A Vision

About author
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West
Yorkshire. He is a graduate of Portsmouth University, where he studied
Geography. As a post-graduate student at Manchester University, his MA
thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders. Until
1994 he worked as a Probation Officer in Greater Manchester.
Simon Armitage is the current national Poet Laureate (2019-2029).
He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and was elected to serve
as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford for 2015-2019. In Spring
2019, he held the post of Holmes Visiting Professor at Princeton University,
USA.
Previously, he taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa�s
Writers� Workshop and Manchester Metropolitan University before his 2011
appointment as Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield and Visiting
Professor at the University of Falmouth.
Armitage has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday
Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, an Eric
Gregory Award, a major Lannan Award, a Cholmondeley Award, the Spoken
Word Award (Gold), the Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, BBC Radio Best
Speech Programme, Television Society Award for Documentary and KeatsShelley Prize
for Poetry. He won the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in
Translation and was awarded the 2018 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry.
In 1999 Armitage was named the Millennium Poet. In 2004 he was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Armitage was awarded the CBE for
services to poetry in 2010 and presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry at the
25th Hay Festival in 2012.
As part of Britain�s 2012 Cultural Olympiad and while Artist in Residence at
London�s Southbank, Armitage conceived and curated Poetry Parnassus, a
gathering of world poets and poetry from every Olympic nation. This landmark
event is generally recognised to be the biggest coming together of international
poets in history.
Publications
Prior to mainstream publication, Armitage published several limited edition
pamphlets with small and local poetry presses, all now highly collectable.
These included Human Geography, The Distance Between Stars, The Walking
Horses, Around Robinson, and Suitcase.
His first full-length collection of poems, Zoom!, was published in 1989 by
Bloodaxe Books. Further mainstream collections are:
? Xanadu (1992, Bloodaxe Books)
? Kid (1992, Faber & Faber)
? Book of Matches (1993, Faber & Faber)
? The Dead Sea Poems (1995, Faber & Faber)
? Moon Country (with Glyn Maxwell, 1996, Faber & Faber)
? CloudCuckooLand (1997, Faber and Faber),
? Killing Time (1999, Faber & Faber)
? Selected Poems (2001, Faber & Faber)
? Travelling Songs (2002, Faber & Faber)
? The Universal Home Doctor (2002, Faber & Faber)
? Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (2006, Faber & Faber,
2008 Knopf)
? Seeing Stars (2010, Faber & Faber, 2011 Knopf)
? Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014 (2014, Faber & Faber)
? The Unaccompanied (2017, Faber & Faber)
? Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019, Faber & Faber)
? Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (March 2020, Faber)
2019 saw publication of Armitage�s new version of Hansel and
Gretel illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Design for Today) which originated
as the puppet opera Hansel and Gretel (A Nightmare in Eight Scenes) and
toured the UK in 2018. Clive-Hicks Jenkins� work went on to win the V&A
Illustration Award 2020 for Book Illustration.
Zoom! was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Kid was short-listed for the
Whitbread Poetry Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The
Dead Sea Poems was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Forward
Prize and the TS Eliot Prize. CloudCuckooLand was short-listed for the
Whitbread Poetry Prize. Both The Universal Home Doctor and Tyrannosaurus
Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid were short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Seeing
Stars was short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society
Choice. The Shout, a book of new and selected poems was published in the
USA in 2005 by Harcourt and shortlisted for the US National Book Critics�
Circle Award. The Unaccompanied was a Poetry Book Society Choice.
Armitage�s highly acclaimed translation of the Middle English classic poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was commissioned by Faber & Faber in the
UK and Norton in the US. Published in 2007, it has sold over 100,000 copies
worldwide to date and appears in its entirety in the Norton Anthology of
English Literature. A new revised edition lavishly illustrated by British artist
Clive Hicks-Jenkins was published by Faber & Faber (2018).
The Death of King Arthur, a further translation, was published by Faber and
Norton in 2011. It became a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted
for the 2012 TS Eliot Prize. Armitage�s translation of the medieval poem Pearl
was published in 2016 and won the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in
Translation.
Throughout his career, Armitage has continued to work with smaller and
specialised poetry presses. Publications of this type include The Anaesthetist
(Prospero Poets, 1994), The Not Dead (Pomona Press, 2008), Out of the Blue
(Enitharmon, 2008) and the pamphlet The Motorway Service Station as
Destination in its Own Right (Smith/Doorstep Books, 2009). Black Roses: The
Killing of Sophie Lancaster was published by Pomona in 2012. Fine Press
Poetry has published several illustrated limited editions including In Memory
of Water (2013), Considering the Poppy (2014), Waymarkings (2017), Exit the
Known World (2018) and Gymnasium (2019). Propolis published New
Cemetery in 2018.
