I wanted to share some lines from Simon Armitage’s Killing Time (1999), a poem commissioned to mark the end of a digital, violent sort of millennium. I discovered the poem (or was commanded to discover it) in the middle of a stressful poetry exam, and despite having to analyse under pressure I was very enjoyably impressed. We were given the extract about the Colorado shootings, in which two boys, ‘armed to the teeth with thousands of flowers’, share with ‘unsuspecting pupils’ the ‘dusting of pollen, if not an entire daisy-chain, / or the colour-burst / of a dozen foxgloves, flowering for all their worth’. It was, and still is, a very uncomfortable extract to read: violence is rendered as kindness; horror as beauty. The reversal works very, very well, and so I was looking forward to the rest of the 1000-line poem, all of which was new to me.
I particularly liked the following extract, which with the same kind of reversal manages to perfectly, ironically refigure an act of violence. The effect is to somehow make the actual event seem darker.
‘This season, luggage containing terrible thoughts
was left in Brixton, Soho and Brick Lane,
the kind which scatters the baggage of one man’s mind
into the public’s brain.’
The poem ends with a mad, magical, wonderful – I don’t know the word – symbol? scene? moment where you say this right here, this is what fiction can do? The speaker describes the lyrebird, who is ‘put on the spot / by animal psychologists’, and blurts out the millennium’s ‘sound-bytes’. The whole world is contained in the single bird’s voice, and it is parroted back – impossibly, and yet so appropriately – to the eager listeners:
‘orders given in a foreign tongue,
the smashing of locks and latches,
petrol poured from a petrol can,
the striking of matches,
glass popping from window frames,
appeals to the mercy of God,
the calling out of particular names,
the splutter of firing squads,
[...]
That interference jamming the air,
that babble of white noise,
that signal bending and burning the ears
was the radiation of news.’
