CityLife

Interview: Simon Armitage

SImon Armitage: Photo by Jonty Wilde

WHAT every Literature Festival needs is just a little dash of rock n roll (this is Manchester after all) and who better to provide it than the eternal indie kid of poetry. Simon Armitage is the region’s best-loved floppy-haired wordsmith; a poet first, he is also a playwright, novelist and occasional musician whose work ranges from dramatisations of Greek mythology to the witty, starkly realist verse for which he is best known

He will be performing a hand-picked selection from his expansive back catalogue on Tuesday 20 October at St Ann’s Church. Alex Hall caught up with him to talk about his work and his beloved Manchester.

Is Manchester a place that looms large for you?  

It’s a place that looms increasingly large in my life. I did my Masters there, and then I worked for Greater Manchester Probation Service for 7 or 8 years, I teach at MMU, my wife works at the BBC there and I’m a season ticket holder at one of the two football clubs there, so it’s the predominant city in my life.  

It’s quite odd for me because I’m from Yorkshire, and I live on the other side of the border, but I’ve always felt like I’m from East Berlin and Manchester is my West Berlin.  

How did your time with the Probation Service influence your view of the city?   

Well, it gave me a rather jaundiced view because inevitably you find yourself dragging around the less salubrious areas and mixing with incurious characters, looking at things that you might rather not look at. I think it skewed my view of what the city’s like.  

I see it as far more vibrant now, plus I think Manchester has changed a lot. It’s markedly more glossy now, it’s cleaner. It feels less threatening.  

Was there a time when it did feel threatening to you?  

Yeah it did, I mean years ago a friend of mine once told me he’d read in a magazine that Piccadilly Gardens, per square yard, was the most violent place in England.  

When I was younger, a trip to Manchester felt like a trip to New York. I grew up in the countryside, so I think it also felt more alien to me then, than it does now.  

We had the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester last week; do you have any thoughts on the Tories coming to what is still seen as the Labour heartland?  

It seems incongruous to see David Cameron jogging down the streets and stood outside the G-Mex. It just…seems incongruous; they’re not the party that I associate with Manchester.  

You’re going to be doing a reading in St Anne’s Church for the Manchester Literature Festival. Have you read in churches before and what do you think of them as venues?  

I’ve read in that church before. I think it was when Killing Time came out, and it was then when I realised how many biblical and religious references there were in the work and not all of them complimentary. I felt quite odd for a few moments but then I thought ‘well I’m not in the pulpit’. Sometimes churches are good venues and other times there’s an odd thing where you’re surrounded by the stone and the pews and it can start feeling like a service.  

What are you working on at the moment?  

I’m working on another medieval translation. I did a translation Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and now I’m working on another poem from the same period, it’s known in academic circles as The Alliterative Morte Arthure.

I’ve been doing more TV presenting and I hope to make a program about The Odyssey, a factual programme following Odysseus’s journey.    

I’m also going to do a project on the Pennine Way, starting in the North and finishing in Edale. I’m going to be walking it as a troubadour, seeing if I can get from start to finish by doing readings, so I’ll be asking people who live along the route if they’d like me to do a reading in their living room, church, village hall, pub or phone box.   

Simon Armitage will be appearing at St Ann’s Church on Tuesday 20 October. For more information visit the link to the right of the page.