Simon Armitage: Writing Poems

Not all of my poems are written from personal experience

but this one absolutely is.

This is the old harmonium.

So what you do is, you pump that.

HARMONIUM PLAYS

It just makes a really lovely sort of churchy noise.

Even though this poem is called Harmonium,

and on the surface it appears to be about a harmonium, this harmonium,

the actual musical instrument becomes an extended metaphor.

It's a poem about memories

and remembering my time in the church choir

and the fact that my dad is in the church choir as well.

Its relevance is to do with my relationship with my dad.

Harmonium.

The Farrand Chapelette was gathering dust

in the shadowy porch of Marsden Church.

And was due to be bundled off to the skip.

Or was mine, for a song, if I wanted it.

Sunlight, through stained glass,

which day to day could beatify saints and raise the dead,

had aged the harmonium's softwood case

and yellowed the fingernails of its keys.

And one of its notes had lost its tongue,

and holes were worn in both the treadles where the organist's feet,

in grey, woollen socks and leather-soled shoes,

had pedalled and pedalled.

But its hummed harmonics still struck a chord.

For a hundred years that organ had stood by the choristers' stalls,

where father and son, each in their time, had opened their throats

and gilded finches, like high notes, had streamed out.

Through his own blue cloud of tobacco smog, with smoker's fingers

and dottled thumbs, he comes to help me cart it away.

And we carry it flat,

laid on its back.

And he, being him, can't help but say

that the next box I'll shoulder through this nave

will bear the freight of his own dead weight.

And I, being me, then mouth in reply

some shallow or sorry phrase or word

too starved of breath to make itself heard.

One technique that's at work in the poem

is that I draw on lots of images of beauty, I suppose.

The gilded finches, these golden birds.

I invoke the saints,

the stained-glass window,

the sun coming through.

Also there's something quite comical as well about moments in the poem

about the organist pedalling away.

Me and my dad must look like two furniture removers

going down in the nave.

And I think what I'm doing in the poem is setting up this quite morbid

and dark remark that my dad's going to make towards the end of the poem.

I'm just doing all that to highlight the contrast.

He, being him, can't help but say

that the next box I'll shoulder through this nave

will bear the freight of his own dead weight.

And I, being me, then mouth in reply,

some shallow or sorry phrase or word

too starved of breath to make itself heard.

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

It's got an elegiac commemorative feel to it,

which I suppose is odd in some ways

because my dad is very much alive and kicking.

He's a larger-than-life character, my dad.

I think, in some ways, my dad in the poem is quite heroic

for being able to say what's on his mind.

But he says that as a sort of challenge to me as well,

and I can't respond.

I'm very sort of weedy and breathless.

I think I used the word shallow.

So, in the end, I think it's about me

and my inability to say the necessary thing.

In fact, my response is the poem.

When you say war poetry these days, people tend to presume

you're talking about the poets of the First World War.

They are the last generation of trained writers

and trained soldiers.

I've never been involved in a war, never been a soldier.

I'm probably a bit of a coward

so my route then into writing about conflict was to talk

to other people about their experiences

and to listen to their testimonies.

The Manhunt.

After the first phase,

after passionate nights and intimate days,

only then would he let me trace

the frozen river which ran through his face.

Only then would he let me explore the blown hinge of his lower jaw.

And handle and hold the damaged, porcelain collar-bone.

And mind and attend the fractured rudder of shoulder-blade,

and finger and thumb the parachute silk of his punctured lung.

Only then could I bind the struts

and climb the rungs of his broken ribs,

and feel the hurt of his grazed heart.

Skirting along, only then could I picture the scan,

the foetus of metal beneath his chest

where the bullet had finally come to rest.

Then I widened the search

traced the scarring back to its source

to a sweating, unexploded mine buried deep in his mind,

around which every nerve in his body had tightened and closed.

Then, and only then,

did I come close.

This poem is written through the experiences of

a soldier called Eddie.

A bullet had entered the side of his face.

The bullet had ricocheted around inside his body.

He wanted to talk about these injuries

and the way that they damaged his body and damaged his mind.

But the poem was actually written from the point of view

of Eddie's wife Laura,

and she's trying to find the real nature of him

and she's exploring that

by following the course that this bullet has taken through his body.

Only then would he let me trace

the frozen river which ran through his face,

only then would he let me explore the blown hinge of his lower jaw,

and handle and hold the damaged, porcelain collar-bone.

A lot of the imagery in the poem

and the language in the poem is borrowed from military vocabulary.

A lot of military ideas and words become metaphors for things

going on in the body and also things going on in the mind.

Only then could I bind the struts

and climb the rungs of his broken ribs,

and feel the hurt of his grazed heart.

Skirting along, only then could I picture the scan,

the foetus of metal beneath his chest

where the bullet had finally come to rest.

I use the word foetus which I think is quite a surprising word

when you come across it.

I was trying to almost get that moment of shock

when the bullet is actually located there.

