I’m wandering around Yorkshire Sculpture Park looking for the poet laureate. Simon Armitage decided we should meet at this beautiful outdoor gallery. The park is just off the M1, seven miles from Wakefield. Dotted with Henry Moores and Barbara Hepworths and Damien Hirsts, this could be the world’s most opulent golf course. It’s about as far from rough-hewn Yorkshire – the inspiration for much of Armitage’s poetry – as you can get. In the cafe, where we are due to meet, flat whites sell at £3.90 a pop.
But there is no sign of the poet. I wander downstairs. Nothing. There are two huge entrances at either end of the visitors’ centre. As I head for one, I’m sure he’s going to walk through the other. It feels like a Morecambe and Wise sketch. I head back to the cafe. This time Armitage is sat at a table, perfectly settled, flicking through his phone, a pot of tea to the side. He glances up at me, like a lugubrious owl. Armitage tells me he got back from Australia a week ago, has spent the past six days touring libraries country-wide and is knackered. His voice is familiar – clear, dourly rhythmic, vowels hard and flat as paving stone.
He really does sound drained. I happen to have chocolate liqueurs with me. Perhaps one of these will liven him up? “No, thank you,” he says. I also have Maltesers. “No, thanks.” My final offer – a slab of Tony’s salted caramel chocolate. “No, thank you. Did you think this interview was going to be difficult?” I think I see the hint of a smile.
I suggest we go for a walk. Having travelled 200 miles to be here, I’m keen to get my fill of sculpture. He points to the pot of tea, and says he’d like to finish it first. It looks as if he’d happily spend the whole time sitting in the cafe, sipping tea.
It’s not surprising that Armitage is tired. He is extraordinarily productive. As well as his many books of poetry, he has written plays and novels. He is the former professor of poetry at Oxford, current professor of poetry at Leeds, and a busier than average poet laureate. Over the past couple of years he has penned elegies for both Prince Philip and Elizabeth II. He has performed with bands, the Scaremongers and LYR (Land Yacht Regatta), and now has published a book of song lyrics, Never Good With Horses.
Armitage has always loved his indie bands. His music education began in his mid-teens with John Peel’s late-night show. He was particularly taken with Manchester post-punk groups Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths and the Fall. His poems echo the starkness of the Fall and the kitchen-sink quality of the Smiths. Armitage’s romance tends to be the romance of missed opportunities, regret and doomed love. Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart could be coupled with Armitage’s fine poem To His Lost Lover.
As soon as we get on to music, Armitage’s weariness dissipates. He says discovering the post-punks was a revelation. “I had a very normal village upbringing, and music came along and it was this accelerant into a different way of thinking. It became this incredible club that not everybody belonged to, a secret language. It had to be something that other people weren’t listening to. It had to be yours.” Was he a cool kid? “I was trying,” he says coyly. And did he succeed? “I did my best.”
At the same time, Armitage discovered poetry, particularly the work of Ted Hughes, when studying English literature O-level. He found this equally invigorating. Armitage didn’t realise language could spear and shock, transport and transcend like this. He says reading Hughes’s poetry was hallucinogenic. “These little packets of language, black shapes on a white page that conjured up these 3D sites.” What made both Hughes and the bands so special was that while they opened a new world to him, they were also local. Hughes grew up in the next valley to him in West Yorkshire, while Manchester was just across the Pennines. Music and poetry roused Armitage. The boy who stared absently out of class windows became interested in language and learning.
Would he like to have been a pop star? “Well, I wrote a book about that called Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist where I test out the idea that I only became a poet because I failed in that world. But, to be honest, I never gave it a try. I can’t play any instrument, and never did it in earnest. The fact that I’m doing it now when it’s miles too late is very satisfying. It’s a lot of fun.”
