words on the page to look at and concentrate on rather than having to listen.

The lectures are the main part of the job of Oxford Professor of Poetry, three a year for the four-year term. Prof. Armitage was it from 2015 to 2019.

Previous incumbents include such names as Auden, Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon and James Fenton. If General Elections can return the most unsuitable of Prime Ministers sometimes, the democracy by which Oxford graduates elect their Poetry Professor seems to work with some vanity candidates and the equivalent of Monster Raving Loonies being summaarily passed over. With his Queen's Medal, CBE, FRSL, this Professorship and then the laureate job, Simon's now only missing the Nobel Prize from a Grand Slam. If that seems like over-achievement, to me if nobody else, it might be due to some squint in my perception that makes poets older than me look more important than those younger and maybe also that Simon adopts a modest demeanour and rather than being the grand old curmudgeonly highbrow that was Prof. Hill, he dupes us into thinking he's still that nice lad from Marsden, Mrs. Armitage's boy. Well, he knows what he's doing, as these lectures-made-into-essays amply demonstrate.

To start with the raptors, what I most wanted was the last word in commentary on Gunn's Tamer and Hawk, the masterpiece analysis of the masterpiece poem. Like any close reader (with books by Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon some years ago now finding poems re-echoing more than a Prince Far I dub album), Simon finds things that are there to be found that the poet may or may not have consciously put there but most won't be unwise enough not to take credit for. The language sometimes does those things for you and are probably among those things that Sean O'Brien once called the 'earned surplus' which I took to mean if you get it right then even more things happen for you. In the first line, for instance,

I thought I was so tough,

he doesn't think it's,

stretching the point...to notice at a subtextual level the word 'thou' hiding

I don't know if he means once, in 'thought', or also in four out of the five letters in 'tough', re-arranged, but since it's Saturday, I have been doing The Times crossword. But I would certainly not have thought of that and I'm not convinced Gunn did, either, but it's one example of how, as he says elsewhere, it's in the reader rather than the poet that the poem takes place and, after thirty years of reading all sorts of poetry professionally, how alert he has become. It is symptomatic of the professional that he is tempted to read The Hawk in the Rain by Hughes as a 'poem about writing' in the same way that The Thought-Fox explicitly is,

This is a poem in which the serried furrows of ploughed land are lines; in which each clay-clogged step is a poetic 'foot', etc, etc.

Well, yes, no and maybe but as a later lecture discusses the 'state of the nation' of poetry and its place in universities and how it can lead to excesses of its own, and the horrors of inbreeding, it is difficult to say quite where the line should be drawn between that which is of genuine interest and entirely admissable and where it should stop. Some people in Oxford University have been inventing the Astro-Zeneca vaccine, others are involved in arcane thinking about words put decorously on a page while, at the bottom end of the evolutionary chain, blond yobbos commit vandalism for vandalism's sake in the name of the Bullingdon Club and are then let out into society to put into practice what they learnt there.

  

Not all poets are as deserving of our attentions. Well, not mine anyway, but as well as astute insights into a selection of those that surely are- Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Gunn - Prof. Armitage demonstrates the most catholic, with the smallest and most commendable 'c' possible, range of interests by talking about Walt Whitman, Edmund Spenser, some fairly postmodern Americans and Kae Tempest. It's possible I'll give Spenser a closer look one day but not one day soon but I'll manage without the rest of them. Not being quite up to date with the latest trends in political correctness and staying on the right side of 'cancel culture', it had escaped my notice that Kate Tempest is now Kae Tempest and should not be referenced with gender-specific pronouns. I was bemused by what looked at first like appalling proof-reading so I was glad of the internet and thus got myself updated.

I hope my ignorance of what goes on in other silos of the poetry community is no offence. My offence is having no time for Kae's work. It is to Simon's great credit that he has time for it. When he goes to heaven, his reward will be that he can hear more of it. When I go to hell, that's all there will be.

We wait a long time before the 'vertical art' of the title is explained. Poems usually start at the top and make their way down the page, when on paper, whereas music takes place in its own time and paintings don't tell you where to start. But, as Simon is ever circumspect in distancing himself from any ready-made assumption, I wasn't going to assume it was that. It might not be quite so simple for Prof Armitage who, uncharacteristically, abandons his immaculate common sense and, maybe having spent too much time on campus, eventually tells us that,

poetry is a vertical art, its verticality extending from orchestrated line endings and managed intervals. 

 

There really is no need for that when common or garden Danny Baker had the recipe for anything and everything in his phrase, 'all you have to be is any good'. Do whatever you like but let's see the benefit of it.

But Simon is making a case for the poetry that has been written since some of it saw fit to abandon the structures that it, whether that meant English, European or all poetry, thought it had to observe. Poetry, he says, has had to find other ways to differentiate itself from prose, and has, and although they might have been difficult to appreciate at first, the so-called New Generation that in 1994 he was co-opted into, did so without being Modernist, by being more Bishop and Larkin than Pound, Eliot or W.S. Graham, led, let us think and hope, into a world in which all and any types of poetry are possible and available. You make your choice just the same as you do between all the available flavours and combinations of them as you would in an ice-cream parlour.

He makes the point that such things matter to so very few people. But to those of us that it does matter, it matters very much. If anyone had so much time on their hands that they thought they might like to know what the poetry world was like by now, this is a snapshot that details all its grandeur and its failings. 

Prof. Armitage spoke, and then wrote, with the laconic wit that provided as many laugh out louds as Alexei Sayle did in his books except they came from different directions. Much of the Armitage humour is in-house, at the expense of other poets or the poetry industry but even Lexi would have been proud of,

in May 2015, nine people were killed when rival motorcycle gangs, including the Cossacks and the Bandidos, explored a difference of opinion in the car park of the Twin Peaks restaurant and sports bar.

 

Let's hope that there is a difference between poetry and stand-up 'comedy'. Or perhaps it doesn't matter any more. Some of the stories Simon tells in the in-between bits of his readings are as good as what Alexei does. All you have to be is 'any good'.