ALL POINTS NORTH:
It’s 25 years since the publication of Zoom! heralded the arrival of an exciting new literary voice. Chris Bond catches up with Simon Armitage in Sheffield.
N the music world rock bands usually release their “best of” albums either because they’ve split up or they’re past their prime and want to milk the cash cow one last time.
Poetry, on the other hand, isn’t known for being lucrative and even if a poet has the talent and good fortune to make a name for themselves, having their “selected poems” published is quite often a sign they have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Not so with Simon Armitage. The Marsden-born poet is very much alive and flourishing. We meet in a busy cafe full of chattering students on the campus of Sheffield University where he is Professor of Poetry.
His latest volume, Paper Aeroplane, covers his entire career stretching from his acclaimed debut, Zoom! in 1989, right through to his forthcoming collection The Unaccompanied due out next year.
He’s been a fixture on our literary landscape for a quarter of a century now and is regarded by many as one of the world’s foremost living poets. A good moment, then, for a spot of quiet reflection – something poets tend to be good at. “I actually did a ‘selected’ book about 13 years ago but I’ve published a huge amount of stuff since then and it felt out of date. So I thought it was probably a good time to reframe it. Plus, I got tired of dragging about 20 books around to readings,” he says.
Armitage has become a familiar voice and face during the intervening years having spread his creative wings. He’s written a couple of novels and presented TV documentaries, including the splendid Gods and Monsters – Homer’s Odyssey for the BBC, and he’s translated ancient works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
“I don’t like looking back, I’ve got this idea you should always be moving forward. Quite often by the time a lot of projects I’ve been working on arrive on TV or get published I’m deep into something else.”
It’s his poems, though, for which he’s best known. His Yorkshire roots give his poetry a distinct rhythm, his deadpan delivery as sharp as an easterly wind blowing over the Pennine hills.
“I agonised for quite a long time about the process for choosing these poems,” he says, referring to Paper Aeroplane. “I was trying to think of a metaphor for what I was doing, but I couldn’t find a yardstick so in the end I just stood by the photocopier one afternoon with all the books on one side and went through them page by page saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”
He feels there have been subtle, rather than dramatic, changes in his work over the years. “If I look at the last poem in the book and the first one they look pretty similar in shape and style. There’s still that same easy going attitude being explored.”
His poems might be easy going and accessible, but he finds the process of writing them far from relaxing. “It’s full of anxieties. I don’t think I have that natural writing style that other people have. I know that other poets write poems in a couple