Close Encounters of the Verse Kind: On Meeting Tony Harrison

In a personal and anecdotal chapter, Simon Armitage reflects on a number of encounters with the poetry of Tony Harrison and with Harrison himself. Armitage locates in Harrison's approach to writing a poetry that is "communicative, clear, local, but at the same time crafted, literary, and universal", a poetry at odds with and in defiance of the prevailing post-modern aesthetic of difficulty and obscurity. He celebrates Harrison's poetic autonomy which he associates with the poet's life outside academia, allowing Harrison see himself as a 'poet of the people', despite his scholarly intelligence and his life-long immersion in classical literature.