Armitage Arms Poems with Power

British poet Simon Armitage has had a prolific writing career. Beginning with his first collection of poems in 1989 and spanning 13 volumes since, Armitage’s poetry has grown up with a whole generation of British children, taking its place in the high school English literature curriculum alongside Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. As well as teaching creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, Armitage embarks regularly on reading tours and on Tuesday, he held a poetry reading in the Woodberry Poetry Room in the Houghton Library.

Armitage’s profile has been steadily rising over the past 15 years since he quit his job as a probation officer and became a full-time poet. His output is marked by an impressive versatility; he has written for radio and TV, produced song lyrics for award-winning musical documentaries, and translated a gem of the medieval literary canon, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” into modern English verse. Primarily, though, he is a lyric poet, specializing in “lively, mysterious, revelatory” poems, according to English Professor James Simpson, who introduced Armitage at the Woodberry event.

In recent years, though, Armitage has turned to the subject of war in his work. In 2008 he published “The Not Dead,” a collection of poems inspired by the testimonies of veterans from the Gulf, Bosnian, and Malayan wars. He is currently contemplating a trip to Afghanistan to produce a documentary for the BBC and to gather material for poems based on conversations with British troops. Armitage says he is aware that such a project would be fraught with ethical and logistical difficulties. “I certainly wouldn’t go there with the idea of becoming a spokesperson for the army or an apologist for the war,” he says. “I’m interested in human stories, in what it takes for a young man or a young woman to leave home at 18 years old and suddenly find themselves transported into a situation where they might be killed for their country, about what it is to miss people, and what it is to come home.”

In his poetry, Armitage has often focused on telling the stories of others, most notably in “Feltham Sings,” a 2002 documentary set in a young offenders’ institution near London. Responding to transcribed interviews with inmates, Armitage produced song lyrics for each to perform on camera, with the aim of empowering them to tell their own stories. One song began, “Brother did time, mother did time, uncle did time, now it’s my turn.” Despite his commitment to remaining “neutral”in these projects—which blend lyric poetry with documentary and biography—Armitage conceives of them as acts of artistic and social generosity. “A lot of people that we worked with have never had anything given to them,” Armitage says, “so for somebody to write a poem for them, taking into account their language and their situation, and give it back to them... that can be a very meaningful experience.”

Although Armitage has demonstrated a serious commitment to performing his poetry both internationally and within the UK—next year he plans on busking his way through the north of England in the style of an itinerant minstrel—he still thinks of his poems as primarily textual experiences. “By and large, I write for the page, for the inner eye and the inner ear,” he says. And despite the meticulous research that goes into his translations and his collaborations, Armitage is still most fond of his more personal poetry, which he refers to as his “daydream poems.” “They’re the things I want to write for the rest of my life,” he says.

Whether collaborating creatively with the disenfranchised or teaching creative writing in universities, Armitage treats his role as a poet as a fundamentally social one. This is partly through necessity—“You can’t make a living as a poet just by writing poems,” he says—but also, it seems, because he has a passion for engaging individuals as well as audiences. Referring to his teaching job, he acknowledges the limitations of education in the creative arts but is adamant about the possibilities. “If they’re not set up for poetry, you can’t change that,” he says, “but what you can do is inspire, motivate, cast a bit of a spell over people.”