The title poem of Never Good With Horses reflects on a relationship doomed because the unnamed partner prefers the deadness of darkrooms and dried buttercups to the aliveness of horses in a field. The compilation also includes the Ivor Novello-winning lyrics he wrote for the Channel 4 documentary Feltham Sings, about the young offender institution. Armitage draws a clear distinction between lyrics and poetry. “My complaint is when song lyrics are taken out of their context and presented as poems.” Can he provide an example? “Yes. Sometimes with my students, I take in Bob Dylan lyrics. Dylan is often talked of as a poet. I give them the lyric and usually they don’t know the tune and they say, ‘Well, if this is a poem it’s a really bad one because it does all the things you’re not supposed to do in a poem – cheesy rhymes, mixed metaphors, tautology, oxymoron, everything.’” He highlights a typical tautology. “Dylan can write the most mundane thing like, ‘In a basement down the stairs’ in Tangled Up In Blue, but when it’s set to music, it’s amazing because it feels spontaneous.” What’s wrong with “in a basement down the stairs”? “Well, where else would a basement be? So if you’re writing a poem and trying to put pressure on language you don’t need a clumsy tautology. It’s just in the basement or down the stairs.”
Armitage delivers a lucid impromptu lecture. I point out that you could make the counter criticism of many of his lyrics – they read, and sound, like poems. He nods. “Lots were written as poems or with my poetry head on, with the idea that they’d be accompanied by music. There’d be some emotional engine attached to them.” When he performs them with LYR, he speaks them to ambient music rather than sings them.
In 2010, the Guardian commissioned him to interview his then hero, Morrissey, the controversial solo artist and former frontman of the Smiths. It was a memorable interview, not least because Morrissey described the Chinese as a “subspecies” in reference to their treatment of animals. It provided Armitage with a great scoop, but he shudders when asked about the interview and says he’d prefer not to talk about it.
The Guardian had effectively sent a poet to interview a poet. Photographs were taken of the two nose to nose. But Morrissey wasn’t having any of it. He refused to allow the photos to be used, and there was a reshoot with Morrissey wearing a cat on his head instead. The pop star treated the poet with contempt. It was disillusioning for Armitage, at best.
* * *
He finishes his tea, and we head towards the sculptures. I can’t help wondering why he was so keen for us to meet here. Marsden, where he grew up, is 18 miles away. He writes beautifully about the town in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. Armitage associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window – “private, moonstruck observations” of the “liminal, transcendent and transgressive” place whose territory is “a vast emptiness, full of terrifying and electrifying possibilities”.
In one of his best-known poems, It Ain’t What You Do, It’s What It Does To You, each stanza compares the faraway places he hasn’t visited with the local ones he has. While he may not have bummed across America or padded through the Taj Mahal, he has “Skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day / so still I could hear each set of ripples as they crossed” and “held the wobbly head of a boy / at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands”. It could be an ode to disappointment, but ultimately it’s a celebration of the everyday.
As we walk, he talks about the love and influence of his parents. His father, a probation officer and a big noise in the local am-dram society, was an extrovert. He says he is more like his mother, who worked as a non-teaching assistant in a primary school, and who is “much gentler”. His father died two years ago and has left a “massive hole” in his life. Looking through old interviews, it’s striking how often he took journalists to meet his parents. Why was that? “Dad was a good foil. It was always a useful thing to do if people came up. He was fantastically entertaining. Dad wrote shows and pantomimes and did standup comedy. He was funny, charismatic, and had lots of stories. He was very welcoming and hospitable.” If his father was a good foil, how would he describe himself? “I think that’s your job, Simon,” he replies.
Armitage didn’t enjoy school till he found poetry. His comprehensive was huge and impersonal, and he felt pressured by fellow students not to work. “If you were caught doing any homework or revision, the students would gather around you and sing Hey Jude because you were a Judas. School was quite a brutal environment.” While there were 1,800 students in the whole school, there were only about 60 in the sixth form. “It was a bit of an oasis. You could get your head down a bit or express otherness. Different ideas.” He points to a series of sculptures. “This is Barbara Hepworth’s Family of Man.” The wind is blowing a fair gale.
Was he academic? “Well, I was professor of poetry at Oxford for four years!” he says sharply. No, were you academic at school? “Oh, I see. I thought you said, ‘Are you an academic?’ No. No, I wasn’t.”
