Simon Armitage: The British Poet Laureate Celebrated for Cosmic Poetry

The West Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage is the current British Poet Laureate, appointed in 2019 He is one of the most popular poets in Britain today, widely known both as a writer and TV presenter of BBC documentaries Armitage s vivid and refreshing poems try to restore a cosmic scope to poetry without losing touch with the particular locality (mainly Yorkshire) that brought them to life

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire His first full-length collection of poems, Zoom!, was published in 1989 Further collections are, for instance, Xanadu (1992), Kid (1992), Book of Matches (1993), The Dead Sea Poems (1995, Faber & Faber), Seeing Stars (2010), and The Unaccompanied (2017) He has also produced contemporary renditions of English medieval poems, such as his highly acclaimed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2009) He has received numerous awards for his poetry, reaching the pinnacle of popularity and critical acclaim in 2019 when he was appointed the Poet Laureate

Armitage has been a regular guest of The Mark Radcliffe Show, first on BBC Radio 1 and more recently on BBC Radio 2 His many contributions to BBC Radio 4 include his co-hosting of Armitage and Moore's Guide to Popular Song and as a reviewer for the weekly arts programme Front Row. He is also a regular contributor to BBC 2's The Review Show. In 2009 and 2010, Armitage presented films for BBC4 on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian Literature and on the Odyssey, sailing from Troy in Turkey to the Greek island of Ithaca.

Simon Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and as a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University Simon Armitage is a Vice President of the Poetry Society For his commitment and achievements in literature he has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Portsmouth, the University of Huddersfield, the Open University and by Sheffield Hallam University. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature In 2010, for services to poetry, Armitage was awarded the CBE In 2019, he became Poet Laureate

Armitages poems have a strong pefrormative potential They are extremely vivid, deeply imaginative, yet firmly rooted in reality (geographical, linguistic, social) His poetry shows heightened sensitivity to natural landscapes and social conflicts He has the ability to turn mundate subjects, such as sports or thieving, into objects of wonder His language is modest, mostly colloquial, avoiding fanciful diction His poetic imagery typically integrates the cosmic and the local, the big and the small

The Straight and Narrow When the tall and bearded careers advisor set up his stall and his slide-projector something clicked. There on the silver screen, like a photograph of the human soul, the X-ray plate of the ten-year-old girl who swallowed a toy. Shadows and shapes, mercury-tinted lungs and a tin-foil heart, alloy organs and tubes, but bottom left, the caught-on-camera lightning strike of the metal car: like a neon bone, some classic roadster with an open top and a man at the wheel in goggles and cap, motoring on through deep, internal dark. The clouds opened up; we were leaving the past, drawn by a star that had risen inside us, some as astronauts and some as taxi-drivers.

The Flying Fish Blue-backed, silver-bellied, half-imagined things; six of them, blown off course by the solar wind. They were coated with salt or snuff interstellar dust and we picked the granules out of their tails and wings. We carried them out to the beach in a budgie cage, lowered them down and opened the door. They went deep, then turned about, breaking the surface, launching themselves wholeheartedly out of the sea at their own stars.

Zoom! It begins as a house, an end terrace in this case but it will not stop there. Soon it is an avenue which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics Institute, turns left at the main road without even looking and quickly it is a town with all four major clearing banks, a daily paper and a football team pushing for promotion. On it goes, oblivious of the Planning Acts, the green belts, and before we know it it is out of our hands: city, nation, hemisphere, universe, hammering out in all directions until suddenly, mercifully, it is drawn aside through the eye of a black hole and bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy, emerging smaller and smoother than a billiard ball but weighing more than Saturn.

People stop me in the street, badger me in the check-out queue and ask What is this, this that is so small and so very smooth but whose mass is greater than the ringed planet? It s just words I assure them. But they will not have it.

Briefly characterize the tone of Armitages poetry. Identify and discuss the didactic dimension of The Straight and Narrow . How does reality interact with imagination in The Flying Fish ? How is the zoom function of the camera registered in the text of Zoom! ? What is the scope and potential of poetry according to Zoom! ?