Simon Armitage

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:43

My castaway this week is the poet laureate Simon Armitage. Known and loved for his subtle knack for finding the poetry in ordinary lives, he has spent 30 years unearthing gleaming truths in scenes from contemporary Britain and beyond. He's covered the Pennine Way and Poundland, formed a poetic response to Brexit, and imagined Bramwell Bronte on Facebook. Growing up in the Yorkshire village of Marsden, he fell in love with poetry as a teenager when he discovered the work of fellow laureate Ted Hughes, who grew up in the Next Valley. Now the public voice of the written word in the UK for the coming decade, he is a passionate advocate for his art form. He says, it seems to me that in this age of over-information, poetry is more important than ever because it refuses to be garrulous and to join in with this constant diarrhea of information. It is resolutely compact. Simon Armitage, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. Now, unusually for Desert Island Discs, Simon, we're not sitting face to face in a studio today. I'm in my little attic, looking over the unusually quiet rooftops of London. Where are you?

Simon Armitage1:39

But

Presenter1:49

I'm looking out over the Yorkshire Moors and the Yorkshire Pennines, so I suppose in our ways we're in our own little desert islands. But there certainly could be worse places to be washed up at the moment.

Presenter2:00

I mean, it is a strange time we're in, as everybody keeps saying. And you wrote a poem about it, Lockdown is about the coronavirus outbreak. You say that poetry is more important than ever. How can poetry help us at a time like this? I don't know whether it's to do with the immediacy of poetry. You know, it's a very democratic art form. You only really need to have a knowledge of the alphabet and be able to pick up a pen and paper. You know, this is like nothing that any of us have ever experienced before or probably ever will experience again. And I suppose I felt some kind of duty as well to write to the moment to say something about now. And that wasn't too deliberate. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 32:39

As laureate

Presenter2:41

You know, the images and the language were queuing up to be written about. So I think to have not have written about it, I would have felt um as if I hadn't really sort of stepped up and met the challenge. There is a sense of hope that you reach by the end of the poem. Are you an optimist, I wonder?

Presenter2:59

I'm not an optimist in my nature, but I wonder if there's something about this current situation that has tried my pessimism a bit beyond its limits. Unless we see hope and some kind of, well, I guess enlightenment at the end of this, you know, that we've learnt something, then we're just going to be wallowing in a very, very difficult situation. I also think that the weather has helped. The fact that trees are greening and flowers are opening in front of our eyes is helpful and a pointer towards a future.

Presenter3:35

Alongside poetry, music is another huge passion of yours. You once called yourself a rock star fantasist. Could life have taken a different turn, do you think, if the poetry hadn't hadn't kind of caught you first? It might have taken a different turn. You know, if I'd learnt to play an instrument or properly joined a band, I think a fantasy was the right word at the time. But I've never been embarrassed about

Presenter3:59

talking about how important music has been to me. It still is to me, as an inspiration and as something that provides pretty much a a constant soundtrack, really.

Presenter4:12

And how was it putting your list together today as a music fan?

Presenter4:16

It was agonising, but I dropped all pretensions of trying to cover my musical taste and decided what I wanted to do was to tell stories. It's odd looking back at the list that I've compiled because I don't think, maybe with one or two exceptions, that I own a single copy of any of these records or tracks. But I was quite sort of intrigued by the way that that had come out in the end. Well, this is a very high-stakes way of getting copies. Of course, we are going to give you one of each.

Presenter4:49

So with that in mind, I think we'd better get started. What's first, Sam? Well, this is Moon Age Daydream by David Bowie. I do actually own this record. This was the first album I ever bought, Ziggy Stardust. I always thought of Bowie as a kind of Jesus figure. You know, when you grow up between the mills and the moors, you need some kind of otherness to believe in. And Bowie provided that through his music and his behaviour. This song wasn't actually a favourite to begin with. In fact, it was probably the least favourite track of mine on the album, but it's definitely my favourite now. I mean, it starts with the line, I'm an alligator. So you can't really go wrong with that.

