English poet, playwright, novelist and DJ, Armitage has been Poet Laureate since May 2019. His strong concern with social issues has led him to create poetry such as Out of the Blue, focused on the tragic 9/11 attacks, and Lockdown, centred on the pandemic caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease. SECTION SUMMARY

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SIMON ARMITAGE • 1963: he was born in Yorkshire, one of the cradles of the industrial revolution, now a county rich in wild landscapes and rolling hills.

• 1988: he studied geography and published his first collection of poems, Human Geography, which was followed by the highly successful collection Zoom! in 1989. His writing was highly appreciated for its “accessible, realist style and critical seriousness” combined with his dry Yorkshire wit! 4 SIMON ARMITAGE • Until 1994 he worked as a probation officer in Manchester, helping young offenders back into society but continued to publish poetry collections (Book of Matches in 1993 and The Dead Sea Poems in 1995)

 In the following years his interests widened to include novel writing (Little Green Man in 2001 and The White Stuff in 2004), translations of poetry (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 2007) as well as works for television, radio and films.

5 SIMON ARMITAGE  2006: he decided to work on the poem-film Out of the Blue. ❖ Having always demonstrated a strong concern for social issues, he wrote it to commemorate the 5th anniversary of '9/11’: it is one long poem divided into 13 fragments.

 2009: he released an album of songs, Born in a Barn, co-written with his college friend and musician Craig Smith, under the band name of “The Scaremongers”. 6 SIMON ARMITAGE  2010: in order to communicate his love of poetry to as wide an audience as possible, he walked the 47-mile long Stanza Stones Trail in the Pennine region, through the central mountain range of England, stopping to give poetry readings in return for food and shelter.

With the help of a local expert and a letter-carver, Armitage composed six new poems for the trail, carved into stones at secluded sites. “Those looking hard enough might stumble across a seventh Stanza Stone… waiting to be discovered and read”! 7 SIMON ARMITAGE ❖ After teaching as Professor of Poetry at the Universities of Sheffield (2011 – 2015) and Oxford (2015-2019), he is currently teaching at the University of Leeds. • 2019: he was appointed Poet Laureate, i.e. the official poet of Britain, expected to write poems celebrating official occasions, national events etc. As such he has written 1. Conquistadores, commemorating the 1969 moon landing; 2. Finishing it, a 51-word poem engraved on a pill, written to aid cancer research; 3. All Right as part of the suicide prevention campaign for Mental Health Awareness Week and many more… 8

Out of the Blue (2006)  Out of the Blue is a poem-film written for the 5th anniversary of “9/11” : it is told from the perspective of a victim of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

❖ An imaginary Englishman was feeling enthusiastic about working in that amazing place when suddenly, in an instant, everything changed...  The poet’s intent and purpose was to stress the chaos and terror of the event: in particular in the best-known extract of this long poem he created a haunting commentary

of 9/11 in just seven stanzas… 10 Structure and form

 This section comprises four-line verses.

 The verse is free, without a regular rhyme scheme, as if reflecting random thoughts and fears.

❖ To start off Armitage actually uses a regular rhyme scheme (ABAB) in order to portray an initial sense of hope, and potentially to contrast with the tragic subject matter of the poem.

❖ This rhyme scheme deteriorates to a half rhyme as the poem progresses so as to reiterate a loss of control.

11 Part III (ext.) stanzas 1 & 2

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? Part III (ext.) stanzas 3 & 4

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. Analysis (1)

 Armitage addresses the reader specifically making the poem feel more personal: we perceive that the person caught within the World Trade Center is helpless, but desperately wanting someone to rescue him.

❖ The repetition of the word “waving” reiterates that the narrator has gone from everyday actions, to facing his own death: a person may wave to get someone else’s attention…

14 Analysis (2)

… or he may wave a “white” flag, here replaced by a white cotton shirt, to surrender. It’s not his case just yet.

