Poems
Poem 2: '*' ('I am very bothered...')
Extract
I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
Location
Armitage reads the poem in one of the chemistry laboratories of the school he himself attended: Colne Valley High School, near Marsden. It is in these laboratories that the central incident of the poem may be presumed to have taken place - if indeed it did take place. A group of present-day pupils at the school talk about the poem on their own and with Armitage, and take part in a reconstruction of the 'incident'.
Summary
This poem is part of a series of poems from Armitage's collection Book of Matches - poems designed to be read in the time it takes for a match to flare up and burn out - recalling a game in which you try to tell the story of your life in the time it takes for a match to be lit and burn out. The asterisk in the title 'represents the matchstick flaring into life just as the poem flares into life'. Its opening lines are taken from a questionnaire which Armitage used to use with his clients when he worked as a probation officer. The poem takes as its starting point a memory from school: that you never accepted a pair of laboratory tongs in a chemistry lesson because they would be red hot and burn you. He sets that memory alongside the memory of a girl at school with whom he was in love and who completely ignored him.
Whether this particular incident really happened to him or whether it has been reworked in the poet's imagination is left for the reader to decide. This is a characteristic tactic in Armitage's poetry. He wants the poem to cause a stir, to burn people's fingers, because he feels that poems are about feeling: 'mood and tone... not just about meaning'.
The poem plays with the conventional 14-line sonnet form - as does 'Poem'.
What Simon Armitage Said
'The way I've treated incidents at school... I've made them into folklore and myth and legend.
'I think the temptation is always to imagine that if the word 'I' appears in a poem, it's the author talking about him or herself, and I think poets know that so they're very slippery about it and I think they wind people up in poems with... playing around with identity and persona.
'I was trying to get people to react, whether they were disgusted by the poem, or they were moved by it. I just wanted them to react.
'I don't want to wave flags at the end of poems - I don't want to sort of shoot out that little gun where a flag comes down and says, "Bang! This is what it means." I want to leave people with the question, not the answer.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