Then I widened the search, traced the scarring back to its source

to a sweating, unexploded mine buried deep in his mind.

A lot of people who have come back from war have real issues

with their temper.

Their nerves are shredded. She talks about unexploded mines.

I think you could almost say that she's trying to defuse him.

One thing I'm very conscious of with this kind of poem is

a responsibility to people's lives.

These are real people who have been involved in real conflicts

where people have been injured and died and have killed people as well.

There's a sense that you're writing memorials to people.

Then and only then did I come close.

When I was a kid,

I was in Huddersfield town centre with my mum.

We went into the town hall.

On display was an architect's model of what

they were going to do to the town in the forthcoming years.

I remember the model being incredibly neat and precise.

I probably thought it looked like a game, you know,

like a train set or a board game.

Where you could drive your little toy cars or move the people around

with a throw of the dice.

A vision.

The future was a beautiful place once.

Remember the full-blown balsawood town on public display

in the Civic Hall?

The ringbound sketches, artists' impressions,

blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel?

Board game suburbs, modes of transportation,

like fairground rides or executive toys.

Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.

It was the late '60s and the early '70s.

There was this very idealistic sense of being able to design the future.

'One of the greatest dreams of the 20th century,

'that dream of an entirely new kind of city.'

This was a future made by architects and like most poets,

I try and get the form of a poem to somehow represent

or resemble its subject matter so in this poem, it's very architectural.

Each verse is a quatrain, a fairly controlled syllable count going on.

It looks orderly and it looks structured.

And people like us at the bottle bank next to the cycle path,

or dog walking over tended strips of fuzzy felt grass,

or model drivers motoring home in electric cars,

Or after the late show, strolling the boulevard.

They were the plans,

all underwritten in the neat left hand of architects,

a true, legible script.

There's a childlike perspective running through the early parts

of the poem and I think this is reinforced by words

like "fairground ride" and "toys"

but it's also a poem about growing up.

There's a line about halfway through,

"Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light."

Cantilevered by light - it sounds beautiful.

It sounds wonderful as if this is an architecture

made up entirely of light.

Well, of course, you look a little bit further into that idea

and light cannot support anything on its own.

This is a dream that isn't going to come true.

I think the end of the poem, I'm afraid to say, is rather downbeat.

This is a landfill site, very smelly and upsetting it is, too.

All the rubbish that we chuck away ends up here

and it's left here to rot.

At the end of the poem, the speaker in the poem discovers

a blueprint or a plan for the future blowing in the rubbish.

I pulled that future out of the north wind at the landfill site,

stamped with today's date, riding the air with other such futures,

all unlived in and now fully extinct.

I'm just trying to make the case that you can draw all the diagrams

you want and make all the plans and maps but people are complicated

and messy and I suppose as you get older, what you realise is

that you're actually living in that future now, it's here, it's arrived.

And you look around you and quite a lot of it is junk.

It's something of a dispiriting poem in that respect

that poems can be gloomy sometimes and so can I.

I just caught the tail end of punk rock

when it all kicked off in 1977 and you know, when you're that age,

things that are offensive and anarchic are very exciting.

The poem the Clown Punk is set 25 years later.

The speaker in the poem bumps into a punk from that era who's still

wearing all the trappings of punk rock, including lots of tattoos.

The Clown Punk.

Driving home through the shonky side of town,

three times out of 10 you'll see the town clown.

Like a basket of washing that got up and walked, towing a dog on a rope.

But don't laugh,

every pixel of that man's skin is shot through with indelible ink.

As he steps out at the traffic lights,

think what he'll look like in 30 years' time.

The deflated face and shrunken scalp

still daubed with the sad tattoos of high punk.

You kids in the back seat wince and scream

when he slavers his daft mush on the windscreen.

Remember the clown punk with his dyed brain.

Then picture windscreen wipers and let it rain.

I think the poem is a very visual poem,

especially when it's describing punk.

-I've got to ask, does that hurt?

-Yeah, I can't tell lies.

It's the language of ink and dyes.

The word "pixel" is also used

and I think that modernises the speaker.

He's entered the digital age,

whereas the punk is still trapped in the age of pen and ink.

You guys are too young to remember.

I grew up in the punk age and that was the thing then,

if you were a punk, you had a tattoo.

Would you have a face tattoo?

No, I don't think so. I wouldn't be that daft.

There's a tradition of this kind of poem in English literature

where two apparently very different people encounter each other.

I might have been thinking a little bit about Shelley's poem,

Ozymandias, where a carved head is found in a desert,

some old ruler of an ancient land and the person in the poem is

explaining how time has passed and left him marooned,

an object of a bygone era.

I suppose the punk in the poem is a little bit like that.

Remember the clown punk with his dyed brain,

then picture windscreen wipers and let it rain.

On first reading, you might feel that the clown punk is very much

the one with the tattoos and earrings, who's out on the street.

I think I'm inviting you to wonder

whether or not the man in the car might also be a clown punk

of some kind because he's the one who has betrayed his ideals.

