Simon Armitage emerges with what can only be described as three-and-a-half dressing gown sashes around his neck in place of a tie. The salt-and-pepper hair of the headshots projected behind him faded now to salt, he speaks with the quiet gravity of middle-aged contentment.
He is appearing at Manchester Central Library to inaugurate the 20th edition of the Manchester Literature Festival, reading from his two latest collections, Dwell and New Cemetery.
His demeanour hovers in the tradition of Northern English raconteurs somewhere between Alan Bennett (on his father borrowing a print of Salvador Dalí’s Crucifixion from Oldham Library, “It’s not surprising I am the way that I am.”) and Peter Kay (“Who remembers twin-tub washing machines?”).
Dwell is a collection inspired by Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan, which he repeatedly confesses to confusing with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, leading on to an anecdote about mistaking the National Trust for the National Front (“Free parking. Cheese scones.”), which elicits knowing groans from the audience of (one assumes) teachers nearing retirement. Many of Armitage’s asides are met with an ‘mmm’ of reminiscent acknowledgement or a muttering of sympathy from the crowd.
The poems of Dwell focus more on the fauna of Heligan than the flora; tales of owls wringing their own necks and metaphysical recipes for bringing a fox to life mix with TripAdvisor reviews from guests of “the biggest insect hotel in the universe” (Armitage’s words). The collection, per Armitage, is an encouragement for readers to dwell (ha) on nature, acting as an alternative guidebook to Heligan, similar to his work on the Stanza Stones adorning trails across the Pennine Way.
New Cemetery takes inspiration from the construction of, and protests against, a new municipal graveyard atop a hill nearby his home in West Yorkshire. A petition was posted against the project by local residents; the misspelling of ‘cemetery’ in the title left Armitage unable to sign it (“I’m the Poet Laureate, for goodness’ sake!”).
He speaks of his writing process, the line ‘The departed are yet to arrive’ described as a ’five-past-nine job’, taking the rest of the day off to bask. He is ‘a writer in residence in [his] own head’, taking time away from writing only to address the ‘dovecote housing issue’ at the titular cemetery, or, in appreciation of the skylight in his home office, to appear on the Velux Windows podcast.
This is not to give the impression that Armitage speaks with ego of his work; he bemoans people’s expectation that he know the collective noun for groups of animals, and tells of a plumber recognising him not from his role of Poet Laureate, as he might expect, but because “I once sold your sister a dog.” He quotes Wittgenstein (“it’s usually Wittgenstein”) as saying “It’s difficult to look at a blank piece of paper and know how to improve it”, hearkening back to his beginnings as a poet, writing his first works on Greater Manchester Probation stationery whilst studying as a postgraduate at the University of Manchester.
A Q&A session leads to questions on the political restraint of the Poet Laureateship; Armitage prefers to use ‘persuasion and subtlety’ in his work as opposed to explicit grandstanding on contentious issues. One senses a slight hesitancy towards subversion from his answer, marking an uncharacteristically reticent ending to an evening of great emotional transparency, especially regarding Armitage’s relationship with his late father, who passed away during the writing of New Ceremony.
Armitage shares some of his father Peter’s “gnomic utterances”; “if you can’t fight, wear a big hat”; “it’s not a competition, but we can win it”; “a man with nothing to lose has nothing to lose”, before closing with the final poem from Dwell, a typically terse, bucolic elegy to the Marsden of his youth. He thanks the library.
