Simon Armitage at the Hay Festival
The beginning of May 2009 was a strange time for British Poetry. The contest between Derek Walcott and Ruth Padel for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry had become front-page news after it had emerged that supporters of Padel had been spreading rumours about sexual advances Walcott may, or may not, have made towards young female students of his in return for higher grades. This prompted seemingly every newspaper editor in the country to commission a near-identical comment piece on how all male poets are sexual deviants. The broadsheet gossip-columns, not to be outdone, were full of society-ladies testifying that they had once been at a garden-party where a drunken poet had tried to feel them up behind the bushes. Ruth Padel happened to be plugging her new book at the festival that week and gave a press conference - in front of an assembly of photographers more suited to Fabio Capello - announcing her withdrawal from the race.
This was also the week that Carol Ann Duffy (also appearing at the festival) was announced as the new poet laureate. At least this news resulted in some poetry being printed in the papers. However, the main angle for the story was, predictably, the fact that Duffy was the first female laureate and that she happened to be gay. It is sad how little was made of just how popular a poet she is: belonging as she does, in a small group of poets whose new collections actually sell a decent amount.
Another member of that select handful, Simon Armitage, was set to appear on the closing day of the festival. Like Duffy, a substantial factor in his popularity seems to be that school pupils study his work all across Britain as part of the GCSE English curriculum. Many children who study him seem to have a strong connection with his work judging from the very youthful make-up of the audience he had attracted.
This was the first poetry reading I have ever attended where such a sense of excited hush develops when a title of a poem that the audience is familiar with is announced as the next one to be read. It was like a band playing a song that everybody knows and can sing along with rather than the ‘new stuff’. It was clear that poems like ‘Zoom!’, ‘Man with a Golf Ball Heart’, and ‘Poem’ were all well-known and the enjoyment was perhaps had from hearing them performed live by the poet himself, rather than dissected in an English class.
Each performer at Hay has to field questions from the audience for the last fifteen minutes of their reading. Armitage made it clear that he doesn’t normally like to do this, but he was good-humoured enough answering questions on how he feels having his work studied and whether he has ever sat an exam paper on one of his poems. The danger of these question and answer sessions made itself apparent when Armitage had to respond to two questions that must have frustrated his admiring audience as much as they did me; this was an opportunity to quiz one of our countries greatest living poets and what did we get? “Who is the greatest foreign player to play in the Premier League?” and “Why do poets always raise their voices at the end of the line; why can’t they just speak properly?”
The answers, if you want to know, were: “Ronaldo” and “I’ve no idea what you are talking about; I’ve just remembered why I don’t like answering questions.”
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