From "Home"

Citizen 32’s Christina McAlpine spoke to Simon Armitage about his roots, influences and what home means to him.

You have been labelled a “young poet” and a “northern poet”. Do you accept or reject either label?

Only in coomparison with Homer or Methuselah am I considered young any

more. As for being a northern poet, I object to the term if it’s used as a kind of

sub-division of poetry as a whole, but if it’s used to describe the nature of my work then I couldn’t really argue with it. My poems couldn’t have been written in

Kensington.

Where do you stand on the current debate about the

“amateur poet” and form v message?

The only truly “amateur” poets I can think of are those who don’t do any reading or re-writing. They’re the no-hopers. Beyond that, we’re all amateurs. There’s no real career structure or any one paymaster. It’s never really a job. You can never be professional, only experienced. I’ve never thought of form and message as being mutually exclusive in any way. In many poems the form is the

message.

How do you feel about the teaching of poetry in schools?

As long as the poems aren’t presented as poems to be solved, I’m all for it. I still remember a section of my English exam called “blind criticism”, in which we were presented with a poem we hadn’t seen before, and asked to write about it. There was a genuine concern about getting it “wrong”. I got it wrong: I said the poem was about a man on a horse. Turned out it was a statue of a man on a horse. For a long time I loathed poetry. And sculpture. They were in league against me.

Have you ever been homeless or felt that you were?

I was an unhappy student in Portsmouth at the time of the Falklands War. Did a lot of wandering. Lived in crummy accommodation usually reserved for penniless holiday makers or the Nigerian navy. Slept in an ornate bus shelter on Southsea Common a couple of nights because I couldn’t stand listening to the rats ripping into the Weetabix packet in the cupboard. I wasn’t homeless, but pretty homesick. I spent a lot of time on National Express coaches, which in itself is a form of vagrancy and melancholia.

Where do you call “home” and what does it mean to you?

Home used to mean “here.” Now it means “us.”

Do you have any regrets?

Nothing I can beat myself up about. There are a few friends I wish I’d kept in touch with , hung on to. Men find it harder to make new friends as they get older.

What are your personal goals for the future?

I’d like to find a completely new style of writing for myself. Something with more freedomand fun, but not sloppy or obscure or plain daft. To change utterly, even if it’s just for one book.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the future of mankind?

An optimist these days. I have to be, for my daughter’s sake. Being an optimist also encourages you to do something about it, rather than sitting around with a large bag of fried potatoes saying fuck it, the whole thing’s fucked.