After school he did a degree in geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic, which he didn’t like because it was more to do more with stats than landscape. He then followed his father into the probation service. He did his social work and probation training in Manchester, and went on to do a master’s at the University of Manchester. His thesis was on the effect video violence has on young offenders, a popular tabloid topic at the time. By now, he was taking his poetry seriously. For the next eight years he was a probation officer by day, a poet by night. The job provided source material for his poetry.
Back then, he says, being a probation officer was interventionist, trying to persuade courts not to send people to prison because prison had a terrible effect on them. Did the work have an impact on him? “I ended up with a very bleak view of the world. Every day you were encountering very upsetting or grim situations. The boyfriend of somebody on my caseload killed a child. I went into work on the Monday and my door was taped up and they’d taken my case files away. I was writing reports on child abuse. When I gave up, people said, ‘Aren’t you worried you’re not going to be living in the real world any more? What are you going to be writing about?’ And I thought: is that the real world – driving around Manchester looking at cigarette burns on kids? I’d had enough.”
Did it make him lose faith in people? “It did, yeah. I had a very pessimistic view of the whole human project. Even now, if I drive through Oldham or Rochdale, where I was working, I can feel it building up again. It left me with a skewed, jaundiced impression of those towns, because I only saw the underbelly.”
To lose faith in people is so much harder to deal with than losing faith in the system, I say. He nods. “I went in because I wanted to help people. I was a do-gooder, I wanted to do my bit.” He bites hard on the last word. “And I lost faith in the idea that I could make any difference. I’m quite a sensitive person and I don’t think that’s an ideal personality type for that kind of work. I took it all very personally.”
I ask him what the ideal personality type is. He mentions his father. “My dad was a bit of a hard nut. I saw that he did help people.” He wasn’t intimidated? “No, he wasn’t.” And you were? “Yep. I was never like him. Sometimes we’d go over into these really dodgy boozers and some guy would come out of the shadows and buy him a drink. It was amazing. He was a tough-love person at work, and that became more and more unfashionable, and unacceptable in probation.” What were his politics? “My dad was a Tory. Working-class Tory. And his parents were as well. It was unfathomable with his parents. They were in a council house, didn’t have a penny to scratch their arse with but they were working-class, aspirant Tories. They were one of those families who saw themselves as being a millimetre better than next door.”
Does he still carry that heaviness from the probation years? “Yes. There’s a quite a lot of violence in my poems. They tend to be on the cynical and gloomy side. I don’t know whether I can blame it all on probation. Maybe there’s something pessimistic in me.” I remind him of the bands he’s adored since his teens – the Fall, Joy Division, the Smiths. Not much light there. He smiles.
While a probation officer, Armitage married his first wife, whom he started dating in his late teens. At 30, he quit to become a professional poet. What did his parents think? “My dad was horrified.” Horrified that Armitage was retiring from the service before him, and horrified that he was sacrificing a secure job.
The Home Office kept the post vacant for a year in case he wanted to return. He says he appreciates now more than ever the freedom that gave him. “I had a bit of money saved up, I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. I thought: I can get through this year and see how this works out.” Was he single by then? “I don’t really want to talk about that. It’s not part of my story.” I’m just trying to understand the timeframe of your life, I say. “Well, that’s not the framework in which my life exists,” he replies. I’m getting used to this pattern of conversation. Armitage chats expansively, then with no warning shuts you down. He has been with his second wife, BBC radio executive Sue Roberts, for close on 30 years, and they have a 23-year-old daughter, Emmeline, a national slam poetry champion and recording artist.
* * *
Armitage’s first poetry book Zoom! was published in 1989, five years before he left the probation service. He wrote in the vernacular, calling his poetry “no-brow”. Some critics have snootily dismissed his work as too accessible. He often writes in the first person. It’s tempting to assume a poem such as Brassneck, written in the voice of a football ground pickpocket, is autobiographical, but it’s fiction. Since Zoom!, he has won numerous awards, and in 2019 he was made poet laureate, an honorary position previously held by his idol Hughes, John Betjeman, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson and John Dryden.
