Profiles

"If you write about the North you're a northern writer," Simon Armitage told us when we spoke to him in 2004. "But if you write about the South you're a writer." Despite this perceived North-South divide, he's stayed doggedly close to where he was born and grew up - and why not? After all, he said, it's pretty important for a poet to have a real sense of place: "It's certainly useful...It becomes part of your identity which is always part of your subject matter."

Moor inspiration above Marsden?

As one of the country's best-known poets - his poems are featured on the GCSE syllabus and he's often heard on the radio and seen on TV - it's certainly true to say that he's doing his bit to shove the image of poetry firmly into the 21st century. From 1989's Zoom!, Simon's first published collection of poetry, he's been an authentic West Yorkshire voice in the poetry world - and unapologetically so. As Simon told us in 2004 : "I still live only four or five miles from where I grew up. I like it in West Yorkshire. I suppose I don't really know that I'm writing about these places because it seems like the world to me. But I guess other people make a distinction."

Marsden and the Huddersfield district have been the constant backdrop to Simon's life. He told us in 2005: "I feel very protective of this place. I did spend an awful lot of time when I was 13 or 14 just roaming around these moors. It's just great thinking time." In fact he admitted to us that he likens the moors to "a brain - there's not much physical activity going on but they're full of thoughts."

From the moors to the front room at his childhood home, Simon told us that inspiration comes from anywhere. He remembers sitting at home with his parents, looking out across the streets and the moors and gazing at the people and the rugged landscape. It was there that he'd write poems about everything from the Mechanics' Institute, his old school, a farm on the nearby hilltop, and cars being stuck in a winter snowstorm.

In 2006, ahead of the publication of his Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid anthology, Simon admitted to us that writing poems with such a fixed sense of place is very important not only to him personally, but also to make a point to the wider world: "Sometimes, writing about Huddersfield feels like an act of political will, in the way that language in Britain is always a political issue; in the way that anyone who opens their mouth is entering the debate about class whether they like it or know it, or not. On other days, Huddersfield feels like the limit of the known universe. The furthest I can see."

Mechanics Institute: Poetry in motion?

And would Simon ever consider moving somewhere else? After all, he must feel the gentle gravitational pull (or black hole, as some might see it) of London from time to time. Not at all, he says: "Everything I need is here. There might have been a time as a writer when there might have been a requirement to be nearer London or spend more time there, but these days if you've got all the various gadgets you don't need to be there."

This doesn't mean that Simon Armitage doesn't travel far afield performing his duties in the service of poetry - he teaches and reads his verses all over the world. But through all our interviews with him, West Yorkshire has obviously been his bedrock and his inspiration. "I think I'll always end up coming back here," Simon once told us. "There doesn't seem to be any need or any reason to go anywhere else. I suppose I'm the apple who hasn't fallen very far from the tree."

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