“Poetry is about subtlety and signals, about nods and winks, so the minute somebody gets up and starts braying loudly in polemical terms is often the antithesis of what defines poetry,” he says. “The loud hailer approach doesn’t serve poetry well. Poetry is the art form that tries to think before it speaks.”
With poetry, one can also say the unsayable and make it be heard, and with the UK’s national curriculum embracing the form, Armitage adds: “Relatively speaking, poetry reading has been a marginalised activity of the British public. But this is one of the reasons I went into it. Most poets have made a conscious effort to step aside from something that’s more mainstream.”
His literary powers stretch to novel writing and theatrical drama, but he wants to concentrate on poetry because “it’s a rare form that delights and excites me”, he says, adding that poetry is a dissenting art. “I don’t see poetry and theatre as being completely unconnected. In some ways I think of theatre as the origin of poetry.”
Sue Townsend once described him as a celebrator of the real world, much like another English writer to whom Armitage has been compared: Alan Bennett. “We do different things, but I take that I’ve been compared with him as a huge compliment because he’s one of this country’s most gifted writers. He has strong political opinions which he transmits through continuous ongoing writing. He’s almost a Samuel Pepys-type character. I love his common touch and if that’s the area of comparison, then I appreciate it.”
In 2008, Armitage also strayed tastefully and with wry humour into the rock world when he wrote a short prose poem for Paul Weller’s 22 Dreams album booklet entitled The Missing Dream: “I was thrilled to do it,” he says of the request, but is quick to make a distinction. “Pop songs aren’t poems, they’re lyrics. Poems exist just as language. They don’t have vocal delivery, they don’t have a backbeat or harmonies. They’re just words. What you find when you take away the music from a song is that you have a bad poem, often with mixed metaphor and hypermetric syllables. But that’s not a criticism of their art because lyric writing is incredibly difficult, but it’s music that gives it its power.”
Growing up reading Ted Hughes, Larkin, Thom Gunn, Sylvia Plath and the Beat Generation poets influenced him greatly. “I was drawn to the style. I’m not sure poets have anything different to say than novelists, but it’s the manner in which things are said that makes them different. The attraction was the economy and compact nature of the language of poetry.”
Here we sat in sunshine and in cloud
