Poet laureate Simon Armitage on how to improve your self-isolation verse – plus read his poem 'Lockdown'
On Simon Armitage’s website, you can find the nine poems he’s written in his first year as Britain’s poet laureate. Eight come with a footnote explaining what inspired them: the opening of a concert hall, say, or the launch of a polar research ship. But his most recent poem doesn’t need a footnote. The title does the job: “Lockdown”.
For the first time since taking up the post last May, the 56-year-old “felt a personal responsibility” to respond to current events with a poem, he tells me over the phone. “I’ve not really felt that obligation before… [but] this affects everybody globally. It’s very oppressive. It feels unique.”
“Lockdown” looks back as far as the Black Death to find a parallel with coronavirus, imagining that plague in a “waking dream/ of infected fleas”. It draws together two stories about parted lovers: first “the sorry story/ of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,/ star-crossed lovers on either side/ of the quarantine line” when the plague-ridden village of Eyam sealed itself off to prevent the spread of the disease in the 17th century.
The second half is a retelling of the ancient Sanskrit poem Meghadūta, in which an exiled spirit asks “a passing cloud” to slowly carry a message to his wife across a vast distance – a story Armitage has said struck him as a timely message “about taking things easy, and being patient, and trusting the Earth”.
He has just finished the poem when we speak in late March, but admits writing about the crisis while it’s still unfolding has been a challenge. “At the moment, everybody seems to be preoccupied with it, including me – and that’s not a good place to be writing from.” It seems he’s decided the best way to write about it is not to write about it: “Lockdown” leaps from Eyam to medieval India without ever directly mentioning the present day.
Armitage has plenty of time for writing at the moment, having been forced to cancel the debut tour for his new band, LYR, after just two shows. Some might be surprised to find the laureate moonlighting as lead vocalist for an ambient rock group (although Armitage doesn't so much sing as deliver spoken lyrics over tunes played by bandmates Richard Walters and Patrick Pearson). But he has long had rock-star aspirations; his 2008 memoir Gig even had the subtitle “The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist”.
Is LYR just an attempt to live out those fantasies? “A lot of poets have worked with music and with musicians, going right back to John Dryden, the first laureate – who was writing, for want of a better word, song lyrics," he says. "The two things are not disconnected.”
For a less lofty comparison, what does he think of former laureate John Betjeman’s novelty poetry-and-music album Banana Blush (1974)? “Not my cup of tea.”
Armitage’s interest in what he calls “the little overlap, the cross-hatch area in the middle” between poetry and song is evident on his new Radio 4 series, The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed. It’s recorded in, yes, his shed, in the garden of his home in Huddersfield where he lives with his wife, Sue, a radio producer, and each episode consists of Armitage interviewing a different writer, musician or artist. Guests so far have included the former model and actress Lily Cole, who talked about being bullied at school, Angel of the North sculptor Antony Gormley and Elbow singer-songwriter Guy Garvey.
The gentle, welcoming tone of the programme is a contrast to the more provocative stance he sometimes took as the Oxford Professor of Poetry. He ended his final lecture last year by tackling writers who are “opaque in poetry, either deliberately or through lack of talent”.
Though stopping short of naming specific offenders, he lamented a “slow but discernible shift” towards a poetry of “specialist knowledge” that tends to “exclude and alienate”.
In the context of Oxbridge – where much of that “discernible shift” has taken place – it must have seemed like a fire-and-brimstone sermon. But when I mention it, Armitage is breezy. “It was the last of 12 lectures. I think by that point I didn’t have a single other thing left to say about poetry, I felt pretty much wrung out!”
If he seems a little torn between his personal tastes and the laureate’s diplomatic role as a “flag-waver for poetry” (as Andrew Motion called it), then “it’s a necessary contradiction in some ways. One thing that I want to do, and I’ve promised to do, is to encourage and promote as much as possible.” But he still believes that “if you are choosing to be obscure – or if you’re obscure because you are unable to be any clearer than that – then you are doing a disservice to language.”
His own poetry is usually marked by its clarity and casual tone, even when leading the reader in strange directions. His 1997 poem “The Mariner’s Compass”, for example, imagined houses taking to the sea with “duvet covers” for sails. “Friends wave from the cliffs,/ talk nervously from the coastguard station./ Under the rules, close contact/ with another soul means disqualification” – lines that now read like the perfect parable for self-isolation.
Armitage is convinced that, as the lockdown drags on and the country is forced to adapt to a slower, more cautious pace of life, more of us will find ourselves turning to poetry.
”People will have more time to devote to that level of language. Poetry is the language of concentration – irrespective of the subject matter, it’s always careful language, and detailed language.
“That kind of pace and focus can be really helpful at times like this. Particularly if we’re thinking long-term about how we come through this, and what sort of world we want to live in afterwards – given that the world that we’ve left behind was incredibly hectic and chaotic and rushed. I think people find confidence and consolation in poetry just through it being so careful.”
For his own careful reading, Armitage has been “getting really stuck back into Seamus Heaney – those poems which are very much concerned with the close relationship between the language and the land.” Armitage thinks the lockdown will encourage people to pay closer attention to their local communities, and the landscapes around them. “I’ve noticed it already – looking out of my window here, I can see people walking in the fields and up on the moors.”
His thoughts are also with his parents who live a few miles down the road in Marsden, the village where he grew up.
“My mum and dad are quite elderly and a bit vulnerable, so I’m trying to keep them under house arrest,” he says.
His latest book, Magnetic Field, brings together the poems he’s written about Marsden since the 1980s.
Does he have any advice for anyone who has been filling their hours in lockdown by writing poems, and wants to start writing seriously?
“I would encourage anybody towards any form of self-expression – if that mood came over you, I would say absolutely give it a go.
"But it depends on what sort of a poet you want to be. Are you doing it instead of a crossword or watching Pointless or doing some knitting, or are you somebody who wants to get better, and get published, mean something to readers? If that’s the case, then you’re better starting by reading poetry rather than writing it.
“There’s really only one lesson: you can’t be a writer unless you’re a reader. What goes out is a version of what goes in.”
Lockdown by Simon Armitage
And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth
in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see
the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.
Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line
whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.
But slept again,
and dreamt this time
of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.
LYR's single Lockdown, featuring Florence Pugh, is released today. Magnetic Field (Faber, £14.99) is out now