Before his appointment, the talk was of there being a first poet laureate of colour. In May 2019, Pakistani-Scottish poet Imtiaz Dharker turned down the position “to focus on her own work”. Some poets regard it as a poisoned chalice – the poet laureate is equally likely to be damned for being a puppet of the royals as for being insufficiently obsequious. But Armitage clearly wanted it. Why? “I saw it as an extension of a lot of the work I was doing, which is writing about topical events, being someone who’s an advocate for poetry.”
Was it also because Hughes had done it? “Possibly, the tradition of it, yes. But it’s changed massively. When Ted was poet laureate it was a lifetime appointment, and it became a decade appointment afterwards. I think it’s seen more now as a working role or an opportunity to get things done.” Was it a way of showing his father that he had made the right choice when he quit his job? “Absolutely. I’m not saying I only took it because it would please my parents, I took it because it pleased me enormously as well. Phoning my dad to tell him was an amazing moment. Hearing him weeping on the other end of the phone. After he stopped blubbing, he said, ‘If your grandad had still been alive, this would have killed him.’” What did he mean? “He just meant his heart would have burst with pride.” What did his mother think? “She was in the kitchen, getting tissues for my dad.”
Armitage says he tended to see the queen twice a year. One of those occasions would be to present the winner of the Queen’s gold medal for poetry to her. “It’s an extraordinary moment when that door opens and she’s standing in front of you – the most recognised person on the planet, they say. And however confident the person with you is, something buckles in them the moment that door opens. She understood people would be nervous and she’d be quite playful with that.” In what way? “I don’t really know how to describe it.” Did she make fart jokes? “Come on!” Armitage says disappointedly.
Armitage saw the queen a few weeks before she died. How did she seem? “She was in good spirits, but she’d had Covid and couldn’t get rid of this cough.” He says private secretaries had discussed the likelihood of her dying during his tenure. “There were people at the palace who said, ‘You will be aware that in the next 10 years certain things might happen.’” He says he’d been thinking about how to mark her death ever since. “I remember reading that her favourite flower was lily of the valley, and I had this idea that I could just lay a quiet floral tribute in the form of a poem. So I made an acrostic out of her name because it also struck me that nobody ever called her Elizabeth. I did it twice, for Elizabeth II. I was pleased with the cleverness of the poem. I thought I’d found a way of being both personal in the use of the first name but respectful at the same time, and still trying to write a poem that had a bit of heart and literary merit.”
When he met the queen, would they talk about poetry or just chat? “Well, I said before I wasn’t going to be that person who comes out and says, ‘She said this and she said that.’” But I’m a sneaky journalist who’s going to ask. “Yeah, and I’m a slippery customer, so I’m not going to tell you.” Does he really think he’s a slippery customer? “No, I don’t think I am, actually.” He pauses. “But I imagine that not many people say ‘no’ to you when you’re asking questions, do they?”
We head back towards the visitors’ centre. Armitage knows the place well – he is a patron of the Friends of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. His tour has hardly been exhaustive (we’re yet to come across a Henry Moore) but I’m starving. Hopefully, we’ll get a bite to eat. Meanwhile, I ask him about the butt of sherry he received as a gift for being poet laureate. Is it really 700 bottles’ worth? “It’s probably about 800. They send me about 70-80 bottles a year, and I give most of it away.” Is he a big drinker? “I am a big drinker. You don’t want to drink a lot of sherry, though. It’s not a session drink.” Armitage’s preferred tipple is wine. Does he drink most nights? “Well, doctor … I try not to drink during the week.” Is that a recent thing? “I say I try, but I don’t always make it.” Has he ever worried he drinks too much? “I’m sure I drink too much!”