Speaker 35:32

Yeah.

Presenter5:32

My mama papa coming for you

Speaker 25:35

Uh Uh

Presenter5:35

Uh

Speaker 25:35

I'm the space invader

Speaker 25:39

I'll be a rocker.

Simon Armitage5:39

Rollin' best for you.

Simon Armitage5:42

Keep your mouth shut

Simon Armitage5:46

Walking like a big monkey bird. And I'm busting up my brains for the world.

Presenter5:56

David Bowie and Moon Age Daydream. Simon Armitage, you once said that there's something wilfully obstinate about poetry as an art form. Tell me more about that.

Presenter6:06

It's always been uh marginal to some extent, and I I think I probably went on to say on that occasion that if every single person in the world was reading poetry and writing poetry, I wouldn't be interested in it in the slightest. I like the fact that it's somehow

Presenter6:24

Stands outside the mainstream, even though what I try to do on the margins is a mainstream version of it. There's an inherent contradiction there, but contradictions have always been very appealing to me as a writer and as a person. I think you once said part of my philosophy has always been to try to find the miraculous within the everyday, the ordinary and the domestic. What is the urge to do that about? What can those miracles do for us?

Presenter6:57

Even the everyday is quite astonishing. That's pretty much my motto. I mean, I've always described myself as a kitchen sink writer. I try and write about the material fabric of my everyday life. In a poem, you're describing it such close detail that the processes of daily life become almost sacramental and somehow spiritual. As a poet, you're both popular and prolific, qualities that some critics can be quite sniffy about. Does that bother you?

Simon Armitage7:29

Yeah.

Presenter7:30

How do you handle critics generally? What's your approach to reviews?

Presenter7:34

It's important to read the criticism of certain critics who are very insightful. And I can think of a couple of occasions where people have said something and I've thought, they're absolutely right. I need to stop doing that. What kind of thing?

Presenter7:48

Somebody once pointed out that this is going to sound so trivial that I often used a comma in the middle of the last line of my poem, and that

Presenter7:59

They're really splitting hairs if they're getting down to that level. Yeah, but when I look back through a lot of my poems, I thought, yeah, that's a good point. But I don't know. I think after 30 years, you need to have built up enough confidence to think that you know what you're doing, or you're just going to carry on doing it anyway, and to hell with what anybody thinks. I wonder whether part of your attitude comes out of cultural identity. You know, there's this alternativism and that slight kind of awkwardness. It's part of the northern identity for me. Am I right about that, do you think? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's part of my identity, and I think it's been a useful identity in my writing on occasions. I mean, I never set out to be a northerner. It wasn't a plan or a campaign. But the longer I've stayed in this part of the world, I've realised that I feel very comfortable here. And I suppose the other thing is that poetry has become.

Presenter8:51

A strange kind of passport really. It it's taken me all over the world and it's become increasingly important to have somewhere to come back to, you know, somewhere to land that feels secure, where I can sort of regroup before setting off on the next adventure, even if that's just an adventure in a in a sonnet or or a haiku.

Presenter9:13

All right, Simon, it's time to go to the music. What are we going to hear next? It's disc number two.

Presenter9:18

So this is John Taverness's setting of William Blake's poem The Lamb. I'm not really a Blakeian poet, you know, in terms of his visionary attitude, but this piece bridges poetry and music, and not many settings of poems are successful, but this one absolutely is.

Presenter9:47

Yeah.

Speaker 39:57

We are done.

Presenter9:59

Uh

Presenter10:17

Uh

Presenter10:28

The Lamb by William Blake, composed by John Tavener, conducted by Andrew Nettsinger, performed by the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge.

Presenter10:38

So, Simon Armitage, you were born in Huddersfield. You grew up in nearby Marsden in West Yorkshire, and your dad Peter sounds like quite a character. Tell me a bit more about him.

