The Clown Punk Flashcards
Subject of The Clown Punk by Simon Armitage
The poem describes an encounter with the eponymous Clown Punk, a tattooed, slightly tragic character 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.
Armitage told a BBC website interviewer in 2006 that this poem is based on a real person he used to see around town, and follows “a tradition in English Literature of writing such poems, where one type of person stands eyeball to eyeball with another type, and something passes between them”.
What do you think is passing between the narrator and the punk?
Structure of The Clown Punk by Simon Armitage
The poem consists of a single stanza of 24 lines.
The lines are pentameters (they have ten syllables each).
Sound of The Clown Punk by Simon Armitage
Some of the vocabulary is very ‘northern’ - the phrase “slathers his daft mush” is particularly suggestive of Armitage’s Yorkshire roots.
The rhyme in the phrase “town clown” contributes to the creation of a comic image, before telling us not to laugh.
Imagery of The Clown Punk by Simon Armitage
This is a strongly visual poem.
The simile of “a basket of washing that got up and walked, towing a dog on a rope” conjures a shambolic person.
The structure of the sentence mirrors the way the dog walks behind the clown punk.
Armitage makes the reader re-imagine a heavily tattooed body. The man’s skin is an image all of its own, made up of “every pixel”.
But the poem stops us from reacting with fear, as we might typically; instead we are encouraged to think sympathetically of how such a person will look in old age, when the tattoos become “sad”.
Vocabulary to do with art or painting - “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”.
Is there a pun here with ‘died’?
It is striking that although the tattoo ink is “indelible”, the image of the clown punk can be washed away with windscreen wipers and rain in the minds of the children on the back seat.
Although tattoos are permanent, people are not, so eventually everything will be gone.
Attitudes, themes and ideas of The Clown Punk by Simon Armitage
The Clown Punk is a character who could be either frightening or comic, but the narrator warns, “don’t laugh”.
Instead the poem creates a pathetic figure, who will be “deflated” by the years.
There is an almost dismissive tone to the poem, suggested in descriptive phrases like “basket of washing” and “daft mush”, perhaps used to make the punk seem less threatening to the children in the car.
As he often does, Armitage is introducing us to a character that we might not normally look at so closely.
The clown punk is a shambles, someone we would try to avoid or might mock.
But Armitage makes us see him in another light and perhaps pity him.
Example comparisons of The Clown Punk by Simon Armitage
Give:
- Each of the main characters in these two poems is someone who is not a part of conventional society: Armitage brings us face to face with them.
- Both characters make a scene by getting too close to an audience.
- The character in The Clown Punk doesn’t get to speak to us, unlike the main character in Give: what difference does this make for the reader?
Horse Whisperer:
- Both poems bring us face to face with an unusual character and let us learn something about them.
- There is a focus on physical detail in both poems - although in Horse Whisperer it is about horses, rather than a human character.
- There is the suggestion of a change over time, in the main characters of both poems.
How is the character presented in The Clown Punk?
Armitage uses strong images to create a visual picture of the character, comparing him to a “basket of washing”.
Adjectives like “deflated”, “shrunken” and “sad” all create a sense of a character who is much less than he could be.
The contrasting reactions of the narrator and children to the Clown Punk help to create a sense of his character: the children are afraid, but the narrator is dismissive of his “daft mush”.
The Clown Punk is presented as faintly ridiculous: Armitage uses the rhyme of “town clown” to suggest this.
The tattoos go right through to the character’s “dyed brain”, and the use of surface-art vocabulary throughout the poem suggests that the tattoos are all there is to this man.
