Simon Armitage is one of Britain’s most popular and prolific writers. There are 37 books with his name on them — mostly poetry, but also fiction, drama and non-fiction. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 2015. A graduate of geography and former probation officer, he tells me that being in Mumbai is like being in a version of the crystal maze. He is normally fanatic about knowing where he is, but here he struggles with the grammar of the city because it’s so alien to where he lives. He identifies himself as a Northern poet and has lived most of his life in the north of England. This is Brontë country, West Yorkshire, the Moors, and even though he feels like an apologist because Brexit was decided geographically, and his region voted to leave, he still feels that living there is a worthy alternative to living in the metropolis.
In 2012, he set out to walk the Pennine Way like a modern troubadour with no money in his pockets, giving readings every night in exchange for food and a bed — a journey he has described as “basically 256 miles of begging.” The walk took three weeks, and it was a way for him to test poetry’s reputation, his own reputation and his knee joints. Excerpts from an interview:
Were there any moments during that Pennine Walk when you thought, I’m really hungry, I don’t know when my next meal is going to be?
I never went hungry and I never went without company and I never went without experiencing peoples’ generosities. I probably thought when I set off that it was going to be about nature writing but it became an anthropological book about communities, people welcoming strangers into their midst. It was tough, and actually I say so in the book, it was probably harder on my smile than it was on my feet.
They’ve just passed this InvestigatoryPowers Act in the U.K., which will make it the country with the highest surveillance in any Western democracy. How do we interrogate ourselves internally when we’re being watched so oppressively?How does the act of looking change?
I’ve got a book coming out in March called The Unaccompanied , it’s my next collection of poems, and I think it’s something along the lines of what you’re talking about, that somehow the more that we’re watched and that we watch each other, and the more connected we are told we are, also the more globalised we are, somehow it feels that we are becoming more marginalised and isolated and solitary. I don’t know what effect that’s having on society, on the imagination, on attitudes, but it doesn’t feel positive.
How are poets meant to work within this framework, where even the information we receive through the media isn’t necessarily true and people don’t care if it’s false?
I think certainly for poets, it’s important to try and remain true to the complexities of life. Poetry is always interested in acknowledging the nuances and contradictions and hypocrisies and self-doubt. It’s pretty useless as a tool for pointing a finger. So, I think it can stay away from polemic because you’d just be speaking with the voice of those you oppose if you fall into that trap. Part of that surveillance and social networking and self-obsession that you’re talking about also has a bearing on how we receive books and texts, and where writing is going to go to next very much depends on where this stuff goes.
People are always talking about poetry as if it’s on the brink of extinction. Your compatriot Martin Amis famously announced the death of poetry some years ago…
I must have missed that obituary. Maybe it was in The Telegraph . I think there will always be a place for poetry, however we define it. As long as we have language there will always be a need for some intense form of it, and if I go back to think about that (Pennine) walk I did, there definitely is a place in peoples’ hearts and minds for poetry. Whether we always give them what they want is a different thing. I guess that’s part of its duty. If every single person in the world was reading and writing poetry I wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in it. I like the fact that it’s some kind of refuge, it’s alternative, it’s an otherness.
You’ve been quite involved in projects that bring poetry to the people. Not all poets are interested or have the energy for that, but you’ve identified it as something that needs to happen.
I completely uphold the rights of all the poets who don’t want to give readings, or who want to be so obscure as to be unreadable, or who work in a very academic or experimental style.
The poetry I write doesn’t define the poetry I want to read. My contract with the world is about meeting people somewhere in the middle. I want to resonate with people. I want to share my resonant frequency with them. Because it makes me feel part of a human project if I can do that. I’m not in any way apologetic about it.
Where do you have the time to write all these books?
I don’t know. I certainly get on with it. I know people who have described me before as ambitious. Actually, I don’t think I’m any more ambitious than the next person. I’m quite driven in terms of wanting to finish work and to make it the best I can, and for a long time I haven’t felt as if I’ve had any lack of ideas. Although I would admit that when I put myself forward (for the professorship) at Oxford, I wanted to insist on some sort of intermission that might cause me to stop writing poems for three or four years, and then come back to it with a slightly different voice.
Tell me about your Oxford lectures, they seem to be this whole other form that you’re working with.
It’s exactly as you describe it, a whole other form, it’s somewhere between essay and performance. I don’t just want to stand there in front of all those people and read in a dry way. I’ve tried to write them as talks and deliver them as talks. It’s incredibly nerve-wracking but it’s also really exhilarating. Ever since I picked up a pen, I’ve gravitated towards things that seem impossible…I like wandering into those territories otherwise how do you grow, how do you learn, how do you move?
What do you look for in language?
Subtlety, surprise, human warmth. I really admire writers who’ve got what I think of as the common touch. One of my favourite writers is Alan Bennett. I’ve just been reading his book of new diaries Keeping On Keeping On . He’s an exquisite writer. He’s also very political, very funny. He’s not at all that sort of national treasure that we sometimes pack him up as. He knows how to push buttons and pull strings, he’s got all the little nods and winks, and also his writing has a direct relationship with speech. The poetry I like the most sounds like somebody or something talking. I don’t mean that it is monologue necessarily but that it has a relationship to the living voice. I don’t like poetry that sounds like thinking.
When Seamus Heaney died, you said you’d lost a chieftain, which is a beautiful way to think of the lineage poetry allows. Not to be too Freudian about it, but do you feel with that particular generation of poets gone, there’s nothing between you and death?
Yeah, that’s interesting (laughs). I hope there is. When (Ted) Hughes died and then Heaney, and more recently, Geoffrey Hill, it felt as if there were these enormous personalities that had a kind of magnetism around them, there was something shamanic about them. Maybe you just don’t recognise it in your own generation but I don’t feel that poetry has those wise people any more, for good reason. I think it tends to operate more from street level, and I think poetry is much more comfortable with the idea of asking questions rather than pretending to be sagacious and prophetic. So, it feels that we’ve moved into a slightly different territory now. I might be wrong. Maybe there’s just a vacancy for more shamans and chieftains.
Tishani Doshi is a writer and dancer. Her most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.
