Looking for Simon Armitage's "Night Shift" (another poem from Zoom!), I found two postings of it in essays by Jeffrey Side that decry Armitage's poem from two very different perspectives. In one, Armitage's poem is used an example of how weak contemporary poetry is in contrast with Bob Dylan's lyrics ("Ambiguity and Abstraction in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan", from The Argotist). In the other, Armitage's poem is used an example of weak "empiricist" poetry ("Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers", from Jacket). In both cases, Side argues that the poem "leaves nothing to the reader's imagination" and is hence weak. But just because the scene described in the poem is clear does not mean the poem does not do anything, and just because the scene is free of abstractions does not mean that the poem does not make abstract interpretation possible. (I'm going out on a bit of a limb in saying this because I have not read the whole essay in either case.)

So here's the poem (I feel free to quote the whole thing since it's already on-line in two places, thanks to Side's interest in it; in fact, I'm grateful to him that I don't have to type it all up but can cut and paste!):

Once again I have missed you by moments;
steam hugs the rim of the just-boiled kettle,
 
water in the pipes finds its own level.
In another room there are other signs
 
of someone having left: dust, unsettled
by the sweep of the curtains; the clockwork
 
contractions of the paraffin heater.
For weeks now we have come and gone, woken
 
in acres of empty bedding, written
lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror
 
and in this space we have worked and paid for
we have found ourselves, but lost each other.
 
Upstairs, at least, there is understanding
in things more telling than lipstick kisses:
 
the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;
body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet.

Given my interest in the issue of "evidence" in Armitage's poems, it's not surprising that I noticed the ways in which identifying evidence plays a role here: the poem is about all the "signs" that "you" have left behind, signs that make it clear that the speaker has "missed you by moments." As in "Snow Joke," each detail is something that first has to be identified as more than just a detail; only then can it be "read" (or "misread") as evidence, as a sign.

That is at the level of the poem's story (that paraphrasable thing that Side identifies), but, as with my point about evidence in "On Miles Platting Station," every feature of the poem could be read as "evidence" of something else, by the very fact of its being in a poem. I am reading the details of the poem as evidence of how evidence works, so I pick out the details that are evidence of that, but a different reading could be developed about the role of "heat" in the poem, or perhaps the repetition of the word "lipstick."

*

It's striking that Side holds up songwriters (Dylan, Cohen) as better poets than Armitage. I wonder what he would make of Armitage's lyrics? On his Scaremongers CD, or in the musical documentaries that he has written lyrics for (see the Century Films website).