THE PEOPLE’S POET

Simon Armitage muses on the pull of the North, the pursuit of popularity and lockdown life as Poet Laureate

Simon Armitage muses on the pull of the North and lockdown life as Poet Laureate

When Simon Armitage heard he had become the UK’S Poet Laureate, he leapt onto the garden trampoline with his wife, champagne in hand. “I knew there were no obligations, but I wasn’t ignorant enough to think that there were no expectations,” he says. “I’ve always thought that there was a public role for poetry… But this did make it a bit more conspicuous.”

The expectations are to mark public occasions. Simon – who has produced more than 20 poetry collections, two novels, several memoirs, plays, TV dramas and a podcast called The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed – has written about the moon landing, the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, and the months we might all like to forget: lockdown. “I’d written [commissioned] poems as Laureate… but for the first time, I felt I had to write a poem about [lockdown],” he says. “I couldn’t imagine a more serious situation occurring in my lifetime and felt, in the role, that I needed to respond.”

THE LOCKDOWN LAUREATE

Simon talks thoughtfully and quietly from his house in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, where he has been tucked away for months with his wife Sue, a radio producer, and daughter Emmeline, now in her final year at the University of Oxford. His words flow in lyrical bursts punctuated by reflective pauses and dry laughter.

The country is opening up and closing down, the oddity of 2020 inescapable. Simon has had to postpone a library tour, alongside other trips and readings. “I did a few things online, but I made the decision that it wasn’t for me,” he says. “I like getting involved in the ambience of a venue, and the whole experience of meeting people and engaging in their response… I’ve always believed in the specialness of events. The sense of you and other people in a room is really important to me.” Such openness offers a salve of sympathy to those who have felt a similar sense of isolation in recent months. Simon has gone on walks every evening with Sue and Emmeline (“I don’t think there’s a field or a path that we haven’t crossed”), and has finished translating The Owl and the Nightingale, a medieval poem he thought might take him until the end of 2021. He has immersed himself in the birds’ tiff over love, marriage, nesting habits and manners, identifying with the owl: “I’ve got an owl face… I think the owl is a bit grumpy. I think of the nightingale as maybe a bit pretentious and overconfident… I think the owl’s a bit more of a Northerner.”

POET OF THE NORTH

The North “feels important” to Simon’s work and identity. “It feels as if it’s become more important the longer that I’ve stayed here,” he says. “I think there’s something about living in the North and maybe something about living in a slightly out-of-town location, which is alternative. I feel as if I can stand slightly outside of other things that are going on and maybe take a little bit more time in responding.”

Simon has lived in West Yorkshire most of his life – he grew up in Marsden, just a few miles from his current home. He has said his first “poetic experiences” involved gazing out of his bedroom window at night, imagining the lives of the locals who were vanishing into the pub or drawing their curtains. Vistas still hold an allure. “The view here’s a bit too good,” he says, motioning towards the fields and woods that can be seen from the attic. “I have to turn away from the window, because otherwise I’d spend all day looking at it.”

The landscape might now be more familiar, but its potency remains “undiminished” – especially the moors. “The moors are not to be taken lightly,” Simon explains. “They’re still a place you can go up to and not come back. But they’ve always struck me as a great breathing place, somewhere to get away from other things

and somewhere the imagination can run riot a little bit... It’s a real magnified emptiness up there. They’re just to be avoided when in a bad mood.”

Simon’s work is certainly bound up with place – from the ‘Marsden poems’ he has composed over the years, gathered together this year in Magnetic Field, to Stanza Stones, a project that features six of his poems about rainfall carved into local rockfaces. Then there’s his memoir, Walking Home, about living as a modernday troubadour along the Pennine Way.

Simon has said before that he finds expanses of land like a “canvas or blank page. Space beyond space and space after that as well”. He brings ideas here to work on. Those ideas “come as provocations from incidents and encounters or overheard language”, leading him back to “a frustration of lockdown: that life has become very easily anticipated. Every time you go around a corner, something familiar is waiting to jump out and not surprise you.”

