The Poetry of Simon Armitage

The Poetry of Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire in 1963. He studied

Geography at Portsmouth, and Psychology at Manchester, qualified as a

social worker and worked for six years as a probation officer. He has

also worked as a shelf stacker, disc jockey and lathe operator. He is

now a freelance writer and broadcaster. His work includes song lyrics,

plays and scripts for TV and radio.

Armitage's first collection, Zoom, was published by Bloodaxe in 1989.

Subsequent poetry books, all published by Faber, include Kid (1992),

Book of Matches (1993), The Dead Sea Poems (1995), Moon Country (1996)

and CloudCuckooLand(1997).

Untitled Poem: "I am very bothered when I think..."

This poem comes from Book of Matches, 1993. It appears to be based on

memories of Armitage's schooldays. He says that:

"most poetry has to come from personal experience of one kind or

another."

The first two lines actually come from a probation service

questionnaire, but Armitage has chosen to use them in a different

context. Here he tells the story of a science lab prank that went

wrong.

The person in the poem heated up a pair of tongs and then handed them

to another person, presumably a girl. This girl innocently slipped

them onto her fingers and was badly burnt. The doctor said that she

would be "marked for eternity" by the ring-shaped scars. The narrator

claims now that he was using this as a way of attracting her

attention:

"that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,

of asking you if you would marry me."

The language in stanza two emphasises this idea of a marriage proposal

with words such as ...

... middle of paper ...

...

* What was the final demand?

* What did the note of explanation say?

From all these details we can guess what might have happened, but we

cannot know for certain. But this does not matter: it's the thought

processes involved that are more important.

The structure of the poem is a series of rhyming couplets, although

some of them are not complete rhymes. The opening couplet sets up a

steady, regular rhythm. This is orderly and satisfying and perhaps

suggests the "regularity of police methods". The longer lines have

four beats and the shorter ones have two beats, until the last two

lines, where the regular rhythm seems to break down. "That was

everything" is ambiguous: it could mean that the list has finished, or

it could mean that the ring is the item that was most important. It

finishes off the poem.