[Felicity Graham]

Hi, I find this poem a bit cryptic and I'd appreciate any interpretations. It's from the collection Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid. The poem can be read online here

I think it's a comment on celebrity and media culture. I think it's about a celebrity that flees a media scandal, only to find his hideout is full of expat Brits clamouring to read The Daily Mail.

Explanatory point: The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper whose editorial slant is small-c conservative, anti-liberal, anti-immigration, pro-life, pro-capitalism, pro 'traditional values'. Its readership is often satirized in the media as being narrow minded, racist, prejudiced or generally intolerant. It has the second largest (!) circulation in the UK.

1st stanza: Guy unconscious on a beach at noon. Wakes but can't be bothered to move. We suspect their might be something wrong with him.

2nd stanza: The donkeys are "refugees or latter day saints". This could be just a straight description of donkeys on the beach, but I think there is something else. I think there is an implication that the guy has endured suffering or persecution. Is "Wax-coated needles wouldn't sink" just part of setting the scene along the beach or is it also a metaphor for a scandal he was in which refuses to go away? 'Loose Talk.' is deliberately placed at the end of the second stanza because it refers to gossip that caused the protagonist to flee abroad. When he gets there he finds...

3rd stanza...that the local expat community are already swarming around the piles of Daily Mail not even out of their plastic yet, eager to find out about the scandal he was involved in. I'm not sure the country is significant. Spain is plausible as it is a common landing ground for, (according to the poet) Daily-Mail reading (ouch!), retired British expats. It was, maybe still is, considered a bolthole for criminals on the run (and runaway celebrities?). cf the multi-talented Stephen Fry who, ill & depressed, fled to America to walk up and down a beach http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...h.broadcasting
I think it is significant that the guy is abroad, somewhere warm (to defrost) where, ironically, he finds stereotypically narrow minded people from the country he has just fled who have nothing better to do than gossip about the latest celebrity scandal.

Noon is now evening. The guy is still on or around the beach. The sea is non-tidal so, building on the Spain idea, perhaps it's the Mediterranean. The ships are fishing boats or more likely large, modern, luxury power boats belonging to the wealthy expats. The man is not in his right mind. He is probably suffering from stress, anxiety, depression and a persecution complex. To him, with their modern, spiky hard edges silhouetted at night the pleasure boats resemble, ironically again, persecuting ships of war

4th stanza: The guy is the frozen chicken of the subject. He is numbed to ice by what's happened to him. Frozen chicken suggests vulnerability, cowardice (in running away?), rawness, something that's been plucked, that's about to be eaten, something farmed (celebrity culture) for consumption? He cannot be thawed by the setting, rust coloured sun at dusk because there's not enough warmth in it. Just as his mind distorts how he sees the boats, it also makes him see the setting sun as a rusty, blunt nail that can't help him. But why wasn't he thawed by the noon sun? Did that just numb him unconscious with its heat? Why is there an enjambement (is that the correct term when the phrase runs from one stanza to the next as opposed to from one line to the next?) between stanza 3 and "The sun's nail" and stanza 4: "by dusk - rusty, blunt - useless against ice."? I've got no idea what the last line about. Was it a all a dream? What is eating the sleep about?

Am I in fact completely off track?

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Note: Felicity, I've edited this to fix the broken link --Alex

[John Hutchcraft]

Felicity, I hope you won't mind my asing, but are you a student working on an Armitage project?

[Maryann Corbett]

I've been exchanging e-mails with Felicity, so I can tell you that this isn't a student project, but genuine curiosity.

I was hoping we could get a discussion going about the process of extracting meanings from poems, and I think I briefly forgot that we most often hear such questions from students who want help.

Having been thinking about the poem since the post first went up, I have two reactions. The first is that Felicity's been able to glean much more from it than I'd be able to. If her reading is right, then the poem seems to be heavily dependent on the reader's knowledge of current social conditions in the UK. And not only the social conditions (many of which she's explained) but phrases like "spark out" are nonnative for me.

So I'd hope for some contributions from members resident in the UK.

But I'll add one thing: let's remember that the reader need not "decode" one inerrant meaning from the poem and that a number of variants meanings could be useful.

