Liverpool has more than its fair share of visiting musicians and theatre groups ready to entertain their genial hosts; sometimes there are those that are conspicuous by their absence but the prodigious home grown talent that runs through the very heart of Merseyside more than makes up for that. What is missing is the poets, the speakers of lines with no music attached in which to give the people of Liverpool their other fix, the well placed word in the right place that can topple Governments, bring the idiotic to their knees…or even just put a smile on a face and inspire the next breed of would be poets.
As Yorkshire’s Simon Armitage makes himself comfortable on stage, as comfortable as he has been drinking water in the sun drenched atmosphere of the bar below in Leaf and taking in the conversation all around him, it is possible to wonder where all the great poets are. Liverpool again has its fair share of wordsmiths of that there can be no doubt, The Dead Good Poets Society that used to frequent The Everyman supplied more than just a few for a start, but visiting poets are scant and far between. In recent years Andrew Motion, the then Poet Laureate, Liverpool’s own poetry mega stars Roger McGough and Brian Patten and a few other top poets have come into the city and received the greatest of admiration for their craft.
Simon Armitage is in the city to give a talk, a glimpse into his travels in the recently published book in which he journeys all the way down the Pennine Way from its very Northern tip to 37 miles south of his home in Marsden and as he gives three readings from Walking Home, it is possible to see the joy in the audience’s eyes, the glistening of a teary eye, and in one smartly dressed woman’s case the lavish love she held for one of the finest poets working in the U.K. today.
Simon Armitage is laid back, he talks with great care to the audience about the journey, throwing in a tongue in cheek slide show for the benefit of those attending and by the end of the hour he has been on stage at Leaf, which is no stranger to great nights of entertainment, receives the kind of applause usually reserved for other mediums of expression.
The night asks a pertinent question, where are the poets, the rock and roll writers without the music to aid them? In a city where its iconic daily paper prints a poem every day in its hallowed pages, the love of poetry is there in Liverpool but is it a dying form of expression in the rest of the country? For Simon Armitage his reputation is sealed as one of the finest exponents of the well-formed verse and on a sultry summer’s evening in Leaf, he stood tall with his prose and poetry. It may not be rock and roll in its truest sense but it is music to the ears none the less.
Ian D. Hall