At The Guardian, Simon Armitage Talks Plans for the Future

In Lisa Allardice's profile of incoming UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, readers learn about Armitage's path to the esteemed position, his views about the role, and what it felt like to get the gig. "Simon Armitage wrote his first poem when he was 10 for a school assignment," Allardice's article begins. Picking up from there: 

“I didn’t know what a poem was. I knew it was short, so that was appealing,” he confesses when we meet at the London offices of Faber, which has published his work for more than 25 years and where his books – 28 in all – take up a couple of shelves on an impressively appointed bookcase. His teacher selected six poems to put on the wall; Armitage’s wasn’t among them. “What particularly upset me was that for the first time, maybe ever with a bit of writing, I’d actually put some effort in,” he recalls. “And I was quite pleased with the thing I’d made. So not to be among the chosen was a setback.” Sometimes he wonders if he has been pursuing a “career of revenge” ever since. On 10 May Armitage succeeded Carol Ann Duffy to become the 21st poet laureate: as he jokes each time he finishes a poem, “Stick that on your board, mister!”

The official call from No 10 kept being delayed – “she’s quite busy, apparently” – but after Theresa May had congratulated him and outlined the job requirements (there aren’t any), they had a chat about geography (in which they are both graduates: May from Oxford, Armitage from Portsmouth Poly). “Five minutes and that was it.”

His parents cried when he rang them to tell them the news. “They’ve wanted it for a long time,” he says, recalling the moment in the early 90s when he told them he was giving up his job as a probation officer to concentrate on poetry. “There were a lot of unknowns. So it was great to go back to them and say it sort of worked out,” he adds with endearing understatement. He and his wife, radio producer Sue Roberts, celebrated with a bottle of champagne and a jump on their daughter’s trampoline in the back garden of their home – Emmeline, a prize-winning slam poet, is now in her first year at university – a few miles from the village of Marsden where he grew up and his parents still live.

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 1998. “His poetry woke me up, not just to poetry, but fundamentally,” he says. “He came from the next valley. The house where he grew up looks almost identical to the house I grew up in.” When Armitage started writing in his early 20s the idea that he might get published was a “fantasy. I had no literary pedigree. Poetry still felt like quite a closed establishment.” But, he reflects, “I suppose I always thought, if he can do that from there, why can’t I do it from here?”

Continue reading at The Guardian.