Simon Armitage
The acclaimed poet on humour, being a Northerner, and his latest collection, Seeing Stars.
Multi award-winning poet Simon Armitage has achieved the rare feat of making contemporary poetry cool again (although by using the word ‘cool’ here, we’re clearly not remotely cool ourselves), with his streetwise jargon, Northern vernacular and modern subject matter. Here’s a bit more about the former probation officer and ‘finest poet of his generation’.
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Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire. Having graduated from Portsmouth University, where he studied Geography, he went on to write his MA thesis at Manchester University on the effects of television violence on young offenders, and until 1994 he worked as Probation Officer in Greater Manchester.
He burst onto the literary scene in 1989, with the publication of his first volume, Zoom!, and since then he has published a further nine volumes of poetry including Killing Time (1999) and Selected Poems (2001), both with Faber & Faber. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award.
He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles. His recent dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA.
His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001, and his second, The White Stuff was published in 2004. He has also published two volumes of autobiography, the most recent being Gig, an account of his lifelong love affair with rock music.
Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and is currently a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Other anthologies include Short and Sweet – 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry. His latest collection, Seeing Stars, is out now.
Seeing Stars
Simon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshippers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; and, the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer - celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball. 'I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-like balm in my huge, coffin shaped head. I have a brain the size of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled to my opinions. I am a sperm whale. When I breathe in, the fluid in my head cools to a dense wax and I nosedive into the depths. My song, available on audiocassette and compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and those who have 'pitched the quavering canvas tent of their thoughts on the rim of the dark crater' - from The Christening. The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'. Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.
Read more about Seeing Stars at Lovereading.co.uk
