Kid - Simon Armitage

 KID - SIMON ARMITAGE

"I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it," as Howard Devoto once declared in Magazine's outrageously good A Song From Under The Floorboards, and it's something we would all probably nod sagely along to and agree with. Beauty, however, is subjective and in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to something like poetry I'm never too sure whether it's a good thing or not?

What makes for a good poem? Does it need to be stained with the blood from failed suicide attempts? Stained with the sweat poured forth at night whilst under the duvet in fear of all the children who won't know how to cope (with a world in rack and ruin from their technocratic dope)? Stained with the tears shed for the poor unfortunates of America?

What is a poem anyway? Is it making play with your native language and in Simon Armitage's case, making fun and games with the English tongue? Displays of dry wit? Observations made?

And how to read poems by the likes of Simon Armitage? One at a time with ten minute interludes so as to savour the flavour of each one? At your own pace or like having a deadline to catch? Who knows? These are things never taught in schools. What would Simon Armitage himself advise? Perhaps not to even bother because who would even be a poet nowadays let alone read poetry? Shouldn't you instead be more inclined to be a singer/songwriter? A lyricist? A rapper? A pop star with an almost guaranteed audience of some kind or another to cling on to your every word?

And apart from fragile youths chasing butterflies with big nets in open fields during long summers, truculent old professors in dusty chambers under the gleaming spires of Cambridge, and politically redundant malcontents on the East Devon coast, who exactly reads this kind of stuff nowadays? That's what I want to know.

John Serpico