Debaters,
Armitage's poetry - and all the bad in that - is there in this prose. But
much of what he says is good, although I think that Armitage is the
beneficiary of the - yes - healthy state of poetry in this country, rather
than the finder of wisdom. I would reverse RC's point about Pound: "a
Poetry Testing Kit", "rule-of-thumb", "laboratory conditions" - I think
Simon has been at his (or his local library's) _ABC of Reading_. Both like
the sound of science: it means that you don't have to mention feelings.
Pound is averse to these; Armitage thinks they will put the lads off poetry.
Which the feelings that are commonly seen as poetic - lambs etc. - probably
will. The strenuously offhand tone Armitage adopts is a descendent of that
which permeates the _ABC_: it's a mode of distancing life from reading
poetry. English as exercises . . tools . . specimens: the poetry that I
study like this won't cause me to question how I live; it won't intrude when
I spout about usury or simple cures for poverty; it won't tell me that
Armitage's desperate hipness is a willed attempt to play by rules that no
one is compelled to play by. There are (to continue the metaphor) other
rules; better ones; and poetry is part of those better rules, if the person
who seeks - the reader, or writer - does not deny that what makes her/him
interested in poetry is that part of them that wants more than what they
have been given, rather than the part that is prepared to apologize for
shrunk horizons.
(The obvious shrunk horizon is the low level of this piece: I assumed it was
for junior schools. I can't imagine many 11-18 year-olds letting Poetry into
their life at the call of the "The Magic Eye Test": - All were amazed. "What
have we here?" they said as they talked the matter over.)
By "healthy conditions" I meant that Armitage is very much the beneficiary
of Pound's hard work. The colloquial language Armitage's poetry uses - the
default poetry-language of today - is only there because Pound hated slop,
slither and dead-wood words. If Pound had not cut the new wood, Simon
Armitage would not have cut it for himself (and us). A poet writing today
starts in a better position than one a hundred years ago: poetry that
acknowledges the colloquial as the point of departure acknowledges poetry's
connexion to life. That Armitage stops there - with the accepted poetic
diction of the day (colloquial but not to the point of shaking, lexically or
syntactically, Standard English) - is his limitation; it's why he isn't a
good poet.
James
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