His parents cried when he rang them to tell them the news. Every so often, he is struck by the realisation that he has followed in the massive footprints of his hero, fellow Yorkshireman Ted Hughes, who was poet laureate until his death in The house where he grew up looks almost identical to the house I grew up in.
I had no literary pedigree. Poetry still felt like quite a closed establishment. He collected the award last month in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, where the winner is traditionally introduced to the Queen by the poet laureate — in this case, himself. In May , Simon Armitage b. Armitage burst onto the poetry scene with Zoom! Born and brought up in Huddersfield, England, Armitage worked as a probation officer before becoming a full-time writer, a job that provided a particularly rich source of anecdote for his poetry, as did the transition from one calling to another.
From an Eric Gregory Award in to his nomination for the T S Eliot Prize in , Armitage has been a frequent presence on shortlists for all the major poetry prizes. He is also a successful writer of drama and prose, with two novels and a best-selling memoir, All Points North , to his name. He was made a C. When writing of Ted Hughes Armitage has spoken of the older poet's 'cataloguing of the natural world', but Armitage's directory is of an equally comprehensive kind.
The cast of clearly-described characters which runs through his work eschews the easy flash of the pop-reference or cultural shout-out; whether describing a latter-day supermarket or a family meal it is the specific details - observed and very probably lived - which authenticate the experience while simultaneously offering them as examples of everyday sacrament.
Often in his poetry the contemporary northern landscape presents a distinctly unpoetic and counter-cultural backdrop, be it in the form of post-industrial decay, dying moorland communities or climate-change weather, forcing the poet to pry into the into the roots and archaeology of his upbringing in search of meaning, identity and comfort. With his acute eye for modern life, Armitage is an updated version of Wordsworth's "man talking to men" for the post-punk generation.
But his seemingly off-the-cuff style masks a sophisticated craftsman indebted to Auden, Muldoon and MacNeice as much as to popular culture. His most celebrated poems often take the form of monologue, allowing him to don a variety of guises to probe serious issues of identity, class and masculinity. I mean the National Front. I could take it everywhere I went; I could work on it on the train. I mean, I took up quite a lot of space. So that was a real breakthrough.
It started as quite a small project, something I was doing with my other hand, and it became enormous. Those were different experiences, different adventures. But I really just want to think about the poems from now on. SA: Well, the poem itself has become the plaything of academics, and the plaything of their students, reluctantly sometimes. What gets lost is the musicality of the poem, the alliterative musicality of the poem.
Just narrative information. I felt as if I were bringing it home poetically, and geographically as well, given that it was probably written by somebody who lived just over the other side of the hill. So the idea of bringing him home was a slightly sentimental and superstitious idea, but it functioned as a helpful motivation. So what advice do you have for students who are writers in this new environment, but also students who are just citizens of the world, and are consuming literature and information in this new climate?
I can point people toward what I believe are great poems and great texts, and I can share my enthusiasms with them, but these are people who know more about how the world works than I do now. I have to ask them how to switch my phone on.
SA: I think the notion of what that good stuff is will change dramatically. Hill, by Daniel Simon. Purchase this Issue ». Skip to main content. Home Magazine September Interviews. Rob Roensch and Quinn Carpenter Weedon. QCW: To kind of give them a voice in that way? April Roensch Photo: Oklahoma City University.
More Interviews. Two Flash Nonfictions. Made Flesh. Four Poems. Two Poems. Widely considered an inheritor of Philip Larkin 's dark wit, Armitage has become one of England's most respected poets. A reviewer for the Sunday Times in England wrote: "Armitage creates a muscular but elegant language of his own out of slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon and the vernacular of his native Northern England.
He combines this with an easily worn erudition Several of his collections have been short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and his first book, Zoom! Armitage also writes widely for radio, television, film, and theater. His recent work includes a libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree , which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in , and the play Mister Heracles , a version of the Euripides play, The Madness of Heracles.
Frequently blending genres, his film Xanadu was described as "a poem film for television," and appeared on BBC television during their "Words on Film" series.
Auden and Louis MacNeice. In Armitage was named the poet laureate of the United Kingdom. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem.
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