‘Snow, snow, snow / is how the snow speaks, / is how the page reads.’[1] in Simon Armitage’s (2020) Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems London, Faber & Faber; “… carved into the rocky escarpment on the exposed flank of Pule Hill, …. Thus far it’s the only one to be vandalised.’[2]
Reading inscriptions in stone is a very different experience from reading the same pattern of words in the text of a book. That’s a very obvious point. But even comparing the text of the poem as it stands in this book and the photograph above from a fellow blogger doesn’t capture the whole of that difference – photographs still giving no more than illusions of depth and environmental effect on both text and reader. To begin with one must walk to read the inscribed-in-stone text and take in the effects of environmental context at different levels and involving different kinds of readable object, from the ancient and monumental, the more recent monuments of quarry and the vents to an underground tunnel and the work of both man and nature in the making of the many facets of Pule Hill.
Texts can’t be felt or sensed other than by cognitive mediation beginning at the eyes and progressing to the visual cortex, picking up signals and associations from other parts of the brain that specialise on the discovery of meanings from stereotyped signs. Ultimately they involve visual discrimination between black text and white page. If colour, or smell exist in these kind of readings they exist as epiphenomena not as direct impulses at a range of sense detectors. It is these mutiple sense detectors, including touch, smell and heat registers, which make reading a ‘stanza stone’ a different experience to reading the reproducible poem divorced from its stone and possible but unusual other contexts.
So why start like this? I think because the poem invites us to test its ontology – what it fundamentally IS before we think about what it MEANS. We won’t therefore read the poem at all until epistemological considerations are backed up by ontological ones. Let’s look at those lines in the title again:
Snow, snow, snow
is how the snow speaks,
is how its clean page reads.
Snow ibid:86
Do the words in a poem ‘speak’? If so, in what ways do they contact the organs of speech production? How do cognitive elements become hearde oral ones when we read poetry? And what relation to spoken word does written word have? The answers to these puzzles inhere in complex issues of translation of representations of thought or feeling between different media. Yet the written poem has no ontology – is literally nothing unless the poem insists it is about how performative verbs like ‘speaks’ and ‘reads’ are understood when we speak and read a poem.
And poetry does these acts of self-questioning by comparing the look of snow to the relationship between the repeated visible sign and audible inner or outer articulation that is the word ‘Snow’ said thrice. A ‘clean page’ is a new page on which the writer rediscovers himself, as if for the first time, because unsullied by past writings. This new start presupposes that we can read the blank white page before it is written on and that this page is also a speech as yet unsullied by prints or print.
Yet no poem is inviolable. Writing about the Stanza Stone above in the Introduction, Armitage says it is now a thing handed over from him to the people to whom it may really belong. There is an acceptance that this Stanza Stone alone of others on the walk to Ilkley is ‘vandalised: ‘Just bored kids throwing rocks, probably, but a useful caution against being a priest in your own parish’.[3]
My own reading of this accepts that Armitage is still ready to admit that the pretensions of poetry have sometimes to give way to the needs of readers – youths ill served by school, the law and social work (Armitage was a probation officer at the time when these were social workers). I think he is on the side of the bored kids if poets insist on being remote from these kids: authoritative fatherly priests rather than companions on a walk or other journey.
That is why I love Armitage’s work and this volume, though much of it is recompiled from past volumes, strikes chord with me because his journey from Marsden started off from a similar place to mine in West Yorkshire on the cusp of the Pennines and of Lancashire. His take on the Marsden habitation rings with mine of Honley, where too, at night:
.., the horizon brimmed with a darkness like outer space, crowding the corner of the eye, thickening and deepening at the back of the mind.
ibid: viii
Marsden cannot quite be contained in ‘the mundane and commonplace’. And what exists outside that range is that usually addressed by the priest, the infinite. Marsden folks too, bored youths included, who have a right of access to the infinite, symbolised by ‘the truer proportion of Marsden’s territory being a vast emptiness, full of terrifying and electrifying possibilities’.[4]
These poems cover Armitage’s career with some few new additions but with many poems from the earlier volumes which tend to be forgotten as poets age and acquire status. They are re-ordered though with no regard to chronology of writing but rather to give a tour of the surroundings. Near its end is one of the great comic prose poems in which he excels. Here he imagines himself taking part in tour showing the famous poet ‘Armitage’ whilst in disguise. The tour is organised by a young man to whom he has become a myth. And, as a myth, entirely remote from Marsden. Talking of a fictional statue to the poet, another local tour member says:
… a lot of people in this village said the money should have gone to the Children’s Hospice instead. …’ Goofy said, ‘And once Armitage had packed his bags for Los Angeles he never came back.’
Bringing it all Back Home ibid: 77.
And the poems otherwise examine the role of the poet in terms of his claims to derive poems of both local mundane and universal otherworldly. Hence these poems often relate to a parental culture of the local that had NOT been unappreciated whilst it endured but which takes on momentous meaning, as our parents often do.
Thus the two short poems lamenting a father The Spelling and Fisherwood.[5]. Fisherwood contains 6 stanzas of 2 lines each and remembers how a son is given a key in trust by his parents. That concrete-object which is the door key to the house is ‘noosed around his neck’ in a way that contains both security for a ‘son’, trust edged with its lack in the parents and a promise of overwhelmingly inappropriate punishment. At its end though is that universal of the looming blackness of the Marsden Moors, wherein complex emotions introjected from, and projected into, the parents lives within the spaces created by a son’s now existential loss of rootedness:
under my eyelids, northern lights
and solar flares shimmer and rage.
Fisherwood ibid: 73
It was right to rehearse in this volume some of the early poems, of course. The early poem Zoom is intelligent about how poets use the term ‘measure’ to plan poetic lines but also to contrast that which yields easily to quantitative measurement and that literally beyond measure, other than the qualitative:
It’s just words
I assure them. But they will not have it.
Zoom ibid: 45
The truth is, of course, that transcendent quality in poetry is no more nor less than ‘words’ just as are Planning Acts. Poets know this and know that ontolgy of a poem lies in the how words ‘speak’ and how they ‘read’ to evoke that which is beyond speech and writing not in some arcane knowledge.
Marsden Mill
If you know Marsden and even West Yorkshire you’ll love this book not only for the intensity of the recollection of a life based in that area but also for its map endpapers, by Neil Gower, and its photographs. And, for the truth Armitage truly believes that great art is in part an attitude that waits for revelation whilst promoting it, a relationship between what is local in the self and something grandiose in the cosmos. And this is the inheritance of all of us and can come from David Bowie or Henry Moore. As Bowie- Major Tom ships out ‘for the last time, touching up his mascara, lowering his visor’, Armitage waits in the ‘crook’ of art to meet the transcendent trick of time and mortality:
I wandered down the big Henry Moore in the park[6] and lay on my back in the crook of its cold bronze curve, watching the skies, waiting for the crematorium of the night to open its vast doors and the congregation of stars to take their places and the ceremony to begin.
A New Career in a New Town ibid:20
I can’t recommend this or any other Armitage volumes too highly. My other blogs on him concern his appearance at Todmorden Literature Festival and his volume The Unaccompanied.
Steve
[1] Snow The first of the Stanza Stone poems located on Pule Hill, Marsden, in Armitage (2020: 85)
[2] Introduction in ibid: xii
[3] ibid:xii
[4] ibid: viii
[5] ibid: 72f.
[6] This park is actually the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, hence the Moore, but the thoughts of a poetic career are Marsden thoughts. It comes from the volume Flit set in the country Ysp (get the joke!), and is based on the experience of living within the Park alone (and it is a vast Yorkshire moor) overnight.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 
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