Simon Armitage on Poetry as a Form of Dissent

Poet and novelist Simon Armitage has been writing about Britain for decades now. In the latest in our National Conversations series of interviews, Armitage talks to John Harris about the obstinate nature of poetry and the culture of violence in Britain that he believes precipitated the UK riots.

From Poetry Foundation (Nov. 2011): The Guardian‘s John Harris takes up the subject of poetry in a recent installment of his national conversations series. A little predictably, he begins with the premise that being a poet these days is a thankless task and then illustrates poetry’s marginality via a series of quick interviews with unwitting pedestrians.

But after that he jumps into an interesting and wide-ranging conversation with poet Simon Armitage, who turns this premise on its head, saying that if everybody sitting on the bus or the tube in the mornings was holding a book of poems, he might not want to be a poet at all:

“There’s something about poetry which is oppositional and it’s a form of dissent. I mean, even in its physical form, it doesn’t reach the right-hand margin, it doesn’t reach the bottom of the page. There’s something a little bit obstinate about it […] Poetry’s always had a complex relationship with language. It’s alternative. It’s independent. It simply cannot be a mainstream art form.”

Watch the whole interview right here:

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