 However, the flames are bullying, driving: like a monstrous living creature the fire is trying to push him to “the point of leaving, diving” as so many victims were led to do by sheer despair.

❖ The lexis of everyday language (“shaking crumbs”, “pegging out washing”) adopted by the poet contrasts with the direness of the situation, strengthening the bond between the reader and the narrator. 15 Part III (ext.) stanzas 5, 6 & 7 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, breathing. But tiring, tiring. Sirens below me are wailing, firing. My arm is numb and my nerves are sagging. Do you see me, my love. I am failing, flagging. Analysis (3)  Once more, the reader is reminded of the horrific visual of people “diving” from the World Trade Center: the irony that a bird flies near them adds to the sense of despair.

 Hope lingers on only for a little longer… till the narrator starts tiring, tiring and has to admit that he is failing, addressing that notion to his «love».

❖ This is the real «you» of the first line: no random viewer picked out the narrator, no horrified observer had any possibility of saving him…

17 Analysis (4)

… it was his “love” that did so, anxiously seeking her beloved, perhaps watching from the ground or on TV. This may have given the narrator the strength he has experienced thus far but it has all become too much for him to bear and he is almost saying goodbye in the haunting final stanza.

• The use of varying line lengths helps create a sense of confusion and chaos surrounding the narrator. The caesuras are used to further this sense of loss of control, since the reader may become breathless reading the poem aloud, just as the narrator would have been breathless breathing in the smoke. 18 Conclusions (1)  What had started as another apparently ordinary day in an imaginary British trader’s life in New York Up with the lark, downtown New York. The sidewalks, the blocks. Walk. Don't Walk. Walk. Don't Walk. becomes the last day of his fictional life, the last day in this world for 2,996 real people. 19 Conclusions (2)

 When he was interviewed by The Sunday Times of London Armitage explained: «I wanted to do something which was both commemorative and elegiac, but not political»

 The actor Rufus Sewell read the poem against a back-drop of a stock trader’s office and actual footage of the horrific day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufZey15WTAk

 Memories from victims’ families were also featured20.

Lockdown (2020)

 According to Armitage, poetry is “by definition consoling” because “it often asks us just to focus and think and be contemplative”. He felt it his duty to say something about now, to address the coronavirus and a lockdown slowly implemented across the whole world. ❖ A message about patience, as opposed to the frantic rhythm of life we are often used to, is what Armitage believes can be learned with regards to dealing with the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. “We need to take things slowly, be patient, respect and trust the Earth: only this way our society may emerge from the pandemic slightly slower, and a lot wiser, at the other end.” 22 Structure and form

 The poem is made up of 17 couplets which alternate a two-stressed line with a four-stressed one as if to make the theme of separation also graphically visible on the page.  The verse is free, without a regular rhyme scheme, almost reflecting the uncertainty and fear of the situation.

 The word “But” in the 17th line acts as the 9th line does in a sonnet, the “turn” which splits the poem into two halves and carries the reader into a different time and place the beauty of which cannot prevent us from realising how cumbersome and seemingly endless this journey is.

 Nevertheless, we have to trudge on and never give up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSX6MGFR1J8 23 Lockdown: stanzas 1 - 5 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, Thimblefuls of vinegar wine purging the plagued coins. Lockdown: stanzas 6 - 8

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. Analysis (1)  The poem moves from the outbreak of bubonic plague in the 17th century, when a bale of cloth from London brought fleas carrying the plague to a Derbyshire village, Eyam, which became known as the «plague village».  Villagers selflessly quarantined themselves to limit the spread of the plague.