Presenter10:47

Yeah, I will always be Peter's son in the village. In fact, there's a joke at the local paper, the Huddersville Examiner, that they always say that they've got a bigger file on my dad than they have on me. He was very much the enthusiastic party that got us all involved in the local Am Dram scene. I think my mum was more reluctant, probably a bit happier behind the scenes. That's much of my youth spent at a place called the Parochial Hall in Marsden. And yeah, I saw my dad morph through all these different characters. He was quite often a baddie. He played Bill Sykes in Oliver. Even his dog deserts him. He's so bad. My dad, he must have been a bit of a method actor now, come to think about it. He sort of adopted a dog for about a month before the show so that they could form this bond, this partnership on stage. This really nasty, nasty-looking, aggressive little dog.

Simon Armitage11:28

Is it

Presenter11:46

What parts did you play?

Presenter11:48

I played a part in Fiddler on the Roof. Yeah, I think I was a young hot headed Russian revolutionary. I don't think people are still talking about it in the village. And what about the culture that you're exposed to when you were young? I mean, apart from the kind of Amdram stuff, was art part of your life at home? Not really. I think a lot I mean, like a lot of people of my generation, I watched a lot of T V. I remember watching the whole of Samuel Beckett's plays. It must have been on BBC Two in in black and white. They were on on Friday night and instead of going out with my mates, I remember deciding to sit in with my mum and watch these plays, which I didn't really understand. But I again I just saw them as being other and different and speaking to some part of me that I hadn't really come to terms with. But I thought I would meet again in the future at some point.

Presenter12:40

And I know that the view from your bedroom window really fired your imagination when you were growing up. What could you see looking out?

Presenter12:47

I realized at one point that I was looking forward to going to bed so I could put the radio on and listen to music and stargaze, if you like, into the village, into the streetlights, into the lights in people's houses and car headlights. And I imagined little stories, little scenarios going on then. I think it was my first experience of an imagined world, a fantasy world, and one that I felt very fired up by.

Presenter13:17

Tell us about your next disc. What are we going to hear?

Presenter13:20

It's uh you've got to pick a pocket or two from Oliver. I picked this just because I wanted something to remind me of those Amdram days and the village butcher and the village undertaker and the bank manager and the women who worked in the co-op suddenly coming out onto stage dressed as cockneys or as people from Oklahoma. I suppose I was thinking that if I'm on a desert island, if I really do start going mad, I'll listen to this song and choreograph my own little song and dance routine. You know, I'll put my thumbs in my belt hooks and walk around on my heels like the artful Dodger.

Speaker 213:55

The Artful Dodger.

Speaker 213:58

Why should we break our backs stupidly paying tax Better get some untaxed income

Presenter14:04

Good.

Speaker 214:07

Make a bug in the middle.

Presenter14:07

It ought to

Speaker 214:08

Oh.

Presenter14:08

Ready

Speaker 214:08

You Gotta pick a Pop it or two

Presenter14:10

Uh

Speaker 214:11

The voice

Presenter14:12

Uh

Speaker 214:13

You've got a picker pocket or two.

Speaker 214:16

Why should we all break out Max? It's better to bulk it all too.

Speaker 314:21

Yeah.

Speaker 214:21

Uh

Speaker 314:22

Who says drive does it play?

Presenter14:26

You've got to pick a pocket or two from the musical Oliver, composed by Lionel Bart, performed by the nineteen ninety four London Palladium cast, with Jonathan Price as Fagin.

Presenter14:36

So Simon Armitage, tell me then about finding poetry. Do you remember the first time you wrote a poem?