Maryann

[Felicity Graham]

Well i have to say just getting this far took me a while. And i didn't know what 'spark out' was either. I guessed, and then i googled it.

For several days i couldn't get anything out of the poem at all. Then someone suggested the guy might not be in his right mind, and the idea of the time passing, and that myabe it was only his perception that the ships were ships of war and that maybe he was the chicken.

After that i eventually made the media connection from the unwrapped newspapers and that he seemed to be an outsider in an expat community, and it had been niggling me that the donkey lines were maybe too odd and specific to be just about the donkeys.

But you're right, i could be completely wrong! One thing's for sure though, he is one of the UK's leading poets & every word will be there and where it is for a good reason.

[John Hutchcraft]

Felicity, I hope you don't mind my having asked. As I'm sure you can imagine, a site like this does occasionally get hit with beleaguered students who will try to manipulate the membership into writing their term papers for them.

Welcome to the Sphere.

[Janice D. Soderling]

It might be of interest that The Fiddlehead which is an excellent literary magazine printed in Canada (affiliated with the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton NB) had in the fall 2007 issue a special section "Simon Armitage in Canada".

Here is a partial quote from editor James Langer's intro.

"(...)This British poet has already outgrown the insufficient labels applied to his early work as surely as he's outgrown the constant comparisons to Larkin and Auden. So, in the spirit of a proper introduction, or perhaps re-introduction, I ask that Fiddlehead readers begin by considering this poet's body of work as a type of urban almanac, a burgeoning catalogue of our passions and idiosyncrasies, and recognize the generous instinct rippling beneath the slick, street-wise cool of his language.
(...)
Armitage's almanac is a compendium of an information laden, urban age. And if we could somehow take an EEG of this work, I think wed discover the patterns and verbal energies of a generation raised on the hustle of consumer culture and the frenzy for immediate gratification, while still smart enough to distrust all flags, brands, and emblems. In short, I think we'd find a durable image of our conscience.(…)"

[Tim Love]

You're way further than I would have managed. I'd say the setting was the Balearic Islands. I didn't get the celeb angle (I was thinking more of a castaway/outcast), but maybe it's there - "Defrosting a Chicken" is close to "Cold Turkey" I suppose. I'm unconvinced by the explanation of "ships of war". My (no better) explanation is that it's a conflation of portuguese man-of-war and "moon jellyfish".

Maybe there's a religious thread - donkeys, nails and suppers. The last line sounds a bit like the sort of trick I try sometimes when I don't know how to end a poem. The first stanza seems long for what it does.

Maybe "a fly might land [on deepfrozen chicken/man]" and "swarmed around shrinkwrapped heaps of the Daily Mail" are in parallel.

[Felicity Graham]

Hi Tim, Many thanks for your thoughts. Now it will be hard to think of the subject of the poem as anything but "deepfrozen chicken man"!

The celeb idea is pretty tenuous, it was based on the same idea of outcast but tied into the 'Loose Talk' the suffering metaphor from the donkeys, and the newspapers. I can't say i'm entirely convinced about the ships of war idea myself, but why *would* there be a link between moon - jellyfish - portuguese man of war - ships & why make it so obscure? I wondered about the religious line too but i just can't see why it might be there at the moment. I see what you mean about the fly/ the expats but in the first instance the fly would be being helpful, whereas i don't think that's how he means to portray the expats. Why do you think the Balearics btw?

Do you have a view on his stuff generally? I have another of his collections, but this is the first one i've read.

[Tim Love]

"Why do you think the Balearics btw?" because they're in the right place for the ex-pats and those species of jellyfish, and because googling for "pine walk" brings them up.

"Do you have a view on his stuff generally?" - he's not someone I've tracked. I think it's easy to underestimate him. This kind of discussion make me think I should read him more.

[Felicity Graham]

I never thought that Pine Walk would be a real place, but i think you're right. Now i'm more inclined to think he's a party guy who ODd on too much Good Time. But that still leaves the "Loose Talk", & the shrinkwrapped piles of newspapers with the swarming expats...