West Meets East
by Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 7/21/2008
Simon Armitage is one of the U.K's most popular poets, but his new book, Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, is the first individual collection of his poems to be published in the U.S.
Is it true that in the U.K. poets are somewhat more prominent cultural figures than they are here?
Within the U.K. there is still the idea of the common reader: the person who, as well as going to the theater, the cinema or a gallery, might also be interested in poetry without being someone who would write or review it. Poetry here still has a place on the BBC and in newspapers. It's not a front line art form, but it has a kind of general visibility.
You had a U.S. selected poems a few years ago, but this is your first individual volume to be published both in the U.K. and the U.S. What does it mean to you?
It means a great a deal. I've always had a relationship with America; like a lot of kids growing up in my generation, I was very influenced by American TV and film, and then American poetry of the '60s and '70s—the confessional and Beat stuff. I was very turned on by the spoken voice that Americans were using in poetry. It's always been a place where I've wanted to take my poems. When I've been in the States before, I've felt a bit like I've been traveling without a passport. Now I'll have something in my pocket.
I think American readers are going to feel themselves spoken for in many of these poems, especially the political pieces.
In lots of ways an American story is a British story, especially if you see through the prism of what's been going on in the Gulf. There are a lot of poems in T-Rex which had that in the background. We're both countries that exist within the context of that at the moment. I think that's a good reason for publishing these poems in the States. The particular passage from my Odyssey I've included in T-Rex is the raid on Cyclops's cave. It's that one act really of menace and brutality that haunts Odysseus all the way home. You don't have to underscore that too heavily to let it make its point. One way you can look at The Odyssey is that this is the original raid on the East by the West. These things all feed into the same idea in a sense. I think that comes back to the title as well: you could see that in terms of East/West, too.
