In a culture that has consigned poetry to the margins, Armitage has become something very rare: a genuinely popular British poet. Aida Edemariam hits the road with the busiest man in verse
One Indian summer evening last September, off a busy slip road not far from the Tower of London, Simon Armitage took to the stage of the world’s oldest surviving music hall and, after a short introduction from the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, started to read. “It begins with a house, an end terrace / in this case …” The hall was full, generous with silence and later with laughter: young couples in careful retro outfits, men in suits dropping by after work, students, and older women; audience and performers held beneath a glowing tent of wobbly fairy lights that rose from the balconies to a bright apex in the roof. “But it will not stop there. Soon it is / an avenue / which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics’ Institute …” Armitage’s reading voice is light; not exactly monotonal, but strung on a more delicate, questioning skein than his conversational voice. The poem, Zoom!, the title piece in his very first collection, in 1989, turns left at the main road, leads to a town, “city, nation, hemisphere, universe, … [is] bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy”, before finally coming to rest in the checkout queue at the local supermarket.
How did the poem come about, Bragg asked. Daydreaming, answered Armitage: “I’d been bunking off school – which was a bit of a worthless pastime in those days because it was before daytime TV.” The audience laughed. He spoke of the challenge, these days, of building thinking time into a day. “‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Thinking’” – another murmur of laughter – “It sounds like an excuse, but actually, it’s vital.” It was a deft, confident performance, an unstrained mixture of taking himself and his work seriously while making sure to puncture anything that might come across as pretension; playing with anti-intellectualism while depending on the fact that no one would be here if they were not intellectually engaged. Did he plan his poems? “I know other poets who work on poems as exploration, but I’ve usually got a destination in mind. I knew in that poem I wanted to end up in Sainsbury’s supermarket” – a slight pause, as the audience guffawed – “it was just a question of getting back from the outer periphery of the universe.”
Poetry has taken Armitage to the Amazon and Iceland, to the US and New Zealand, to prisons and to Eton
I have got to a point in my life career where I’ve stopped having to feel apologetic about what I do and why I do it
Armitage’s father is 'a born exaggerator', a barbershop singer and amateur actor
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