The Twilight Readings (2007) is an illustrated publication of Armitage�s first
residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). Flit (2018) comprises 40
poems and photographs by Armitage, who returned to YSP as poet in
residence throughout 2017, its 40th anniversary year.
�Still� became a WW1 centenary exhibition and then specialist illustrated book
edition (Enitharmon 2016) which published Armitage�s sequence of poems in
response to 26 panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the
Battle of the Somme, chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, London.
This work was commissioned by 14-18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Art
Commissions, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and Writers Centre Norwich.
Armitage edited with Robert Crawford The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from
Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (Penguin, 1998) and edited with Tim Dee The
Poetry of Birds (Viking 2009). Other anthologies include Short and Sweet: 101
Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes� poetry. Both are published
by Faber & Faber.
Armitage has written two novels: Little Green Man (Viking, 2001) and The
White Stuff (Viking, 2004). His other prose work includes the best-selling
memoir All Points North, (Penguin 1998) which was The Yorkshire Post Book
of the Year. His subsequent memoir Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star
Fantasist (Viking, 2009) documents his life-long passion for popular music
and his role as lead singer and lyricist with the band The Scaremongers. The
Scaremongers released their first album, Born In A Barn (Corporation Pop
Records) in 2009; the same year they featured on BBC 2�s Culture Show and
played Latitude Festival.
Armitage�s 2012 non fiction book Walking Home, an account of his
troubadour journey along the Pennine Way, became a Sunday Times Top Ten
best-seller for over a month and was shortlisted for the 2012 Portico
Prize. The follow-up publication, Walking Away, also made the Sunday Times
best-seller list for non-fiction.
Film, theatre, television and radio
Armitage has written for over a dozen television films and, with director Brian
Hill, pioneered the docu-musical format which lead to such cult films as
Drinking for England and Song Birds. Song Birds was screened at the Sun
Dance Film Festival in 2006. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his songlyrics
in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA.
In 2009 and 2010, Armitage presented films for BBC4 on Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight and on Arthurian literature. For his programme on The
Odyssey, he sailed from Troy in Turkey to the Greek island of Ithaca.
A Brief Period of Rejoicing, a 30 minute film-poem commissioned by Channel
5 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VE Day, was performed by Sheila
Hancock. Out Of The Blue was commissioned by Channel 5 to commemorate
the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and was performed by Rufus Sewell.
The Great War: An Elegy (BBC 2, 2014), written and presented by Simon
Armitage, followed seven WW1 stories and featured the new poems they
inspired.
In 2011 Armitage wrote the BBC Radio 4 docu-drama Black Roses: The Killing
of Sophie Lancaster, about the murder of Sophie Lancaster and with the full
co-operation of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation. The broadcast created
unprecedented feedback and listener-response. It was repeated soon after its
original transmission and became the most re-requested of any programme
on BBC Radio 4 in 2010.
Black Roses was awarded BBC Radio Best Speech Programme of 2011 and
short-listed for the Ted Hughes Award that year. In 2012, it opened as a stage
play at Manchester�s Royal Exchange and has since been produced as a BBC
film, directed by Sue Roberts. The poetic script of Black Roses was published
in full by Pomona in 2012. Black Roses and the work of the Sophie Lancaster
Foundation contributed significantly to a change of UK legislation in the
reporting of hate crime against sub-cultures.
More recently, Simon Armitage wrote the poetic script for Child in Mind (BBC
4, 2017), a commissioned documentary featuring a groundbreaking new
scheme in Hull called PAUSE, which aims to break the cycle of repeat care
removals. The film The Brink (2019), written and performed by Simon
Armitage, was created for Art 50 to explore British identity and meditate on
the relationship between Britain and Europe.
Armitage�s theatre plays include Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides
play The Madness of Heracles; Jerusalem, commissioned by West Yorkshire
Playhouse; The Last Days of Troy, commissioned by Manchester Royal
Exchange, and The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead, a 2015 English Touring
Theatre and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse co-production. I Am Thomas
was a 2016 co-production with the National Theatre Scotland, Royal Lyceum
Edinburgh, in association with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse. Both The
Last Days of Troy and The Odyssey played at Shakespeare�s Globe on
London�s Southbank.
Armitage wrote the script for the puppet opera Hansel and Gretel (A Nightmare
in Eight Parts) which toured with Goldfield Productions in 2018. The opera�s
narrative poem was published in 2019 by Design for Today with illustrations
by Clive-Hick-Jenkins, who designed the puppets.
