Ian Gregson

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Biographical note:  Ian Gregson’s latest book of poems is How We Met (Salt, 2008). Call Centre Love Song, a selection of his poems, was shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize. He has published poems and reviews in the London Review of Books, the TLS and Poetry Review, amongst others. His critical books are Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism, The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity iin Postwar Poetry (both published by Macmillan), Postmodern Literature, Hodder Arnold, 2004) and The New Poetry In Wales (University of Wales Press, 2007). Since 1977 he has taught in the English department at the university in Bangor and is now a Professor there.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717675
ISBN:  9781844717675
Author:  Ian Gregson
Title:  Simon Armitage
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jan-11
Extent:  112pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8.232 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Simon Armitage is one of the most compelling figures in contemporary literature, most conspicuously because of his charismatic style, but also because he has brought into poetry an irreverent, streetwise gusto and a kind of knowledge that often seems to come from outside poetry altogether. This book nonetheless shows that he is a considerable intellectual whose key concerns include space and place, and gender.

Main description:  Simon Armitage is one of the most compelling figures in contemporary literature, most conspicuously because of his charismatic style, but also because he has brought into poetry an irreverent, streetwise gusto and a kind of knowledge that often seems to come from outside poetry altogether.

But this book is organised thematically in order to stress that Armitage is a considerable intellectual who tackles a wide range of issues. Geography is one of these: his poetry represents a shift in paradigm from time to space. So his poems continuously express a spatial awareness which creates the particular kinds of specificity – of location and imagery – which give his work depth in the metaphorical sense. Another key concern is gender: Armitage’s reflections on masculinity are a consistent feature of all his writing, and he is especially acute about the drives and insecurities that fuel the most obsessive and off-handed, apparently gratuitously destructive behaviour.

However serious the issue, though, Armitage retains his affinity for the comic mode. He is drawn to its earthy, unpretentious idioms, and its exhilarating habit of dwelling on the possibilities of renewal and happy endings.

That makes the recent ecological turn in Armitage’s writing especially promising. I am certain that this is a direction his work will increasingly take; but his fondness for the comic mode ensures that he will approach the subject with a vivid sense of how the ecocentric and the anthropocentric incongruously mingle, and of the still open possibilities for change and regeneration.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Armitage’s Texts
Introduction
Armitage’s Contexts
Armitage’s Voices
Armitage: Man And Boy
Armitage’s Changes Of Place
Index

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Simon Armitage is one of the most compelling figures in contemporary literature, most conspicuously because of his charismatic style:

Sweatshop, mop and bucket,
given brush, shop floor,
slipped up, clocked in
half stoned, shown door.

Backwoodsman number, joiner,
timber, lumber, trouble,
axe fell, sacked for prank
with spirit-level bubble.

Sales rep, basic training,
car, own boss, P.A.
commission, targets,
stuff that, cards same day.

These lines from ‘C.V.’ (The Dead Sea Poems, p. 7) are characteristic in creating a surface that immediately grabs attention with driving rhythms and colloquial energy. They are created in this case by short lines and obvious rhymes, and by the exclusion of definite, and indefinite, articles, and of conjunctions, so that nouns and verbs are made emphatically prominent. The resultant fast pacing creates a comic effect from the implication that the speaker is incorrigibly accident-prone – each quatrain, by its last line, has him fired from each new job. Each time, however, Armitage finds a new phrase for being fired, drawing upon a stock of colloquial phrases that simultaneously reveals how large and various that stock actually is, and injects a vivid sense of a contemporary speaker. These effects of poetic voice are highly visible (or audible) in Armitage's poems and I dedicate a whole chapter, ‘Armitage's Voices’ to discussing them. So, here, each stanza's working of variations on the theme of being sacked builds momentum relentlessly, and that momentum is also impelled by other, more local variations. For example, there is a set worked around the motif of wood in the second stanza quoted here, which refers to carpentry, but also discovers metaphors relevant to the speaker's disastrous career, where wood is implicated in questions of joining and being ostracised, and finding yourself ‘in lumber'. Critics of metaphysical poetry would call that a ‘conceit', but in Armitage's hands it is exhilaratingly of the here and now and linked to a knowledge of contemporary music, with hints of a sort of ‘hook’ (Armitage's fondness for strategic repetition often suggests this too), and also with a post-punk sensibility of a ‘never-mind-the-bollocks’ kind.

