Poetry

Poetry

1. The Clown Punk

   • Subject
     • Encounter with eponymous Clown Punk, who presses his face against the windscreen of the narrator's car when it stops at traffic lights, frightening the children sitting in the back seat. Based on a real text
   • Structure
     • The poem consists of a single stanza of 24 lines. The lines are pentameters (they have ten syllables each).
   • Language
     • Sound
       • Northern Vocab. E.G: "Slathers his daft mush"
       • The rhyme in the phrase "town clown" contributes to the creation of a comic image, before telling us not to laugh.
     • Imagery
       • Visually strong poem. Simile of "a basket of washing that got up and walked, towing a dog on a rope" conjures a shambolic person. The structure of sentence mirrors the way dog walks behind clown punk.
       • Armitage makes reader re-imagine a heavily tattooed body. The man's skin is image all of its own, made up of "every pixel". But the poem stops us from reacting with fear, as we might typically; instead encouraged to think sympathetically of how such a person will look in old age, when the tattoos become "sad".
       • Art/painting vocab - "ink", "daubed" and "dyed" - permeates the poem in the same way that tattoos puncture the man's skin, so that the ink has sunk even into his "brain".