❖ Why Eyam? Confined at home in West Yorkshire, Armitage said that “as the lockdown became more apparent and it felt like the restrictions were closing in, the plague in Eyam became more and more resonant”. 26 Analysis (2)  Among the measures used by the villagers was the boundary stone, which acted as a marker between Eyam, widely infected, and nearby Stoney Middleton which had not been hit. ❖ The stone had six holes drilled into its surface, where money soaked in vinegar – which was believed to kill the infection – was placed by villagers in exchange for food and medical supplies brought to them by the inhabitants of the surrounding villages.  The themes of separation and distance emerge through the tragic tale of two young people, one from Eyam and one from a neighbouring village, no longer able to visit due to the plague: they met secretly at a distance until Emmott

stopped appearing, having fallen foul of the disease… 27 Lockdown: stanzas 9 - 13 But slept again, and dreamt this time of the exiled yaksha sending word to his distant wife on a passing cloud, a cloud entranced by the earthly map of camel trails and cattle tracks, streams like necklaces, fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants, embroidered bedspreads of meadows and hedges, Lockdown: stanzas 14 - 17 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. Analysis (3)  The scene shifts from England to India when Armitage references Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s work, Meghadūta, in which an exile uses a passing cloud to send a message of comfort to his wife.

 The cloud is persuaded to take the message because the yaksha, a sort of attendant spirit to a god of wealth, tells him what amazing landscapes and scenery he’s going to fly over: fan-tailed peacocks, colourful elephants, great stretches of meadows and hedges, bamboo forests and snow-capped peaks, waterfalls, creeks… 30 Analysis (4)

 A hopeful, romantic gesture, that of the cloud: the “meeting” between the exile and his wife is thus possible though it’s only a “virtual” one.  We are led towards an ending open to optimism: the journey we have unwillingly undertaken is certainly a difficult one, but it is necessarily so.

 We can’t do anything about it: it’s a long, slow process that we need to accept and endure while we wait for the time in which it will be possible to meet and hug again at long last. 31 Interpretation (1)  The incipit of the poem evokes Ezra Pound’s epigraph to his first successful collection of poems, Lustra: And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.  The same simplicity, intensity, directness of expression which characterize imagism, in turn indebted to Japanese haiku, can be found in Armitage’s poem which moves away from fixed metres and direct moral reflections, subordinating everything to what T.E. Hulme, the father of imagism, once called the “hard, dry image”, that of a life which slips by, empty and meaningless, leaving no trace. 32 Interpretation (2)

The two “vision[s] in a dream”, instead, recall S. T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan not only in that both poems focus on fragments of something which is not yet complete or completed, dreamlike and hallucinatory in its tone, but also in the underlying message about human fragility and limit. 33

From man’s fragility…  Coleridge’s poem can be read as an extended metaphor about the power of creativity which is limited, fragile, and quickly lost.

 Armitage’s poem can be seen as an invitation to recognize man’s structural limits and frailties, today as in the past, here as elsewhere. 35 … to his grit and resilience.

 As Armitage himself stated,

“I didn’t want to just write a dirge or an elegy, but I didn’t want to write a trivial bit of fluff either,” and the poem certainly has a grit as well as a sense of optimism and belief: “I think there’s some enjoyment to be had towards the end of the poem, when the imagination is charged with bringing hope and comfort to the confined and separated.”

36 A CHARITY RELEASE…  One subtext of the poem is the difficulty of communication during stressful situations so in May 2020 Armitage joined forces with actress Florence Pugh: they were both conscious of the rise in domestic abuse cases and violence against women and children during the coronavirus restrictions.

 Lockdown was set to music and sold to help raise money for the UK-based domestic abuse charity Refuge.

 The track was recorded remotely and it features Armitage and Pugh reading the lines to music that starts ominously, and becomes more hypnotic and euphoric as it proceeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0bWqq8sQiE 37 …thanks to poetry and empathy.

 The video was filmed in Bristol during lockdown: locals were asked to partake in the project from a safe distance and the result is a series of smile-inducing clips!

 The director Daniel Broadley, constantly on the look out for “positives within this negative period of our lives”, said that this project allowed him to reach out to Bristol locals from all walks of life, people “who all poured their time and energy into bringing this piece of work to life”.

 Even at a distance we are capable of creating a wonderful connection with others… and we need to do so

everywhere, at all times. 38