The application of that attitude to literature explains much of Armitage's newness in the poetry world:

bookish people imagine themselves as purists, but are actually perverts, belonging to a deviant culture. The appropriation of poetry by the literati can be quite properly compared with the enclosure of common land in England, the Highland Clearances and the hijacking of ancient medicine by Western science. We should never be surprised by the way in which the privileged minorities eventually take control of every valuable commodity, but how much more exciting it would have been if poetry had been commandeered by people who did more than sit at home with their thumbs up their arses.1

That irreverent gusto is a key input into Armitage's poetry. He was not alone in this attitude, and his rise was aided by the presence of others who came to prominence in the late 80s, among them most notably Carol Ann Duffy who is eight years older than Armitage and was already establishing a reputation when Armitage's first book appeared (she was sufficiently established to be able to review it in The Guardian). Armitage had also been helped by the presence of poets from a similar background to himself (including Ian McMillan and Geoff Hattersley) and by the poetry scene in Huddersfield where Peter Sansom – who was important for many young poets – ran poetry workshops at the local polytechnic, and where Armitage and others (as he describes in Gig, pp.275-6) sat and wrote poems together in the Merrie England coffee houses (which he has celebrated in Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid pp. 21-3).

In my chapter ‘Armitage's Contexts’ I discuss wider settings for his work, including the precedents set by two key forefathers, W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes. Armitage's distinctiveness arises to some extent from his way of assimilating those canonical predecessors, which is to do with his interpolation of his own version of their themes into stylistic contexts invented partly through the example of two other influences – Paul Muldoon and Frank O'Hara. What must be stressed, however, is that crucial input into his sensibility comes from outside poetry altogether, from the kind of knowledge he brought to his poems from subject-matter which had previously not been prominent in poetry. I want to simplify here in order to stress this point: Armitage is a geography graduate, and he brought into poetry, whose orientation had been above all towards history, a geographical sensibility. I explore this at length firstly in ‘Armitage's Contexts’ and then in my last chapter ‘Armitage's Changes of Place': his poetry represents a shift in paradigm from time to space. So his poems continuously express a spatial awareness which creates the particular kinds of specificity – of location and imagery – which are constitutive modes of expression in his work (including his novels and life writing, as well as his poems).

It is largely because Armitage's surfaces are so striking that his reviewers have sometimes implied that he lacks depth: but part of the point of his geographical sensibility is that his work is less about depth (as, for example, Seamus Heaney's is, with its obsession with wells and digging and archeological probing) than it is about extent, or extended surface. I would argue that this is one of the qualities that give his work depth in the metaphorical sense. And I have organised this book thematically in order to stress that Armitage is a considerable intellectual who tackles a wide range of issues which are of urgent contemporary import. One of these is gender; Armitage's focus on masculinity, which is the subject of my chapter ‘Armitage: Man and Boy', is important because it still gets ignored as an explicit issue. Even now many university English departments teach modules, with ‘Gender’ in their titles, which are actually only about women – as though only women had a gender. That is troublingly sexist and does a disservice to women, because it implies that women are gendered whereas masculinity is universal. Armitage's reflections on masculinity are a consistent feature of all his writing, and he is especially acute about the drives and insecurities that fuel the most obsessive and off-handed, apparently gratuitously destructive behaviour.

What makes these reflections especially worth reading, though, is that they are almost always connected to another of the most distinctively Armitagean qualities – his affinity for the comic mode. I mean by this first of all that he is very funny, and it is one of the many drawbacks of literary criticism that it allows too little scope for conveying this quality, other than to keep repeating that the writing is funny, which does not work either. So I want to say here that often in this book I am describing texts which made me laugh but whose comedy I necessarily could not do justice to. However, I mean more than this. Armitage's rueful comedy often resembles that in satirical novelists like Joseph Heller and Philip Roth who test the edges of humour with a self-reflexiveness that draws attention to the interpenetration of comedy and seriousness – as, for example, in Portnoy's Complaint, where the central character declares himself to be living his life ‘in the middle of the Jewish joke', declares that he is the son in the Jewish joke, ‘only it ain't no joke!'2 Armitage's affinity for comedy is a characteristic feature of his sensibility in that he is drawn to its earthy, unpretentious idioms, and its exhilirating habit of dwelling on the possibilities of renewal and happy endings. Armitage often deals with grave themes but he always returns to the messages of comedy, including those of the most positive kind whose provenance dates from before the absurdism of Heller and Roth.