Simon Armitage Interview

Sonnet Central          

The first thing I noticed in Selected Poems was that even in the one piece that would, say, qualify as a sonnet, you play freely with the rhyme and with meter, and it started me wondering how things are in north England poetics in regards to the sonnet tradition.

Simon Armitage

There's quite a lot of interest in the sonnet per se, which was probably summed up in a book that came out recently: Don Paterson, a poet from Scotland, produced an anthology called 101 Sonnets. There is a very illuminating essay at the beginning. And also a new book edited by John Fuller on the same subject. It's an ongoing concern.

I think generally in Britain - I don't know that you could say the north of England or anything like that - but I think generally in Britain there's been more interest in form these last ten or fifteen years than there was in the period just preceding it, and I'd be hard pushed to say why, except perhaps to fall back on the old thing that comes up time and time again, which is that Britain might be categorized as a country which in some way experimented with and then rejected Modernism. I think there's also something about a legacy, and the heritage of poetry within Britain, which has been one of speaking to a general rather than a specialized reader. Formal poetry, formal poems, tend to be more memorable, tend to be the ones that go down best - crudely speaking. I don't know whether it's specifically about using sonnets, but if you flip through a lot of books of contemporary British poetry, you will come across a lot of poems with fourteen lines in them.

You have a section in Book of Matches where the poems range from about fifteen or fourteen lines. Did you start thinking maybe you were doing a sonnet sequence and then relax in a more general thing?

I think I might have been. Just the idea of unity and order and a kind of tidiness, both for the ear and the eye, and I probably did start off with the sonnet in mind. Maybe in the way that Berryman's Dream Songs expanded into a form more suited to his vocabulary.

You can readily see in your zodiac pieces (Cloudcuckooland) that you were thinking in term of form, the four and four. Back to the sonnet, when you taught at Iowa, did you encounter a cultural shift?

Very much. I don't know whether that was to do with poetics in general or to do with the marketplace or poetry's meaning within society. My take on poetry in the states is that it's very much, well, this phrase has been used before, imploded into the universities, and you can take that any way you want, retreated, consolidated, found a niche there, whatever. I'm not speaking about the whole of poetry across the states, but literary poetry, the way it's become a highly specialized language. The students there were very keen, very committed, extremely knowledgeable. A fantastic experience for me, very rewarding. But the course was vocational, in the sense that many of the students were hoping to get jobs as a consequence. Their manuscripts were applications, of a sort, and the qualification they received a kind of teaching certificate.

Trying to tie that question back to ideas of form, there wasn't much formalism going on at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when I was there. It was much more experimental than that, and when people did produce poetry in a recognizable shape, it was generally for the purpose of an exercise, a sort of finger exercise, little arabesques.

So they did not bring many sonnets into the workshops.

No, there weren't many, although there was one student, a very good student who went on to win one of the book awards that year, who's published since then, a guy called Spencer Short, and he had a sonnet sequence within his dissertation. I haven't seen his book, but I hope the sonnets are in it. I heard I got a name-check in fly-leaf. But more than that I kind of got the impression that to write using form would very much locate you within a school. You'd be seen as a New Formalist. Most students at Iowa didn't want to be part of that. They wanted to be freer, looser.

They didn't feel there'd be job opportunities.

It could've been seen as a wrong career move. I don't know. I'm speculating.

Does Britain have much of a workshop tradition? Do you find much difference in the workshop approach?

If it wasn't for the poetry workshop ideology, I wouldn't be writing today. My formal education is in other subjects and in other fields, but I wanted to write poetry, and there was a writing workshop at the university near to where I lived. Some people who went there were students, some people were hobbyists. And I went into that workshop, and that's how I got going.

The workshop approach, in terms of its format and procedures, seems to be pretty similar the world over. People sit around in a group, read one another's poems. There'll be some use of critical vocabulary, there'll be some hurt feelings, there'll be some improvements, there'll be some people who resolutely resist any change whatsoever.

Workshops came in for a bit of flack in Britain in the Eighties, and you know, there was said to be "a workshop poem," and I think it was seen as the beginning of the end. But that was only by people who were at the beginning of their own poetic ends.

How about strictness in form? Your sonnet "and if it snowed and snow covered the drive" uses a lot of variation from the form. You have one stanza where it's almost entirely the same sound. I've noticed Carol Ann Duffy also following that approach, and in the earlier generation, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Are there many poets writing in Britain who are sticklers for exactitude, iambic pentameter only, or are more moving away from the norm?

There are some people who are sticklers for form, but they tend to be thought of as eccentrics. Poets who adhere to the conventions precisely. But somebody like Paul Muldoon is more typical. He takes a form, and you recognize it on the page, but then you notice how the form has been altered to accommodate the language - often colloquial vocabulary - rather than the other way around. I do quite often start with a formal pattern, then there comes a point in the poem where I actually want to use a particular word, and it doesn't fit, and then I say to myself, well, what the hell am I worried about, it's not like the Sonnet Police are going to come in and bust me for not using that tenth syllable.

No one expects the Sonnet Police.

No, not in the free world, anyway. Anyway, it's liberating when you get to a point in a poem where you can legitimately deviate from the form, and I like the tension that can exist between expectation and execution. Like there's something a little more idiosyncratic or individual going on.

Thank you for giving us time.

Pleasure.