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

But to bastardise WH Auden, another Yorkshire poet (and an influence), all the clocks have not stopped; their chimes are just muted. Simon had already announced, as part of his Laureateship, that he was creating the Laurel Prize, an annual award for the best poetry collection about nature and the environment to highlight the climate crisis.

Could ‘ecopoetry’ help to fight climate change? “I think what [poetry] tends to do is reinforce ideas and give people a kind of sustenance for their thinking,” Simon says. But, crucially, the poetry must be good. “I think the challenge is to write things that still sound fresh and unusual. Otherwise, we’d all just be saying the same thing all the time, and that can be a turn-off.”

All poetry is in some way, he says, “a form of self-expression – how you see the world, how it feels to be in the world, what it feels like to be you, as a person; to describe the inner landscape of being you, rather than just the outward appearance and expression of it”. Simon is “both revealing and holding back” every time he writes – and he enjoys the tension that comes with it: “That’s the excitement, the code, the extent to which you’re signalling – and sometimes doing the opposite.”

He wants his poetry to have an impact. “I’ve always believed that poetry has more potential than just appearing in these little thin books,” he says, holding up a poetry pamphlet. “There can be more power in it than that. I’ve always wanted to speak to a wider audience than just the specialist poetry crowd.” The desire for popularity extends from the poems to the poet. “I think [popularity] is important to me,” Simon says. “I think if poetry ever becomes so popular that everyone is reading it and everyone is writing it,it’s probably lost its purpose… It’s a dissenting art form. It’s unbiddable, it’s stubborn. It doesn’t even get to the right-hand margin.

It is obstinately not prose. And for that reason, it’s never going to be for everyone. And I think that if it is for everyone, it’s probably not doing its job.”

A SENSE OF WONDER

Simon writes because he feels he has “something to say” – and there’s plenty more to come. “I think part of my motivation for writing is to explore the sense that I’m more than just a few chemical reactions,” he explains, hugging his polka-dot mug. “I think, at some level, all art is an investigation into that strange territory. On the one hand, we know quite a lot about ourselves – and, on the other hand, we don’t really know anything at all. If that’s what spirituality is, then that’s the name that we can give it.”

He is endlessly curious, particularly when it comes to what it means to be human. “I am reluctant to be confined to the idea of biology,” he says. “It feels as if there’s something more intriguing going on.” At 57, he feels “more reflective” than his younger self. “I’m more curious now about psychologies and cosmologies. The death for any poet is wisdom. You should stay on the side of wondering.”

A poet should wonder about everything except their legacy, even if they’re Poet Laureate. “It’s a disaster to start thinking about what you’re leaving behind, because you don’t know what the world will look like, what it will need, what language will be like,” Simon says firmly. “I just try to work for the here and now.”

The here and now, for the time being, means Christmas. During Simon’s childhood, the Armitage festivities were “very traditional, very magical… very family-oriented, very ritualistic”. One Christmas, Simon’s father brought home a tree that was too tall to stand up in the house. He took it outside, chopped it in half with a breadknife and threw the top (the wrong half ) into the river. Other years were memorable for visits to the all-male panto in the village, written by his dad, a probation officer and am-dram enthusiast (Simon once played a Spice Girl).

Usually, each year, either Simon or his sister, who lives nearby, hosts Christmas for his parents and a dozen other relatives: “The baton’s been handed down.” Christmas Day involves presents, dinner (cooked by his sister’s “fella”, a chef ), quizzes (“to prove your intellect”), a visit to the pub and a walk. “It’s straight out of a Hollywood film,” Simon quips. The sort of film where the star is Poet Laureate. Someone call Richard Curtis.

“THE DEATH FOR ANY POET IS WISDOM. YOU SHOULD STAY ON THE SIDE OF WONDERING”