He's the person who has become separated

from the thing that he really believed in.

It's interesting to write about homelessness

because it's a real, visible manifestation of something

that's not working properly in society.

These are people who have been left behind or people who don't fit in.

Give.

Of all the public places, dear, to make a scene, I've chosen here.

Of all the doorways in the world to choose to sleep,

I have chosen yours.

I'm on the street, under the stars.

For coppers, I can dance or sing.

For silver, swallow swords, eat fire.

For gold, escape from locks and chains.

It's not as if I'm holding out for frankincense or myrrh, just change.

You give me tea, that's big of you.

I'm on my knees, I beg of you.

A poem written in the voice of somebody living on the street

requires I think a certain amount of empathy.

You have to put yourself in that person's position.

Graham, do you want to tell me a bit about what goes on here?

It supports a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds,

predominantly homeless.

We run two soup runs a week.

We treat up to 70 people a night.

I myself was living on the streets for a while.

It's terrible because it's soul-destroying.

People just walk past you and don't even look at you.

Sometimes, it's not even about the money.

Sometimes it's about someone to say hello to you.

-That can make you feel human again.

-A bit of human contact is worth a lot.

Yeah, worth more than money.

Of all the public places, dear, to make a scene, I've chosen here.

Of all the doorways in the world to chose to sleep, I've chosen yours.

I'm a big admirer of that kind of poem which has a surface meaning

and then another meaning and in the case of this poem, it's love.

Um, it's a love poem.

I think that's hinted at in the use of that word, dear.

It perhaps suggests a more personal relationship.

And I think as the poem goes on, you get further signals and hints and clues.

For coppers, I can dance or sing.

For silver, swallow swords, eat fire.

For gold, escape from locks and chains.

It's not as if I'm holding out for frankincense or myrrh.

Just change.

There's usually one line in every poem

which seems to be flashing on and off,

either because it's outrageous or it contains

the significance of the poem.

I refer to it as the neon line.

In this poem, it's that line

about holding out for frankincense and myrrh.

The speaker in the poem is saying "It's not like I'm trying to be

"the infant Christ here.

"You know, all I want is something

"that you can give me.

"It's not a miracle that I'm asking for."

You give me tea.

That's big of you.

I'm on my knees, I beg of you.

This poem doesn't have a rhyme scheme as such,

but there are little rhymes holding it together.

Some of them are internal, they don't always

happen at the end of the line, and some of them are half-rhymes.

Words like chains and change.

It suggests unrequited love

and it reduces the person in the poem to begging.

They are begging for love, which is an extraordinarily

uncomfortable and insecure place to be.

That's the place that the poem's speaking from.

Oh, no!

Oh, no!

9/11, the 11th of September 2001,

became one of those dates of collective consciousness.

Everybody who witnessed the attacks

on the World Trade Centre

remembers where they were at that time.

The whole of Out Of The Blue is written from the point of view of

an English trader in the North Tower on the day that the planes strike.

He's narrating and commentating on the events of the day,

but from afterwards.

It's a voice from beyond the grave.

You have picked me out.

Through a distant shot of a building burning.

You have noticed now

That a white cotton shirt is twirling, turning.

In fact I am waving, waving.

Small in the clouds, but waving, waving.

Does anyone see a soul worth saving?

So when will you come?

Do you think you are watching, watching

A man shaking crumbs or pegging out washing?

I am trying and trying.

The heat behind me is bullying, driving,

But the white of surrender is not yet flying.

I am not at the point of leaving, diving.

A bird goes by.

The depth is appalling.

Appalling that others like me

Should be wind-milling, wheeling

Spiralling, falling.

Are your eyes believing?

Believing that here in the gills I am still breathing?

But tiring, tiring.

Sirens below are wailing, firing.

My arm is numb and my nerves are sagging.

Do you see me, my love?

I am failing, flagging.

This is girder sections from the North Tower.

This would've come tumbling down

under all that weight of the building

and has arrived here, in the Imperial War Museum North.

It's very moving

to be standing here in front of it.

In the poem, I talk about the "gills" of the building,

these struts down the building, and that was what I was referring to.

These might well be those sections.

There's also the idea there of gills, you know,

a place where you're trying to breathe from.

The extract from the poem was written to fit

a piece of footage which was taken at the time.

The frame of the picture wobbles around

and can't always keep the person in the tower in focus.

To try and replicate that a little bit,

I use repetition in the poem.

So I've tried to get the nature of the poem to resemble

the nature of that actual piece of film.

There's a certain amount of irony in the poem,

because it's written in a very controlled way,

fairly neat stanzas with the same number of lines in each one.

I suppose what I'm trying to do there is to contain the tension,

to build up that sense of stress and panic.

So in the same way that the lens of the camera

finds the man in the building,

so the poem focuses on him

and describes his situation,

and he becomes a metaphor for everyone.

Everyone's terror, everyone's fear and everyone's heartbreak.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd