I once was an officer of probation, now I’m writing verse for the nation...
Yorkshireman is new Poet Laureate
PROBATION officer turned writer Simon Armitage was announced as the new Poet Laureate last night.
The Yorkshire-born poet said he hopes he is not ‘judged on my identity’ as a white man after female British-Pakistani author Imtiaz Dharker turned down the role.
Mr Armitage, 56, succeeds Carol Ann Duffy, the only woman to have held the post, after the Queen approved his appointment for a fixed ten-year term.
His poems, distinguished by their accessible, unstuffy and often sardonic style, are popular with adults and children alike, and have long been studied in schools.
It is up to the Poet Laureate to decide whether to produce verse for national occasions or royal events. Asked if he would mark the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son Archie, Mr Armitage said: ‘I think I’ve missed the boat on that front...
‘It’s been made very clear to me on a number of occasions by several people that that is not one of the conditions of the job. It’s something of a public misconception that that has to happen. I’ve absolutely no idea what I will or won’t write.’
Former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion once described the role as thankless because ‘ the poems that result are always likely to be held up for mockery’.
But Mr Armitage said: ‘I’ve drunk from many poisoned chalices in the past... I feel I’ve got enough confidence in myself to keep focused on the work. Living in Yorkshire helps in terms of having space and staying away from some of the distractions.’
Fellow poet Miss Dharker, who was born in Lahore and grew up in Glasgow, refused the position last week. She said it was a ‘huge honour’ to be considered, but added: ‘I had to weigh the privacy I need to write poems against the demands of a public role. The poems won.’
Mr Armitage said yesterday: ‘I’d hope I won’t be judged automatically on my identity (and) what I’d be judged on is my actions and values.’
He has a working class background and was educated at a comprehensive school and polytechnic. He worked as a probation officer in Greater Manchester until 1994 before focusing on his poetry.
‘I’m completely homemade,’ he said. ‘Whatever positions I’ve achieved in poetry... at no point did I ever feel special, chosen or entitled. It’s been a slog and I’m not trying to equate that with other people’s experience. But if that can be a useful model for achievement against a certain amount of odds then I hope that’s helpful.’ Mr Armitage said he hopes ‘to build on work of my predecessors with energy and enthusiasm’, promoting poetry, especially within education, and young talent.
One of those predecessors is the late Ted Hughes, who also came from West Yorkshire and who Mr Armitage cites as an inspiration.
He has praised Hughes, who died in 1998, for his ability to show how ‘clarity and complexity can exist simultaneously’.
‘No one could ever accuse him of simplicity or superficiality,’ he said. ‘And yet his poems have an immediacy that students, even of a young age, find alluring and true. They draw the reader in, like black holes, whose eventhorizons are instant, but whose intensities are infinite and utterly absorbing.’
Last year Mr Armitage called for the next Poet Laureate to be a writer ‘at home both in the library and in the wider world’, as well as someone well versed in the classics.
‘If you put the laurel crown on your head and you haven’t read the whole of Beowulf or the Iliad, or don’t know who wrote Lycidas, or can’t recite a poem by Sappho or Emily Dickinson, or can’t name a poem by Derek Walcott, then you are not worthy of the role,’ he wrote.
‘The great majority of the best poetry ever written is freely available so not to have to read it – even just to disagree with it – is inexcusable.’
Mr Armitage was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire, and has published 28 collections of poetry. His poems are regularly anthologised and broadcast on radio and television.
His books also include novels, an acclaimed translation of the Middle English Arthurian alliterative
‘Energy and enthusiasm’
poem Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, and a memoir entitled All Points North.
Last year he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and was made a CBE for services to poetry in 2010. In 2015 he was appointed professor of poetry at Oxford University and he holds honorary doctorates from Leeds, Sheffield Hallam and Huddersfield universities.
He was presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry at the 25th Hay Festival in 2012, the same year he was nominated for the TS Eliot prize.
He now lives near Marsden with his wife Sue Roberts, a BBC producer, and their daughter.
Theresa May said: ‘ Simon brings a wealth of expertise and experience to this important role. He is well placed to attract even more people into the literary world, and further enhance our nation’s proud tradition of producing exceptional poetry.’
The Poet Laureate receives a stipend of £5,750, and traditionally also gets a ‘butt of sack’, equivalent to roughly 600 bottles of sherry.