Cancer is a subject the poet laureate Simon Armitage has always shied away from. “I find it very daunting,” he said. “I’ve lost friends and family to cancer.”
But when he was commissioned to write a poem to mark World Cancer Day, he was forced to confront the realities of the disease. “I think I saw part of my task as being slightly demystifying and maybe de-mythologising or de-demonising cancer a little bit to myself,” Armitage said.
He was asked to write the poem, titled The Campaign, by Yorkshire Cancer Research, a charity that funds research and works with people affected by cancer across his native Yorkshire.
“My initial thoughts, as with every commission, is that I can’t do this, don’t really know where to start,” Armitage said. “But that’s the challenge really, and I like the idea that the subject is the sort of puzzle, and the poem is the solution.”
In Yorkshire, someone is diagnosed with cancer every 17 minutes. Before writing the poem, Armitage met with 17 people from across Yorkshire – researchers, families, fundraisers and people living with cancer – at the Yorkshire Cancer Research centre in Harrogate.
“The thing that really galvanised everything for me was spending time at the centre,” he said. “That was incredibly inspiring, very moving as well, and I think that’s always the place where poetry wants to go to, to the emotional part.”
He added: “I knew that I didn’t want to write something mawkish and sentimental, particularly because on the day I went to the centre there was a huge amount of optimism and hope in the room.”
One of the people Armitage met was Gary Lovelace, a former headteacher who lives with stage 4 kidney cancer.
“What was important for me was it finishes on a positive note,” Lovelace said, “with the classic line at the end of turning Yorkshire into a verb and saying, ‘we keep on Yorkshiring on’ I thought was a really inspirational finish, and I found it powerful.”
“Reading it I found I had all those emotions,” he said. “But hearing Simon speak with his dialect, his Yorkshire voice, his pace, his intonation, just really brought it to life, and made it a very special piece of work for me.”
Dr Kathryn Scott, the chief executive of Yorkshire Cancer Research, said when she first read the poem: “I have to admit, I had a little tear in my eye.”
The charity commissioned the poem because, she said, “of our centenary year and really wanting to mark it with something a bit different, and something that is there in perpetuity, something that’s a real symbol of that milestone of 100 years”.
The metaphorical dragon that features in the poem is taken from a speech by the charity’s first honorary secretary, Sir Harold Mackintosh, who, in a speech marking its first public fundraising appeal in January 1926, at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, issued a call across Yorkshire to “deliver the attack upon cancer, the great enemy of mankind, and become the new Saint George in the work of slaying the dragon”.
“I can understand how some people might be a bit more pragmatic,” Lovelace said. “Say, yeah, I don’t want a poem, I want better tablets or I want a cure or whatever. But from my point of view, we’re all real people, we’re all emotional people, what makes us feel good is good for us.”
He added: “I do believe if you live with cancer in a positive way, then that’s better for you. And Simon’s poem … will make people feel good.
“I think it will inform people a little bit, but it will make people feel good, whilst not underestimating the tasks ahead. So I don’t think we should ever underestimate the power of poems.”
Similarly, Armitage, who has been poet laureate since 2019, said poetry had “evolved very subtly and very well to the age that we live in” and the medium was in “a very healthy place”.
“It’s amazing really, I know I get very tired of people saying that young people, younger generations aren’t interested in poetry, they absolutely are,” he said.
“They’re fanatically interested in language, and they might not manifest it and transmit it in the same way that I did when I was growing up, but poetry has proved itself to be unkillable from the very beginning.”
He added: “My feeling is that the poetry is in a very healthy place and I think maybe in a world where we’re surrounded by 360-degree noise, 24 hours a day, not all of it trustworthy, if you get a poem, which is one person saying something that they’ve thought about, and they really believe in, it becomes very valuable.”
The Campaign
Because we famously speak as we find
we said the word cancer out loud, called it a dragon,
went looking for trouble and picked a fight.
When it reared up in the liver we went into action,
outflanked it, stoned it with tablets and pills.
When it hid in the kidneys or blood we rootled it out,
chased it into the open then shooed it over the hill.
Whenever it raised its serpent’s head we slapped it
hard in the mush with a giant charity cheque,
baited it, lured it out of its lair then zapped it
with photons, protons, compounds and hormones,
messed with its atoms and cells till its forked tongue
was tongue-tied, and tied its forked tail in knots.
When it hunkered down in the prostate gland
or made a nest for itself in the bladder or bowel
we caught it on camera, waylaid it with magnets,
tracked and traced it across the body’s ridings
and wolds, through ginnels and snickets,
then galloped against it with needles for lances,
aimed wave after wave of invisible bullets
into its bitter heart, bamboozled its dark soul.
When it perched on the breast we clipped its wings
with skilful hands; when it smouldered and skulked
in the lungs or roared with its fiery breath
we drowned it with thousands of voices, tamed it
with words and songs. When it tainted the skin
with its presence we pierced its scales, punctured
its plated hide, flummoxed it right to the core.
When it prowled in the mind we outfoxed it,
killed it with kindness, ran rings around it
with marathons, pram races, tea dances, car rallies,
left it behind in the trolley dash, laughed in its face,
stood shoulder to shoulder, held hands, linked arms,
and flew a white rose on a flag wherever it fell.
But the job isn’t over, the work isn’t done;
it broods and lurks in organs and genes,
muscles in on our lives, so we push forward,
keep slaying the dragon inside, keep Yorkshiring on.