I ask whether it’s possible to be poet laureate if you’re anti-royalist. “I think you would struggle if you were an ardent republican, because of the contact you have with the palace and some of the expectations of the role.” Does he believe this country should remain a monarchy? He gives me another of his looks. “I’ve got the Queen’s gold medal for poetry, I’m a CBE, I’m poet laureate so I’m clearly not a republican, am I?” When you were young, did you think the same? “No, I was different. I was very radical and anti-establishment.” What changed? “I think you’d be a real weirdo if you’d gone through life and still held the same views at 59 as you did when you were 17.”
What did he believe in back then? “I was just anti-everything. I don’t think I’m a poacher turned gamekeeper. I’ve just calmed down. I’m really relaxed. That’s how I feel about it.” Does he regard himself as part of the establishment these days? “I’m aware, looking at it from somewhere else, I must be. I’m poet laureate, I’m published by Faber & Faber but, in my own head, poetry is still an alternative. It’s stubbornly not prose. It’s still a different way of being.”
Nowadays he lives in Holmfirth, about eight miles from Marsden. “I haven’t got very far, have I?” he smiles. Is it very different? “Holmfirth is a bit more chichi. Marsden is the last village in the valley before you get on to the moors. Marsden is a bit more old Yorkshire – families who’ve been there for generations. Holmfirth has got fancy restaurants and bars. Marsden’s never properly made that transition.”
I tell him I’m surprised we didn’t meet in Holmfirth or Marsden. “I didn’t know what I’d do with you. Where would I put you? I wasn’t being evasive necessarily. I don’t have journalists in the house, because the first interview I ever did was with a journalist called Maureen Cleave and she came to the house years and years ago and said, ‘You should never invite a journalist to your house.’ I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘They go through your bathroom cabinet.’” I think she’s wrong, I say. “It was a metaphor,” he replies.
We’re back at the visitors’ centre, with its fabulous view over Yorkshire. “That’s Barnsley,” he says pointing into the distance. “Texas! See, I’m from West Yorkshire and Barnsley is South Yorkshire and there’s always a bit of rivalry. They used to say Barnsley is Texas, like it’s a wild town. It’s great, Barnsley!” Some of the lyrics for LYR’s new album are about Barnsley.
As Armitage says, he hasn’t got very far. But he knows that’s a metaphor of sorts, too – and an ironic one at that. When he was a teenager, he says, being a poet was a pipe dream, let alone making a living from it. He’s thinking about why and how he’s changed over the years. “The 70s was pretty horrible, wasn’t it? Everything seemed impossible to me at the time. The idea of having a career in literature or poetry was like standing at the bottom of Everest with a stepladder and a piece of string. I saw it as very ‘us and them’. That’s what’s changed.”
We’ve been walking and talking for three hours, and now Armitage makes it clear he’s had enough.
I might not have seen all the sculptures I wanted to, and I’m still starving, but he has been generous with his time.
If I need to check stuff with you, I say, how do I get in touch. He starts to spell out his email. Have you got a phone number? “Er, no,” he says. Then he remembers his phone, propped up in the breast of his coat like a pocket square. “I never answer the phone anyway, so there’s no point in ringing me.” As Morrissey did with him, he makes it clear that this has not been a meeting of equals. In the very next sentence he returns to his meeting with the musician that left him feeling so diminished all those years ago. “When I interviewed Morrissey, right at the end he said, ‘Have you got one last question and you better make it a good one?’ And I said, ‘Can you drive?’ And he said to me, ‘D’you think that’s a good question?’ So erm, what’s your last question, Simon, because I’m going home? I can drive by the way.”
I ask a question half-heartedly, and the answer doesn’t register. I’m thinking about what he said about his father – his humour, his hospitality, his warmth. I imagine I would have liked his dad very much.
Before I know it, Armitage is walking towards his car, and I’m left on my own in the middle of the sculpture park, just off the M1, seven miles from civilisation.
“Do you think I’ll be able to get a cab from here?” I call out to him.
“Yeah. Yeah,” he says. He points to the visitors’ centre and disappears.
• Never Good With Horses: Assembled Lyrics by Simon Armitage is published by Faber & Faber at £14.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Armitage will talk about his new book at a Guardian Live online event on Wednesday 26 April at 8pm. Book tickets here.
