A Vertical Art: Oxford Lectures

by Simon Armitage

This edition gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his 'conscientious and often amusingly self-conscious tenure' ( TLS ) as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Armitage tries to identify a 'common sense' approach to an artform that can lend itself to grand statements and vacuous gestures, questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, asserting certain fundamental qualities that separate the genre from near-neighbours such as prose and song lyrics, examining who poetry is written for and its values in contemporary society. Above all, these are personal essays that enquire into the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the point of view of a dedicated reader, a practising writer and a lifelong champion of its power and potential.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Writing

Kindle Edition

Published May 18, 2021

About the author

Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019

Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) GCSE syllabus for English Literature in the United Kingdom. These include "Homecoming", "November", "Kid", "Hitcher", and a selection of poems from Book of Matches, most notably of these "Mother any distance...". His writing is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness."

Reviews

[Davidcharlesbowmangmail.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

These lectures deserves a much more considered review, but for the moment I'll just record that they are sophisticated and challenging, and just sufficiently so. But they are also witty, tremendously lucid, and have no truck with pretentiousness or stupidity in writing or criticising poetry. I especially enjoyed his scathing comments about the commercial success of "mindfulness", but the main value of these lectures is the light they shine on how and why much recent and modern poetry needs to be taken seriously.
Armitage mildly condemns unnecessary obscurity, but equally mildly rejects that the "intentional fallacy" is actually a fallacy. He recognises that simplicity has its place, but also that difficulty can be a desirable quality; much (as he says) that when one is attracted to a person, one prefers him or her not to make themselves available too easily.
There are a great many pithy and original passages worth harvesting, and I'll just choose one, which I still struggle to understand: "Poetry is shaded language. [...] [T]he shadows of chosen words fall in a particular angle, suggesting an angle or view. It's a form of hachuring." (p.310)

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would have preferred a book of lectures about poetry written by someone who still enjoyed it.

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned:
“It partially acknowledges one of the great anxieties of modern poetry, as articulated through modern criticism: that no matter what control poets attempt to exert on the page, ownership of and power over any text rests ultimately with the reader, and readers are largely unpredictable in their responses”

I didn’t read much poetry for many years, but I’ve always enjoyed it as a concept - for me it is the often, but not exclusive, short form set up; the interpretation skills needed but levels can be chosen by the reader; the pictures painted by the writer in sometimes simply less than 10 lines; the white space surrounding, prompting metal space to chose show to use; the skill of imparting the emotion through layers of metaphor - yes, it can be as pompous as this list, and I’m not going to deny it that title! But I wish that I could have understood more of this… highbrow and then some!! I was determined to finish despite it taking numerous library loans and nearly a year, but this was tough. Even when the discussion was broken down into smaller chunks in the last section (poetic approach?), and even though quite numerous and thematic, overall I was partially lost. Although I am intrigued about the McCloud fronted, poetry based, time lapse slow montage tv show… that I’d tune in for.

Maybe ideal for English scholars studying the form, but not for me as a casual read… or am I just not an Armitage fan…?

[Katrinka]

I about stood up and cheered for the "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" chapter (which, to sum it up badly, bucks against the university-professionalization of poetry).

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first heard Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures on poetry via the podcast series, and I'm very glad to have the chance to re-visit those same texts in book form.

Armitage is both a talented poet and a keen observer of the practice of poetry in the contemporary world, and his insights are almost always valuable and thought-provoking. His ability to articulate the complexities of modern poetry is well-demonstrated in the final lecture, "CODA. Ninety-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry", in which he constructs a series of positions on poetic practice with succinct yet articulate evidence.

My other favorite lectures are "Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn't? Dilemmas and Decisions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "'Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments': Clarity and Obscurity in the Age of Formlessness". The latter is worth quoting at length, to demonstrate the razor sharpness that Armitage is capable of using to build his arguments:

"...poetry is a vertical art, its verticality extending from orchestrated line endings and managed intervals. In dispensing with form and formulae, and without any meaningful frameworks or scaffolding to support its structures, poetry has - in spirit, at least - tended more recently towards the horizontality of prose...To shore up its standing, the intriguing consequences of pattern and shape have been replaced by specialist knowledge - a poor substitution, since the effects of structure, no matter how covert, are involving and engaging at both the aural and visual level, whereas classified intelligence and restricted understanding tend to exclude and alienate...Language is the greatest tool ever devised by the human brain; obscurity is a betrayal of its expert and exquisite functionality - and to be opaque in poetry, either deliberately or unconsciously, is to take this most precious and precise of instruments and use it as a delivery mechanism for white noise or pepper spray."

