THE man widely tipped as the next poet laureate has written his most high-profile work yet, a poem to be broadcast on television to mark the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.
The poem by Simon Armitage, 43, features a fictional British trader trapped in one of the twin towers as the planes strike. It will be read by Rufus Sewell, star of Rock ’n’ Roll, Sir Tom Stoppard’s hit West End play.
The work, to be broadcast on Five next Monday, the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, will boost his position as frontrunner to succeed Andrew Motion, whose term as poet laureate expires at the end of 2008.
“I wanted to do something which was both commemorative and elegiac, but not political,” said Armitage.
Some of his previous works to mark public events have brought him a reputation as the unofficial poet laureate. These include one that he was commissioned to write last year for the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Other works have proved to be more controversial. Armitage caused a political storm when he was asked by the New Millennium Experience Company to write a poem to celebrate the millennium.
The work, Killing Time, was an attack on celebrity culture and derided the competition to give birth to “millennium babies”. It was also a reflection of his disillusionment with the Labour government and included a bitter denunciation of Anglo-American foreign policy, including the lines: “Britain is an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of continental Europe, home to a squadron of hawks and harriers”.
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His latest poem avoids overt political comment. “For this new poem I was interested much more in bereavement,” said Armitage. “I also wanted it to reflect what was happening that day inside the towers. To give those inside a voice.”
Sewell will read Out of the Blue against a backdrop of a dealing office, actual footage of the day itself and some memories from victims’ families.
It begins with the trader embarking on what he thinks will be another ordinary day:
Up with the lark, downtown
New York.
The sidewalks, the blocks.
Walk. Don’t Walk. Walk.
Don’t Walk.
Then Armitage moves on to the shattering of his self-assurance as the attack strikes and his familiar world lurches
"Simon has written a poem as a picture of what happened. We wanted to get across poetry which tells a story and can be understood,” said Daisy Goodwin, a poet and poetry anthologist. She is also producer of the Five programme.
Armitage and Goodwin believe that poetry should address public issues.
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“Some poets are more abstract but I like telling a story,” said Armitage. “This poem deliberately follows the chronology of the day.” The work recounts the trader’s growing awareness of the scale of the disaster which is about to engulf him.
“I wanted to get over the terror of what happened to this one individual,” Armitage said.
As the poem continues, the trader’s plight becomes increasingly desperate. Armitage describes him looking desperately out of the windows as a blurred shape goes past, possibly a falling body.
Finally the man realises that there is no hope:
Armitage, who took just two weeks to write his 878-line poem, said: “I was transfixed by the television images of the disaster unfolding on that day.”
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He is not the first poet to write about September 11, but Out of the Blue is the first significant public poem in Britain about the event. He wrote some short verses about it for the Radio 4 Today programme two months after the attack. Other poets who have written about the attacks include Wendy Cope and Motion himself.
Armitage, who has also written the libretto for a new opera, The Assassin Tree, which opens at the Royal Opera House in London on Wednesday, has won many awards.
He was a rival to Motion in the race to become poet laureate in 1999 and is thought to have lost partly because he was considered to be too young.
In America, September 11 gave rise to a mass of verses written by ordinary people to express their grief. Remembrance of the attacks has also taken other artistic forms such as photography shows, sculptures — including one from Anish Kapoor, the British artist, at a memorial garden beside ground zero — and films. The most high-profile of these, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, will open in Britain on September 29.