Simon Armitage Not Actually a Sperm Whale
British poet Simon Armitage (b. 1963, Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire) was in town this week for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series (still tickets available for Naomi Shihab Nye's second night, May 8).
We wanted to clear up the whale thing right away. He says right there in the first line of "The Christening"--"I am a sperm whale"--and it's not true. This is why people don't trust poets. That and because they're usually sleeping with your date.
Other beginnings include "We went out into the school yard together," "Three walked barefoot into the sea," "You're beautiful because you're classically trained," "The couple next door was testing the structural fabric of the house with their difference of opinion," "Meanwhile, somewhere in the state of Colorado," "They'd overloaded the plane," "I left a spelling at my father's house," and "You're twelve, thirteen at most."
You wouldn't think it, but these poems were frequently punctuated by loud laughter. What you do notice, though, is Armitage is not straining to hit that elevated, lyric note. He is making a show of speaking to you.
In some ways, he's like the British Billy Collins, perhaps slightly less obsessed with death and jazz (and more with spent youth and manhood), but equally plainspoken and willing to drop in a punchline for the cheap seats. But there are poems like "The Shout" that slips on the suicide inserted so casually near the end--a self-portrait of a modern man being sensitive to the death of whatshisname. Maybe this goes over better in schoolboy-haunted Britain.
In conversation later, Armitage discusses one of the bigger fish he's landed, a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that went off particularly well, shades of Seamus Heaney's tackling of Beowulf. This gives him reason to mention how Ted Hughes--"the poet from over the hill"--lit his poetic fire with his animal poems, how Hughes' "wodwo" connected him to Gawain, and how Tolkien's antique translation of Gawain struck him as somehow sounding older than the original. And of course he includes his hat-in-hand visit to the British Library to see the original manuscript, only to be warned by a librarian that "There aren't many pictures in it."
