ON POETRY - Simon Armitage's 9/11

“Am I more of a poet than a man of prose? “


That is the question I was asked very recently. Nor, having observed the questioner’s efforts with interest, was I in a position to answer it - except in very general terms. Poetry is prose on the wing - a paean to the transcendence of the human spirit and the beauty of the human thought. The Germans put all their poetry into their music. The Anglo-Saxons put their music into their poetry. The Africans put poetry into their voices. But post-modern poetry, even under the spell of individual eloquence, is bereft of harmonic contemplation. This is the age of the common man, an age of violence, not of poets, and anyone doing verse today, should be prepared, in my humble, untrained opinion, to do it for his own blog rather than municipal masturbation.

Which, incidentally, also holds true for modern art.

Modern art is God’s personal joke on the greedily rich who are compelled to vie for the latest artistic conception in such places as New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. But then, perhaps, I am not qualified to deny the world her versifiers. The Romantic age of Byron, Keats and Sir Walter Scott, opened the notion of poetry to me, rather than Dylan Thomas or Ezra Pound, as did the purple of ancient ballades with their lasting refrains, from Francois Villon to the likes of Baudelaire and Verlaine, or the German romantic movement, Schlegel and Novalis, sooner than the Communist poet Berthold Brecht.

To prove my point, and for what it is worth, here is the link to a Poem for 9/11, Simon Armitage’s 878-line “elegy”, to provide an example of what I have in mind. Read it at your own peril:


Out of the Blue

All lost.
All lost in the dust.
Lost in the fall and the crush and the dark.
Now all coming back.
I’m afraid, as a non-specialist in poetry-processing, what I see are monotonous one-dimensional rhymes, lacking in the ability to radiate charisma, the type of construct that pasty-faced male geeks sometimes send in to local papers:

Then a thump or a thud
But a Pepsi Max jumps out of its cup,
and a filing cabinet spews its lunch.
...and predictable imagery:

The cables, wires, pipes and ducts,
The veins and fibres and nerves and guts
exposed and loose.
Nor did I find the deep emotion and the cry of anguish, that touch of tragic agony, in any of these “limericks.” Above all, I miss the craftsman. This is the natter of an overactive mind, rather than of true vocation. The sort of poetry it is easy to say no to; weighed down with placement stereotypes, inert and passive, rather than impassioned.

Municipal establishments that are also forced to endure the office of Poet Laureate (albeit that this one is still “in waiting”), very obviously, are no longer considering art as a two-way process but as a clash between public ambition and personal aberration. Arthur Schopenhauer said, a “married philosopher” is a contradiction of terms, and so, in my opinion is an itinerant poetaster or “writer in residence” who is exempt, apparently, from public flogging. The very prototype of the window-licking special needs geek. I expect this is his flagship poetry used for spiritual showing off, semi-official auditioning and the loveless beguilement of paid office-holders. Somehow, the pain other people experience becomes pain he has elevated to a personal poetic possession. How terminally desperate would a versifier have to be before he got round to invading the privacy of a broken heart with this sort of trash. To me this is the most stultifying poetry outside junior high. A dullness so intense that it is almost a physical ache. There are parts of verse where you have to say “Shut up, shut up!!” out loud.

here is a calendar, counting the days.
Here is a photograph snug in is frame,

this is my wife on her wedding day,
here is a twist of her English hair.

Here is a picture in purple paint:
two powder-paint towers, heading for space.


I was told of a visiting American relative who refused to read it, on the grounds that it made him want to throw up. How can anyone accept this as poetry, when in fact it looks to me like the very antithesis of it. Every skyscraper in Manhattan is now some sort of symbol for the annual pilgrimage of poet acolytes who come for the pretext of personal sacrifice and pixie propitiation that are the new poetic testament. So 9/11 has long since become a public sore invariably stereotyped by the repetitive pictures of pleading flames swaying brightly against the blackness of the human heart. But it’s only if you really care about something that you can get sufficiently infuriated when soulless zombies disparage it.

Let me be very clear here, lyric aridity is an attribute which defines its possessor's soullessness. Instead of creating a poem, this man created a void.




Dreamy