Armitage�s earlier dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC,
was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and released on CD through BBC
Worldwide. It received Gold at the 2005 Spoken Word Awards. The book
version, Homer�s Odyssey � A Retelling, is published by Faber and Faber
(2006) in the UK and by Norton in the US. Other BBC radio plays include
The Raft of the Medusa (2014) and Orpheus (2015).
The BBC Radio 4 series, The Poet Laureate has Gone to his Shed, which
happened to be recorded just before the UK�s 2020 coronavirus lockdown and
then broadcast during it, featured Simon Armitage talking to guests about
life, language and music in his shed.
Armitage wrote the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree, composed by
Stuart McRae, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in
2006.
For over ten years, Armitage has been a regular guest on The Mark Radcliffe
Show, first on BBC Radio 1, then BBC Radio 2 and more recently on the
Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 6 Music. He also contributes to
Guy Garvey�s Finest Hour (BBC Radio 6 Music).
Armitage�s many contributions to BBC Radio 4 include his co-hosting of
Armitage and Moore�s Guide to Popular Song and his role as a reviewer for
the weekly arts programme Front Row. He was also a regular contributor to
BBC 2�s The Review Show.
Landscape projects
From 2010 to 2012, Armitage worked with letter-carver Pip Hall and
landscape designer Tom Lonsdale on the Stanza Stones project hosted by
Ilkley Literature Festival. Armitage wrote a sequence of six poems, In Memory
of Water. Each poem was carved into stones at various sites along the South
Pennine watershed between Marsden and Ilkley. These sites now form the 45
mile Stanza Stones Trail. The mystery seventh stone, sited in an unnamed
location, has yet to be found.
Subsequently, Northumberland National Park�s Sill Arts Programme
commissioned Armitage to write six new poems for the Poems in the Air
project. Walkers in the area can now use the Poems in the Air mobile phone
app to unlock the opportunity to hear each poem at the site which inspired
it.
In Praise of Air was the world�s first catalytic poem. Developed in collaboration
with Professor Tony Ryan at the University of Sheffield, it used air-cleansing
nanotechnology embedded in a 10m by 20m (33ft x 66ft) poster-poem which
was attached to the side of a city-centre university building. The poster
absorbed more than two tonnes of air pollution before it was turned into
multiple artworks and sold in aid of charity.
Honours
For his commitment and achievements in literature, Armitage has been
awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Portsmouth, the University
of Huddersfield, the Open University, Sheffield Hallam University and Leeds
University. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2019, he was elected Honorary Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford.
Armitage has served as a judge for the Forward Prize, the TS Eliot Prize, the
Whitbread Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the Man Booker Prize 2006.
Simon Armitage is a Vice President of the Poetry Society, a Patron of the Arvon
Foundation, a Patron of the Friends of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a Patron of
the Wordsworth Trust, and Official Patron of the Elmet Trust.
� 1988 Eric Gregory Award
� 1989 Zoom! made a Poetry Book Society Choice
� 1992 A Forward Poetry Prize for Kid
� 1993 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
� 1994 Lannan Award
� 1998 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year for All Points North
� 2003 Ivor Novello Award for song-writing; BAFTA winner
� 2004 Fellow of Royal Society for Literature
� 2005 Spoken Word Award (Gold) for The Odyssey
� 2006 Royal Television Society Documentary Award Winner for Out of
the Blue
� 2008 The Not Dead (Channel 4, Century Films) Mental Health in the
Media Documentary Film Winner
� 2010 Seeing Stars made a Poetry Book Society Choice
� 2010 Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry
� 2010 Awarded the CBE in the Queen�s Birthday Honours List, for
services to poetry
� 2012 The Death of King Arthur made Poetry Book Society Choice
� 2012 Hay Medal for Poetry
� 2014 Cholmondeley Award
� 2017 The Unaccompanied made a Poetry Book Society Choice
� 2017 Pearl, winner of PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation
� 2018 The Queens Gold Medal for Poetry
� 2019 Poet Laureate
� 2020 Man of the Year, Yorkshire Awards
The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall.
The ring-bound sketches, artists� impressions,
blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.
And people like us at the bottle-bank
next to the cycle-path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or model drivers, motoring home in
electric cars, or after the late show -
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects � a true, legible script.
I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today�s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.
