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Simon Armitage Reads at the Todmorden book Festival, The Todmorden Hippodrome 1^st November

One of the questions asked of Simon Armitage on this evening was to define a prose poem. From the master of them in Seeing Stars, this was an appropriate enough question, especially since one of the highly appealing readings he gave was ‘The Sommelier’ from his recent Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) Collection, Flit. The poem is also in his new collection of occasional poems, Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic p. 114ff. Here’s a sip of a part where the writer, having mistaken a wine-tasting event for a pub in Ysp (the fictional country imagined from the original context of the Sculpture Park) and now in the swing of talking wine-tasting language:

.… ‘Plums. Tobacco. Chocolate, ‘ I proposed after downing a mid-price Argentinian Malbec. ‘Very good, ‘ said our host. A few glasses later, after a ripe and well-balanced Zinfandel and a somewhat indistinct Pinot Noir, I blurted out, ‘Rhododendron.’ ‘OK,’ he said, a little warily. ‘Bovril. Cement. Old man’s slipper,’ I shouted. ‘You’ve tasted an old man’s slipper?’ he came back. ‘I have now,’ I said, waving a glass of Chianti Classico in his direction. The room exploded with laughter, after which there was no stopping me. Someone had to get the party started, and anyway, who did he think he was – the pope or something? – passing amongst us with the blood of Christ. … (115)

Armitage’s answer with regard to the prose-poem got us no further in understanding this particular  prose-poem (it wasn’t intended to), although he said some wonderful things about the role of lines and circumambient spaces in defining poetry. And in retrospect, I wonder if the term ‘prose poem’ helps much at all.

When poets write they claim access to a world (or a country like Ysp) made of language used and crafted with great skill over which they have some if not absolute authority. In a sense this extract, and the poem as a whole, feels to me about that authority. It is at least a dual authority. First, a figure who creates worlds out of specialist language but in that sense no greater a figure than the sommelier who creates a world out of specialist language where naming is regulated and experience has too its own register of choice words. The second is a voice that can talk ‘sommelier’ with some demonstrable personal learning: ‘indistinct Pinot Noir’, for instance will only pass as meaningful in select contexts. However, this voice is capable of disordering that world by disordering the register’s of language and image allowed in it. They can taste an ‘old man’s slipper’ in a way that no sommelier could and imprint that taste on he collective consciousness of an audience. That latter Dionysius calls out Apollo like poets in this passage in a comic translation of Nietzsche on Greek tragedy. You are not a Pope. You do not possess ‘the blood of Christ’, only the artifice of elevated language.

This disruption of a traditional craft of verse by a disordered drunk is very much the model of Armitage’s verse. He can return poetry to a wider register without having to claim to ‘purify the language of the tribe’: his language aims at popularity but can also be floored by the fact that the bearer of poetic authority gets his own back in the end, rounding the experience into a structure that still makes claims to legislate for their newly created world – in this case Ysp. The drunk in the prose-poem was ‘surprised how much knowledge (he’d) gained that night’ and must accept his place as apprentice maker of worlds and wines.

Armitage’s poetry combines worlds – of informal prose, with its democratic exchanges of ‘he said… I said’, and the ‘formality and ritual’ of the poem. It is these terms describing the art of the sommelier from which the pom escapes, only for the sommelier to return at the end and get his own back.

Hearing Armitage is much like that drunken party – we laugh and applaud the joker disrupting the expectations of poetic language and form  in the verse, enjoying its immediacy to us. Occasionally it reminds us of its own ritual formality – its world-creating wizardry. Poets are I think today always liable to be dopplegangers: defenders of the formal Apollonian lyric in the end whilst blasting the hierarchical languages that view sometimes presents in the process of world-creation – and shattering that world along the way.

So this evening was complex. Entertaining and fun and that, perhaps is all we can be said to have simply enjoyed, but also sometimes unbearably complexly moving when we access new worlds; no longer safe and common but heightened, beautiful and dangerously unstable. In one beautiful lyric also read that night about ritual murder/execution validated by a bugler’s music: ‘The Parting-Shot’ (Sandettie … p. 15):

          tears which fall from his face and bloom

 on his ironed green shirt like two dark wounds.

              Then the world swims and drowns

                   In everyone else’s eyes too.