[Dominic H · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although the lectures given by Oxford Professors of Poetry have yielded some wonderful books, notably Seamus Heaney's 'The Redress of Poetry' and Paul Muldoon's brilliant 'The End of the Poem', Simon Armitage's 'A Vertical Art' is a disappointment. It's not just randomness as a unifying theme which proves unsatisfying and for the most part uninteresting, nor the unabating demotic style which consistently seeks to draw attention to its own virtuousness. What he has to say is, for the most part, drab and unoriginal. Maybe this all felt different if you were in the Examination Schools listening to him.

The book is not helped by having so little of the texts being discussed actually reproduced. Armitage says he was the first Professor of Poetry to use PowerPoint so maybe the poems were being displayed behind him as he was speaking but it's a major omission within the book. Surely someone at Faber must also have felt this? Anyway, baffling.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impeccable and precise line readings of disparate but connected poems placing ancients and moderns often side by side. These lectures also explore some of the quirky mechanics of what make a poem work such as the space and air between stanzas or at the page margins, poems of lists. On the other hand many observations are unnecessarily condescending or - in the case of the essay on Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize - bitchy. And though the humor or observational irony is meant to be endearing, sometimes it was - to me anyway - distracting and offputting. Still there's a lot here to send a reader back to read Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Thomas Hardy, Strabo the ancient geographer, Spenser, the Pearl poet, and others. Many amusing facts such as that Ben Jonson used the word wind-fucker instead of hawk or kestrel to describe the bird.

[Peter Longden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am already a reader of Simon Armitage poetry and a follower of his writing on other subjects so a book of his thoughts on poetry is an absolute delight. It gives so many insights into the ‘vertical art’ that I’m glad I’ve marked at least some of them with index tabs! As a writer of poetry myself who is struggles to decipher and understand the true nature of the art, this book is a masterclass of insights if epic proportions!
This will be permanently on my desk for reference whenever I need a little inspiration.
Excellent!

[Bardfilm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled on this book while searching for something else entirely, and I'm glad I did. These written versions of lectures are almost always insightful, and some are brilliant. Most of them meander, but usually pleasantly so. The separate talks on Dylan, Gawain and the Green Knight, and "The Ninety-Five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry" are all terrific. The ones on Wordsworth and Elizabeth Bishop precisely the opposite. But I'm still offering four stars for the collection.

[Josie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great essays/lectures in here. A little biased at times, but some good points to make you think. Refers to quite a few modern poets, not just the more traditional ones you usually see in essay collections. I would definitely recommend reading.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full of snide, generic, academic wit. Armitage wants to reduce poetry to “common sense”, like putting up a shelf or changing a tyre. He holds your hand and assures you that you and he are more capable than those he dissects.

[Huckfinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging notes from a practioner critic, calling for poetry to find a path between the obscure and the banal. Potshots at Ben Lerner on the one hand, Adrian Mitchell on the other.

[Austen to Zafón]

I was very much enjoying this, but I have other priority titles right now. Will pick this up again at some point.

[Matthew Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I "read" this book in the format of listening to the podcasts of the original lectures, with the ebook (borrowed on hoopla) open to make notes and highlights. I put "read" in inverted commas not because I'm anti-audiobook (I have a shelf for them!), but because the lectures and the book are somewhat different, so there may be much that I have missed. Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to the lectures and getting some insight into the state of poetry in the half-decade pre-Covid according to Simon Armitage.

I tend to think of myself as being quite new to poetry, and from that perspective I enjoyed Armitage's view as a way of discovering some new poems and poets and ways of looking at poetry that I had not previously encountered. I have made a list with the intent of actually sitting down with the physical version of this book and rereading it after I have read some of those referenced in the lectures - approvingly or not.

But Armitage's memories of the book of poetry he received in secondary school reminded me of all the poetry I not only read, but remembered from my time at secondary school - principally the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen; but also U.A. Fanthorpe's 'Not My Best Side', John Donne's 'The Sunne Rising', and a few others that have stuck in my head over the years without much effort on my part. And it made me miss the environment where I was forced to read certain things that I might not, initially, have wanted to read, but which ultimately affected me quite a bit. It makes me think about how I suppose I was always into this, but just didn't have the motivation to get into it.

Which ties in, I suppose to Armitage's through-line of accessibility of poetry - how yes, it should be some work, but that deliberate obscurity is not as clever as concise clarity, that accessibility should not be frowned upon, that the work should not all be on the reader (or, to be fair, the poet). I think there can be more nuance to his argument but I did like it, and feel seen by it, and I hope to read more poetry now that I have read this.

[Francis Christie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you mike

[Katherine Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good essays, neither pretentious nor simplistic. He rambles a fair bit, but they're generally witty and interesting. Gives you false hope about his poetry though.