Summary
�A Vision� is a wonderful poem by Simon Armitage, that featured
in Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Corduroy Kid. It creates a warm,
inviting tone and describes the ideals of a model of a city. But at each turn,
the ideas that this espouses are refuted and subverted. Sometimes very subtly
never revealing genuine problems with these ideals until the final sentence
where this vision of an ideal future is finally dismissed totally. What makes �A
Vision� so captivating is its ability to come across as so positive and warm
when in actuality it is as if the poet is so �snarky� as to make his opinions of
the ideas put forward by the model builder as laughable. If you examine the
poem carefully there are hints as to the nature of the poem right from the
start when he describes the future as being good and then uses �once� that
word sets off the poem in the fashion that it continues in raising the positives
of this imagined future but then undermining them imperceptibly.
Form and Tone of A Vision
�A Vision� is written in free verse. It is four stanzas long and each stanza
consists of five lines. There is no rhyming pattern in place although there is
the occasional use of assonance and alliteration (the repetition of certain
sounds). �A Vision� uses striking imagery to create a vision of a sort
of utopian future. (based on an architect�s model.) However, this is constantly
and subtly subverted by the use of certain key contradictions as you will see
from my analysis.
Analysis of A Vision
First Stanza
The first line of the poem, which can be read in full here, is very striking as
Armitage refers to the future but in the past tense. This line taken in isolation
is very jarring but is explained as the poem unfolds. He then continues to
explain that the vision of the future he is referring to is one that is inspired
by a model of a village that would have been on display in a civic hall. What I
find interesting here is that Armitage�s narrator describes the future (and by
that, we assume that the building itself is almost a metaphor for the future in
general) as a beautiful place but the description of the building�s blueprints
contain smoked glass and tubular steel. Both of these descriptions give an
impression, not of beauty, but of an industrial feel. This runs in contrast to
the description of the model itself. Armitage uses alliteration in �the full-blown
balsa wood� description. Balsa wood models could certainly appear beautiful
and the alliteration helps lend that idea to the model. What is also prominent
is the fragile nature of balsa wood in comparison to the rigidity of steel.
Second Stanza
I love the phrase �board game suburbs� it gives the reader such a wonderful
feeling of community spirit. Although I think this phrase is subversive,
suggesting that the ideals represented by this model are unrealistic, childlike
in some ways. There is further credence given to this theory as he uses the
imagery of fairground rides and then executive toys. Executive toys being
an oxymoron gives this poem yet another contradiction, further subverting its
meaning. The idea of a cantilever of light whilst sounding immensely positive
is once again a bit contradictory. A cantilever is a feature in architecture
designed to ensure stability and a solid structure. Having one created of light
would mean a city that was balanced on effectively nothing. The narrator then
turns his attention to the people of this utopian future. They are wholesome
doing the sort of activities that a good, cultured person might do. Walking
their dog, recycling, etc.
Third Stanza
Throughout �A Vision� Armitage creates an image of a lovely future but
constantly underpins this by phrases and clever poetic tricks that make it
seem like the narrator is being sarcastic or perhaps to give a sense of
foreboding as if to say � things aren�t going to work out like that. Fuzzy-felt
grass not only uses alliteration to highlight the description, but the word itself
�fuzzy�, could be used to put across the narrator�s opinion. The fuzziness
represents uncertainty over the future. Once again in this stanza, the narrator
talks about an idealized civilization that drives electric cars. The final sentence
of this stanza states that the aforementioned vision was the �plan(s)� he then
says they were all written in the neat left hand. There is some ambiguity as
to what this means. Left-handedness has a negative connotation that unfairly
exists in modern culture. There is a phrase �a left-handed compliment� which
means something is actually an insult. Left-handedness is also wrongly
associated with the devil and misdoings. Could this reference to lefthandedness be
relevant? It�s hard to imagine that it isn�t significant in some
way.
Fourth Stanza
I think this line is deliberately enjambment, running on from the previous
stanza to add tension as the poem starts to draw towards its close. The use
of the word �true� is interesting here. I don�t think that the narrator believes
that the architects were �true�, but perhaps suggests that their ideas were?
The end of this stanza is almost like a revelation and gives the poem its
meaning as it is revealed that these plans were discovered by the narrator at
a landfill site. There is a certain sadness that firstly these plans were clearly
never carried out. If they had they wouldn�t appear on a landfill site on the
day that they were due to be used. But also because of all the other �unfilled
futures� the landfill site almost acts as a metaphor for what did happen in the
future. There are no wealth of electric cars and masses of people recycling and
working together to save the planet. Just a giant landfill site filled with the
dreams of yesterday. The narrator even goes so far as to say those dreams are
extinct. Is this the narrator�s way of suggesting that the people of the actual
future gave up on making the dreams of the past a reality?