Sunday, 3 October 2010
Poets to Check Out - Simon Armitage
I am a huge fan of Simon Armitage. I love his voice, his sense of humour, his slight nerdi-ness.
He was supposed to come to Dublin once to read and every poet I know was going. Then he got sick. some tropical disease or infestitation or something and he cancelled. I imagine what would have happened if he had come and read and infected the audience. All the poets in Ireland would have been infected. A whole generation, wiped out in one go.
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4 comments:
I tried to like him, but his "Gawain" makes me want to bang my head against a wall, and I just can't get past that.
Sorry.
Did you see the programme he did for the BBC tracing the Gawain one? Evocative.
Not sure though that it's entirely fair to take one big fat poem as a roadblock. If so, I'd never read Heaney as I didn't like his Beowulf translation
I love Armitage. His new collection is interesting. Not really poems, more flash-fiction, but inventiveness and wit transfers.
God, you're wise.
And I did see the Gawain programme and as long as I hummed when he did his bits I rather enjoyed it.
It is one of my "greatest poems ever, ever. Ever." so it's a large roadblock. I listened to his being done on Radio 4 (they serialised it, I think) and came close to beating the radio to death with a stick - No! That! Is! Not! It!
Possible a bit of PTS remains...
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