It's the end of the news of the world as we know it. I wasn't really meaning to blog about that, I just thought of the line while we were watching the news late last night. I did find the comment from one of the many pundits that of course once you close an organisation you don't need to keep all the records rather chilling. If our politicians, police and judiciary were wise and truly eager for all the facts to emerge, they would work out what sort of order they have to make to ensure that the shredding does not begin, and make it before next Monday. Though what with the close links between some politicans and the Murdoch press, and the Met officers who apparently took payment to pass on information, and the other Met officers who closed the previous investigation down prematurely, there do seem to be rather a lot of people for whom, as Terry Pratchett put it, 'the truth shall make ye fret'.
I was watching the late news with my very late supper because I had spent the evening listening to the poet Simon Armitage reading from his poems and prose, and discussing his work as a poet. This was part of the Ipswich Arts Festival, which I didn't even know was on until it was nearly over, and the tickets to hear Simon Armitage were kindly organised by one of my colleagues. She had asked her husband if he would like to go, and his response was that given the choice between an evening at a poetry reading and having root canal work he thought he'd opt for the trip to the dentist, so it became a works outing, and three of us went.
The only book I possess so far by Simon Armitage is a collection of short (13 lines or less so excluding sonnets) poems that he edited, and which contains a couple of his, but I've heard him on the radio, and liked what I knew so far. The reading was held in a grand high ceilinged room in the Victorian town hall, which got rather stuffy by the interval, but we had a great time.
Simon Armitage has been around for a while as a poet. He is my age (middle aged) but started young. Asked what got him into writing poetry he said it was partly because he came from a really gobby family, and could never think of a rejoiner quickly enough, so his comeback was to go upstairs and ten years later emerge with a poem that said what he thought. By his own account he was drifting along as a teenager when he read some Ted Hughes, and the light lit in his head. After university he became a probation officer. By his mid-twenties he was a published poet with a smash hit on his hands (in poetry terms). His work now encompasses poetry, essays,a very well-regarded translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two novels, and collaborations on documentary films.
He is from Yorkshire. Faced with a southern audience, he teased us gently about this, suspecting (correctly) that we would find the idea of Huddersfield intrinsically faintly comic (especially a power breakfast in Huddersfield with Disney executives. Imagine), and letting us know that he knew. There are a few self-conscious stage Yorkshiremen around in the media that are so irritating they make me instantly flick radio channels, but Simon Armitage comes across as entirely genuine, thoughtful, considered in his responses, with a wry sense of humour. He manages a nice strain of diffidence along Alan Bennett lines without overdoing it (an easy temptation, and so annoying, if you have multiple books to your credit and are speaking to a packed hall).
The prose extracts he read to us were very funny. There was one which distilled all the most embarassing readings he had ever given into one tale of disaster (the over-anxious hostess, the pre- and post-reading cafe meals ordered to a stictly limited tight budget, the sign-language interpreter despite the lack of any signing deaf people in the audience, the host for his overnight stay who had prepared a selection of his own poem's for Armitage's perusal, the airbed in a room shared with the owner's dog) shading into a portrait of life's sadness (the down and outs in the shopping centre to which he fled at dawn to await his train home, the copy of his own book in the bin outside Oxfam. I won't give away the final twist with that one). Also his account of visiting the British Library for the first time, and asking to see the manuscript of Sir Gawain. There had been frost on the pavement in Yorkshire that morning and he was wearing an anorak and heavy boots. As he stood there sweating the librarian took him to be a nutter, and as all the other readers stared at him he was too embarassed by the entire experience to say that he was a published poet and had been commissioned to write a new translation. Instead he found himself back at Kings Cross half an hour later having been fobbed off into buying postcards of the illustrations. Which were very nice. Or so he says. True or not, it was howlingly funny.
He says that writing does not come easily to him, and so his poems are developed through multiple drafts, alone and in silence, weighing and considering every word and shade of meaning. Several of those he read seemed familiar, and I don't know if that's because I have heard them on the radio, or read them in the Picadilly Waterstones when looking at his books, or just that they sound right and that makes them seem something previously encountered. Several of the poems he read yesterday were surreal juxtopositions of the everday and the fanciful. Here is one which he didn't read to us, but which is one of the first of his I read, and which whetted my appetite for his work:
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn't spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.
And for his mum he hired a private nurse
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.
Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
I can't copy out the ones he did read, because I don't have those collections, but I shall be getting them, also Sir Gawain, which has been on my Amazon wish-list for a long while. Listening to his translation I was reminded of Heaney's version of Beowulf, as it had the same use of internal rhymes and alliteration. I should have liked to ask whether the originals were similar, or had been written at around the same time, but it seemed too showy-offy a question for a public session and I thought I could go away and look the anwer up later. Listening to his other poems I began to think that he uses a fair bit of alliteration anyway in his normal style.
His poems are on the school exam syllabuses, and there was a good smattering of school pupils there. Mostly girls. I don't remember studying any living poets for English 'O' level, and our teacher certainly never took us to a poetry reading.
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