Presenter14:44

I was 10 years old. We were asked to write a poem about Christmas. And I went off home, wrote this thing, which I was very pleased with. And the teacher had said that he was going to put the best six poems up on the wall. And he didn't choose my poem. And I think I was a little bit heartbroken about it. And he came up to me a couple of weeks later and he said, oh, Simon, you know, I just thought I'd tell you that that poem of yours was very good. And I just thought, well, why didn't you put it on the wall then? I have wondered on occasions since then whether I've really just been pursuing a career of revenge. You know, that every time I finish a poem, I'm thinking, well, why don't you go and stick that on your wall? But poetry didn't really resurface then until I was sort of 15, 16, and we started reading Ted Hughes. And I just woke up. You know, I was a very sleepy kid up until that point. And it suddenly struck me in a very electrifying moment that the world was a really interesting place. It could be packaged up in these little bundles of language, which at the end of the day are only black marks against a white page. But if you put them in the right order, you can make extraordinary things happen in somebody else's head across thousands of miles, across thousands of years, and in complete silence. And the shock of that realization and the magic of it, the primitive magic of it, has never really left me. I still feel that when I'm looking at a poem, that I'm staring at some kind of circuit board of language which makes a contactless contact with something in my head. And I think I knew at that very moment that poetry was going to be my thing. I didn't know that I wanted to write it then, but I knew that I wanted to read it and that I could find escape in it and I could find shelter in it.

Presenter16:48

Ted Hughes was an early influence, but he proved to be an enduring one. Why has his poetry stayed with you throughout your life?

Presenter16:56

For me, you know, Hughes was this incredible presence with this enormous literary gravity, but he was also the man who came from the next valley. And at some level I probably thought, well, if you can do that coming from my themeroid, why can't you do it coming from Marsden?

Presenter17:17

I think we'd better hear your next disc.

Presenter17:19

So this is uh Ted Hughes reading a poem called Ice Crust and Snowflake: The Polished Glancing.

Speaker 317:26

A blue frost bright dawn

Speaker 317:32

and the ox's hoof quag mire at the ice cumbered trough has so far protected the primrose.

Speaker 317:40

and the wild mares In the moor hollow stand Stupid with bliss among the first miraculous full flowers.

Speaker 317:52

They are weeping for joy in a wind that blows Through the flint of the ox's horn.

Speaker 318:03

The North Wind brought you too late To the iron bar, rusted, sodden, in the red soil The salmon weightless in the flag of depth, green as engine oil.

Speaker 318:18

A snowflake in April that touched the red

Presenter18:21

Ice Crust and Snowflake, TED Hughes. Simon Armitage, you studied geography, which might surprise people, at Portsmouth Polytechnic, and you became a probation officer in Manchester. What made you go into that line of work?

Presenter18:35

So I came back home after Portsmouth.

Presenter18:39

and didn't really have a plan, wasn't sure what to do. Um my dad was a a probation officer at the time, so I suppose there was something of the family business about it, and it had meaning, it had purpose, it was it was quite a sort of radical job at the time.

Presenter18:55

Working as a probation officer is a hugely demanding role physically and emotionally. What sorts of situations did you have to deal with day to day once you qualified? A lot of the work was drug-related. People living incredibly chaotic and disorderly lives. And, you know, I might see these people for an hour and a half a week and go home thinking, what possible impact can I make on that person's life, given that for the rest of the week, they're just involved in mayhem for pretty much 24 hours a day. You know, I'm not really sure that I was very good at it. Yeah, it was upsetting. It felt dangerous occasionally. I didn't enjoy my time in the prisons. I had a placement in Wakefield prison. Dennis Nielsen was in Wakefield prison at the time, and suddenly I was face to face with people I'd been reading about in the papers and people I'd read about as a kid in the papers, you know, notorious criminals who'd done terrible, terrible things. And there you were, you know, sort of eyeball to eyeball with them in a tiny little room in Wakefield. And I think by the time I finished, by the time I decided to quit, I'd probably given my best and I'd realized I needed to do something where there was a product. You know, it was all process in probation. I could never point at anything and say I made a difference there. I'd like to think I did make a difference, but I couldn't say what it was. And that side of it was exhausting. So by the time I'd finished, it had sort of finished with me.

