Simon Armitage - Seeing Stars

To the South Bank last Friday evening to hear Simon Armitage read from his stunning new collection, Seeing Stars. After the reading came a witty and thoughtful 'in conversation' with Stuart Maconie.

In Seeing Stars Armitage has broken out of his familiar, ten-syllable line and sprawled across to the right-hand margin. The result - expansive, hyper-real monologues, stories and aphorisms that shift your view when you least expect it. At the end of each long poem - often two pages - you're never quite where you thought you might be.

So, are they poems, prose poems or just plain prose?

"They are poems," said Armitage, "because I say they are. It's to do with intention and context. " He intended them to be poems; Faber published the book on its poetry list. Sorted.

"Poetry is saying something in a thought-through way. That's important in an information age." But, he said, we are at a stage with poetry where we need no longer rely on familiar templates.

If there was template for the new work it was, Return To The City of White Donkeys, a collection by the American poet, James Tate. Armitage spent time with Tate on a trip to the States. Following that, and after translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Armitage found himself wanting more space than was afforded by "lyric architecture."

Each of the poems grew by following an idea, not getting hung up on line length, syllable count or rhyme. When an idea struck Armitage went after it - "It can be dangerous if you're driving" - taking the founding word or phrase and testing it to its logical limit though a range of voices and personae.

The cover design is an obvious acknowledgment of Tate's influence. And, in the poem 'Beyond Huddersfield,' which features a bear in a re-cycling dump, Armitage is clearly referencing Tate's poem 'Never Enough Darts.' That may have been the starting point but Armitage's poem travels much further; like his cover, the poem is considerably bolder. 'Beyond Huddersfield,' alone is worth the price of the book.

In these poems often a surface humour is working against a darker meaning. There was plenty of laughter on Friday night both in response to the poems and Armitage's deadpan answers to Maconie's questions.

"I don't think I'm funny," he said. Uproar.

"Humour is a way of courting the reader, leading a dance, building a bridge." The humour in this new works, entices the reader in, makes the poems accessible.

Armitage's mix of accessibility and complexity has seen him on the GCSE syllabus for some time. Did he mind? No, he said, he was flattered. After all that was how he came to poetry, aged fifteen, reading Ted Hughes, "He woke me up."

Seeing Stars refers to the several poems featuring celebrities but also to the cartoon bash round the head. These poems, said Armitage are, "things you might have been thinking about while in a coma."

Hyper-real and playfully absurd, I'd say these poems are intended to wake you up, bring you out of comatose, habitual ways of seeing the world.

Do read them.