Major Concerns of Simon Armitage`s Poetry
There are three poems I have chosen to help me discuss and write about my thesis ‘Life , its problems, the good and the bad of human experience, are major concerns of Simon Armitage’s poetry’. They are the Untitled poem “I am very bothered”, “Poem” and “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s What It Does To You”.
“Poem” is one of Armitage’s life problem poems When You don’t remember the good things a person has done but the bad things a person has done you remember. This poem has many lines which start with ‘and’ which is a sort of list of things this person has done. Also he starts off the poem with “And if it snowed and snow covered the drive” which is like the poem is the second part of another poem or he has left out the beginning and got to the important part. There are three verses describing things he did. Mostly everything is good things about him for example “And for his mum he hired a private nurse” apart from the last sentence which describes him doing bad things for example “And twice he lifted 10 quid from her purse” (Mother).
This made the reader only remember the bad things because it was the last thing the reader remembers about him from the whole paragraph. The last verse is about how people rated him as a bad person who he was only occasionally like everyone else in the world. There was one sarcastic part of the poem when he said “every week he tipped his wage” and soon after said “what he didn’t spend he saved” because he would not have nothing to save if he spent half on alcohol. I think Armitage’s poems puts in these sarcastic bits and bad or wrong doings spread over the poem so you are al ways reminded he is a bad person but he is clearly an average person but people judge you on all the things you do so you should be careful on what you do.
“I am very bothered” is a poem of the bad of human experiences. It’s about what you do to try to attract attention which has good and bad consequences. Simon Armitage shows how he feels about his experiences when he looks back on them. He feels very troubled when he remembers a time when he was in school as a child in a science lab. He put a pair of plastic handled scissors over a hot Bunsen burner until it was soft and melting slowly and gave it to a female pupil.
When she held it around her fingers he described the scene as “O the unrivalled stench of branded skin as you …” meaning it was so bad no other bad smell could compete with it and that it left a mark of dull, dark, black, burnt skin. There was a burnt ring around one of her fingers and one of her thumbs that were marked for life. He described his feelings of this horrific atrocity by saying “Don’t believe me if I say that was just my butterfingered way at thirteen, of asking you if you would marry me” butterfingered way meaning not really meaning it, not seriously so he means don’t believe be if I said I was only joking when I said will you marry me.
Finally, the poem “It Ain’t What You Do It’s What It does To You” is about human experiences which are mainly good. It starts off with him not have gone to America with hardly anything but then say he has lived with thieves in Manchester which are both bas experiences in the first verse. In the second verse he talks about only one thing he hasn’t done which is gone to the quiet, peaceful Taj Mahal “padded through Tag Mahal, barefoot”. In the third verse he talks about only one thing he has done. Which is skimmed a flat stones across Black moss on a day so still he could hear every sound which is normally unheard of “hear each set of ripples”. In the fourth verse he starts off with him not have sky dived from an aircraft but he says “I held the wobbly head of a boy at a day centre, and stroked his fat hands” which has a really big effect on your life to see someone in a bad state. All these examples shown of things done or things he hasn’t done means he is saying our experiences effect our behaviour and ways of thinking and makes us more wiser on the things we do. Like In the final verse he describes the feelings of doing all those things inside of us as a “sense of something else” which I believe it’s a feeling so out of this world that you have to do it to find out.
All these poems we have studied show that Simon Armitage thinks deeply about humans and how they react to life experiences. Whether life experiences bring problems or happiness we all have to deal with them in the right way. For example from the poem ‘Poem’ the problem of the man only remembered by the bad points and that man has to deal with that in the right way by defending himself and the people who rate him also have to be careful on what they say about people. We have to try and live through it all without it bringing us down and making us feel miserable. For example ‘The untitled poem about him very bothered about the girls burnt fingers we have to deal with the fact that it happened and to let it go and get on with our lives. We also have to make sure we don’t make wrong decisions just to make ourselves feel happy and don’t care about the others. For example again to the untitled poem Simon should of thought of the consequences and the pain of others but he didn’t he was only seeking attention for himself. Now I hope you now know Simon Armitage poems are based on life’s good and bad experiences.