Presenter20:39

Simon, it's time to go to the music. Your fifth disc today. What are we going to hear?

Presenter20:44

Atmosphere by Joy Division. There's something about this track I think that absolutely transcends rock and and pop. It's got an element of the requiem in it. It feels to me to be near sacred music. So it's sacrilegious I always think to use this track out of context. When I heard it being used on Peaky Blinders I stood up and walked out of the room.

Speaker 321:10

Uh Ha ha

Speaker 221:12

Turn away.

Presenter21:16

Inside

Presenter21:20

Your confusion

Presenter21:24

My Illusion.

Presenter21:28

More like the mask of self-hate

Presenter21:32

France and then die

Presenter21:42

Joy Division and Atmosphere. So Simon Armitage, your first published poem was called Without Photographs and that came out in 1987. It must have been so satisfying to see your work in print. What do you remember about it? It was a tiny local magazine, probably with a circulation of, I don't know, a couple of hundred, something like that. But I'm not sure that it ever gets any better than that moment, especially if you've grown up without really having any high hopes of achievement. And I kept the check. I think it was for £2 or £2.50. I've still got it. Why did you keep it? Why not cash it?

Simon Armitage22:24

Why

Presenter22:26

Um just as evidence of that moment. I mean, it was never going to get me a mortgage, was it? But uh yeah, and maybe maybe I thought that, you know, if I only ever published that one poem, I would have uh the check there to to prove that I'd been a professional writer at some stage in my life.

Presenter22:41

There was also a point in your early career when you felt apologetic about being a poet. Why was that?

Presenter22:48

Probably it was to do with, you know, not feeling as if I was being particularly productive in the world compared with people who had real jobs. There was maybe a little bit of self-consciousness about it as well. At that stage I was playing cricket and football for the village and poetry wasn't really something that I wanted to discuss in the dressing room. You know, I did I did not want the P word to uh to come up.

Presenter23:16

Last year you became the twenty first Poet Laureate. You were considered for the post ten years earlier, and you once said that it would have been a disaster if you'd got the job then. Why?

Presenter23:26

I think I would have felt a little bit hemmed in and obligated towards a certain kind of writing. And if I think back over the last decade and the work that I've done and the work that I needed to do to, you know, sort of expand as a writer in different directions, I just wouldn't have been able to get on with that. William Hill, I think, had odds on me. My dad lost a little bit of money on, I think. But yeah, it wouldn't have been at the right time.

Presenter23:56

And how does that idea of alternativism sit with the position that you now occupy? You know, it's a fairly august role being the poet laureate. Yeah, it's a very exhilarating contradiction. You go into poetry, I think, perhaps into any art form, because you want to be anti-establishment or independent of any sense of authority. And three decades down the line, and you know, it appears as if you're connected to the government and to the monarchy. But I just take that firstly as an enormous compliment. You know, I see it as the highest role, and I suppose subconsciously it's something that I've always been aiming towards. And I like the idea that you can write poems in that context of power and establishment. It somehow.

Presenter24:49

makes the challenge greater, but it's just a huge opportunity to to promote the art form that I so passionately believe in. And how did you celebrate when you found out that you'd you'd got the job? Is it true that you bounced on the trampoline at home?

Presenter25:04

We did bounce on the trampoline, yeah, when we got back home. Not easy with a bottle of champagne in your hand, I have to say.

Presenter25:11

Although, you know, you can only pretend that you're poet laureate in your own house for about five minutes every day.

Presenter25:18

After that, you know, you've got to do the washing up and find your car keys.

Presenter25:21

What are we going to hear next and and why?

Presenter25:24

Tainted Love by Soft Cell. I remember going into a nightclub in Huddersfield called Flicks and asking for a record. The DJ leaned over to me and he said, We don't play records with guitars in. And I thought, I don't know what he means. I don't really know any records that don't have guitars in. And then he played this. I felt like I was hallucinating. It's so sexy, sleazy, cheap, luxurious, lush, intimate. I'd never heard anything like it.

