Northern England Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Simon Armitage (1963- ) was born and bred in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and his passion for the North of England has been an ongoing one. To give but a few examples, he has released a collection of essays entitled All Points North, set his play Jerusalem in a northern social club and recently translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval poem whose origin is still debated but which he chose to situate in the Pennines. No wonder then that he should be repeatedly referred to as a “northern poet” by the critics. For instance, Peter Reading is quoted on the blurb of his Selected Poems (Faber, 2001): “Armitage creates a muscular but elegant language of his own out of slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon and the vernacular of his native northern England. He combines this with an easily worn erudition, plenty of nous and the benefit of unblinkered experience… to produce poems of moving originality.” Such a sentence relies on a common knowledge of what “northern” means, immediately divides the British readers into two groups – those who belong to the North of England and those who do not – and implies a way to read the poems depending on which group one belongs to. It would be interesting to understand what the word “northern” encompasses and what it refers to in the poems. How is northerness constructed in Selected Poems? How does it affect the reading of the poems.
Surprisingly though, the poems dealing explicitly with the matter of Northern England are almost all left out from the collection. Is it due to the lesser quality of those poems or else to an attempt to establish a corpus of poems that would embrace the two groups over the divide and widen his readership? It would be interesting to have a look at Armitage’s selected poems of another northern writer he claims as an influence, namely Ted Hughes, to see if the choice of obfuscating the northern feel is sustained or not (Ted Hughes: Poems Selected by Simon Armitage. Faber, 2002). Can such editorial choices be understood as an attempt to escape the label “northern”, still often synonymous with provincial, vindictive, unworthy even or are they motivated by other reasons?
Finally, Simon Armitage’s 2001 Selected Poems could be compared with his first American edition, The Shout: Selected Poems (Harcourt, 2005). Peter Reading is quoted again on the blurb and yet, poet Charles Simic, who introduces the collection, goes no further than stating that Armitage was born in Yorkshire and makes no reference to the northern feel in his poems. On the contrary, Armitage’s affiliation with the American poetry scene (in particular Franck O’Hara) is pointed at and the book is supposed to mark his “American debut”. Furthermore, the collection contains almost no poem set in Northern England whereas most of the Robinson poems (from the name of a persona invented by the little known American poet Weldon Kees) are to be found. To what extent do such choices change the way his poems are read? Do the poems lose a little more their northern quality or is it resilient?