SIMON ARMITAGE:When I was a kid, I was in Huddersfield Town Centre with my mom. And we went into the Town Hall. On display was an architect model of what they were going to do to the town in the forthcoming years.
SIMON ARMITAGE:I remember the model being incredibly neat and precise. I probably thought it looked like a game, you know, like a train set or a board game where you could drive your little toy cars, or you could move the people around with a throw of the dice.
SIMON ARMITAGE:'A Vision. 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.'
SIMON ARMITAGE:'Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.'
SIMON ARMITAGE:It was the late '60s and the early '70s. There was this very idealistic sense of being able to design the future.
NEWS READER:'One of the greatest dreams of the 20th Century. That dream of an entirely new kind of city.'
SIMON ARMITAGE:'You know, this was a future made by architects. And like most poets, I try and get the form of a poem to somehow represent or resemble its subject matter. So in this poem, it is very architectural. Each verse is a quatrain, a fairly controlled syllable count going on. It looks orderly, and it looks structured.
SIMON ARMITAGE:'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.'
SIMON ARMITAGE:There's a childlike perspective running through the early parts of the poem, and I think this is reinforced by words like "fairground rides" and "toys." But it's also a poem about growing up. There's a line about halfway through, "Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light."
SIMON ARMITAGE:"Cantilevered by light" it sounds beautiful. 'It sounds wonderful, as if this is an architecture made up entirely of light. Well, of course, you know, you look a little bit further into the idea, and, you know, light cannot support anything on its own. This is a dream that isn't going to come true.
SIMON ARMITAGE:I think the end of the poem, I'm afraid to say, is rather downbeat. This is a landfill site, very smelly, and upsetting, it is, too. All the rubbish that we chuck away ends up here, and it's just left here to rot. At the end of the poem, the speaker in the poem discovers a blueprint or a plan for the future blowing in the rubbish.
SIMON ARMITAGE: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.
SIMON ARMITAGE:I'm just trying to make the case that you can draw the diagrams that you want, make all the plans and maps, but people are complicated and messy. And I suppose as you get older, what you realize is that you're actually living in that future now. It's here, it's arrived, and you look around it. And quite a lot of it is junk.
SIMON ARMITAGE:It's something of a dispiriting poem in that respect, but poems can be gloomy sometimes, and so can I.
Simon Armitage reads his poem ‘A Vision’ and talks about the inspiration, themes, structure and vocabulary that went into creating it.
We see him with a town planner’s model, and he explains how the memory of one he saw in childhood inspired the poem.
He reflects on the ordered structure of architectural plans and how he incorporated the same order into the poem’s structure.
He moves to a rubbish dump, to talk about the pessimistic attitude at the end of the poem, and how the passage of time affects our optimism.
His reading of the poem is combined with an explanation and analysis of some key words and phrases, illustrated with a series of visual images.
This clips is from the series Simon Armitage: Writing Poems.
Teacher Notes
Can be used to help students in exploring the use of form in poetry.
Armitage is clear that he purposefully employed an 'architectural' form in the poem, to reflect the major themes he explores. Can students annotate the poem exploring examples of an architectural form or structure?
What does this choice of form bring to the poem and how does it add to our understanding of Armitage's pre-occupations in the poem?
Is the structure a force for good or is there something more uncomfortable implied by this structure?
Students could add cuttings or sketches of buildings to border the text. Can they draw shapes around the stanzas to reflect architecture?
Curriculum Notes
This clip will be relevant for teaching English Literature.
It will be relevant for teaching poetry analysis at KS3 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and Level 3 in Scotland.
At KS4/GCSE, this poem appears in the AQA pre-2015 poetry anthology.
Other works by this poet appear in the Edexcel, OCR and WJEC pre-2015 poetry anthologies, and in the AQA,Edexcel and WJEC/Eduqas post-2015 anthologies.
This clip could also be used for teaching general poetry analytics skills at KS4/GCSE/National 5.