Poetry by Simon Armitage: AQA (A) Literature; Edexcel Literature Close reading is central to all modules
Public poetry is incredibly hard to write well. You only have to look at the official works of some our Poets Laureate to see that even the best writers have trouble writing poems that comment on current affairs without falling into platitudes and bad rhymes. This makes Simon Armitage’s Killing Time, a 1,000-line poem commissioned by the Millennium Simon Armitage Experience Company to mark the changing of the millennia in 2000, a remarkable achievement. His work is by turns profound, funny, sad and witty, and in the extract that we are looking at takes one of the most shocking events of the late twentieth century and turns it into something magical.
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