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Simon
is one of the country's most accomplished contemporary poets is
a Yorkshireman born and bred, having lived in Huddersfield and its
surrounding moors for most of his life. Talking to the BBC
West Yorkshire team, he says it's here that he gets the
ideas for much of his poetry - from its places and people to its
language and rhythms.
Renowned
as one of Britain's most exciting young British poets, Armitage
is a poet for whom the slogan "poetry is the new rock'n'roll"
could have been coined. He
combines accessible humour and a realistic style of writing with
critical seriousness, winning him fans amongst the public as well
as hardened literary critics.
Today
he lives a stone's throw away from Saddleworth Moor, close to the
area where he grew up: "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."
Simon
remembers wandering the moors with his mates and playing with an
old tyre which they'd roll down the hills, later to feature in a
poem called The Tyre.
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| Armitage:
"It's probably Margaret Thatcher's fault I'm a poet!" |
After
University, Armitage returned home: unemployed and without any immediate
prospect of work. He moved back in to his parents' house in the
village of Marsden, and remembers constantly thinking of ideas for
poems and scribbling them down: "It
was just groundwork for good poems. A
consequence of being on the dole is that you just sit around looking
at things, so it's probably Margaret Thatcher's fault that I'm a
poet."
Simon
remembers sitting in his parents' window looking out across the
streets and the
moors, gazing at the people and the rugged landscape. Here
he would 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.
But
it was at school that Simon was first inspired to become a poet.
He learned the rudiments of writing poetry at Colne Valley High
School in Linthwaite near Huddersfield. Simon
remembers his schooldays with more than a hint of trepidation: "I
wasn't a great student".
Today
he goes back to his old school to work with a new generation of
pupils, sharing his experiences of writing with them. "It's
hard to be back - a priest in your own parish," he says modestly.
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| Huddersfield's
sons: Simon Armitage with the town's statue of former Prime
Minister Harold Wilson |
As
a teenager Simon didn't see himself as a Bohemian Oscar Wilde-style
writer, rather a maker of poems: "I was never going to be a
Bohemian because I'm from a part of the world where we make things.
And I wanted to make things as well but I didn't want to make tractors
and engines which a lot of kids from school wanted to do. You
need a role model to show you what things to make."
It
was the writing of Yorkshire poet Ted
Hughes which was to provide Simon's greatest inspiration.
Hughes
had lived in a terraced house in Mytholmroyd located in the next
valley to his parents' house.
Simon
remembers: "I thought if he can do it, maybe I can do it from
my ordinary background. You
can create miraculous and astonishing poetry, and this shows me
the journey I have chosen to embark on through language and the
places it might take me."
Simon
continues to draw inspiration from his youth as illustrated by a
series of rites of passage poems. The
poem "My Father Thought It..." celebrates how Armitage
came home from college with his ear pierced, much to the concern
of his dad who remarked:"Simon, what does this mean?".
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| Ted
Hughes: "I thought if he can do it, maybe I can do it" |
The
poem expresses the dilemma of a son attempting to free himself of
the values of his parents and discover himself. It's also a good
example of how Armitage writes about real people and everyday situations.
With pride he says: "I
still write a lot of poems about this part of the north - the school,
this village, where I grew up, the moors, about the roads.
"I
tend to feel that you don't have to go to Paris and see the Eiffel
Tower…You can write poems about Marsden Mechanics. It's about
celebrating real life."
Simon's
first published poem, Zoom!, does just that. It starts in his parents'
house, taking the reader down the street outside and then into the
wider universe. Simon says: "Poetry is very simple but very
powerful. You can go from one end of the cosmos to the other in
just a few lines, a few seconds - it's just words."
Today
Armitage is one of Britain's leading poets, and he continues to
be inspired by his native Yorkshire. But
he believes that a poet's life is more than just words - Armitage
insists that his life is fulfilled through teaching and taking poetry
around the world.
Despite
his travels to far-flung destinations to read his poetry, Yorkshire
is his bedrock and his constant inspiration: "I
think I'll always end up coming back here. 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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| "You
don't have to have go to the Taj Mahal or the White House or
anywhere exotic or important." |
Armitage
is a huge fan of the everyday, reinforcing the view that he's an
accessible poet who speaks to the man and woman in the street: "You
can make poetry out of the local and everyday. You don't have to
have go to the Taj Mahal or the White House or anywhere exotic or
important. In
fact, if you can celebrate the language of the everyday, you've
already sharing language with a made audience as people know what
you're talking about."
One
of the places that inspires Simon are the moors around his home,
near Black Moss, which he calls a "trig point where I get all
my coordinates from". Simon
likens the moors to "a brain - there's not much physical activity
going on but they're full of thoughts".
One
of Armitage's great strengths is being able to transform the places
around him into something which resonates with the audience. A good
example is Lest We Forget, a poem inspired by the great and good
of Huddersfield.
In
another poem, Armitage tells the story of a stone lion in Huddersfield
which was replaced by a fibreglass substitute when it cracked in
a storm. When
the sun shone through it, the locals thought it looked like there'd
been a religious miracle, which Simon describes in the poem. It's
a good example of how Simon combines accessible humour and a realist
style of writing with a seriousness of tone.
He
says: "It's not just enough to write what you see. You have
to make some transformation in the imagination. Quite
often your job as a writer is to bring a piece of writing alive."
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