Presenter25:57

Sometimes I feel I've got to run away, I've got to get away from the pain you drive into the heart of me. The love we share seems to go nowhere, and I've lost my light for I toss and turn, I can't sleep at night.

Presenter26:25

Soft Cell and Tainted Love.

Presenter26:29

So Simon Armitage, like many poets from Wordsworth to Hughes, nature has influenced your writing and and it seems to play more and more of a muse in your work and your life as well. What draws you to the natural world?

Presenter26:43

The natural world is fairly unavoidable where we live. You know, you walk out the front door and you're confronted by it. And I think if you have an interest in the natural world, then certainly over the last 10, 15, 20 years, you are by definition an environmentalist. These issues are inescapable now and they inform the language. And what's it like seeing your work carved into the landscape?

Presenter27:11

Satisfying and humbling. This is a project called Stanza Stone. So six of my poems have been carved into exposed rocks across about fifty miles of the South Pennine watershed. So a lot of these are rock faces and stones that have already been brutalised. You know, they're quarry faces. One of the stones, the snowstone, is in the village of Marsden. It's up on top of Puelle Hill, which is a beacon for me and a very important location. In fact, I was up there a few weeks ago before I wasn't allowed to go up there, reading the poem from the stone and making a little film about it. And a rambler sort of popped up and saw me. And I think he must have thought, you know, what a saddo coming up here to recite his own poems, to his own poems.

Presenter28:01

So Simon, you often return to your home village of Marsden in your work, and you describe it as a liminal, transcendent and transgressive location. I mean, that sounds like a list of your favorite things. Why is that such a magical combination?

Presenter28:15

It has this epic geography surrounding the actual community and I think when you're in the village somehow you're you're conscious of that and all these big open spaces are open, it seems to me, to interpretation and to the imposition of ideas and to and to poetry. I'm all about the space. I remember going to give some readings in the States about ten years ago and one of the American poets was saying, Oh, I was just over in Britain and all they talk about is routes and roads. You know, you'll go to a dinner party and they just sit there saying, Oh, I went to Winchester the other week. Oh, how did you get there? Oh, I went this way and that way and that way. And it was so boring. And I was sat there quietly thinking, I love all that. I love all those conversations.

Simon Armitage28:54

Oh how do you

Simon Armitage28:55

Twin

Simon Armitage29:02

Uh

Presenter29:04

I think we'd better go to the music. What's it gonna be next?

Presenter29:07

This is a piece of music which is sometimes called the Homefirth Anthem and is sometimes referred to as Pratty Flowers. Pratty is a Yorkshire word for pretty. It's very local and my wife will tell you that if I hear somebody singing this song, let's say that I'm very emotionally susceptible to it. And what I particularly like about this recording is that I can hear an audience in the background murmuring and joining in. And that's the way that I know this song. I hear it sung in clubs and pubs and people just don't seem to be able to help themselves from joining in.

Presenter29:48

A barn for pleasure as I was walking on one summer summer's evening clear

Presenter29:59

Up a road for pleasure as I was walking on one summer, summer's eve.

Presenter30:11

There I beheld a most beautiful damsel, Lamenting for her shepherd sword.

Presenter30:22

John Renard and Homefirth Anthem Simon Armitage, it's not enough to be a poet in print these days, you need to be a performance poet too. Do you enjoy getting up on stage, mic in hand?

Presenter30:35

There is a time each day, maybe each week, when I want to get onto the stage and let my poems perform their little shows and for the curtains to open on those little pieces of language, which is what makes it very exposing. Because for the most part, the relationship and the contact is just between you and the page. And then there does come a point where that page meets its reader, or you meet an audience in the reading of it. And what's that like?

Simon Armitage31:06

And what

Presenter31:08

Um uncomfortable to begin with because you've often been writing about your personal feelings and so you feel as if you're very vulnerable. It's just you on the stage. It's almost time to cast you away, Simon. You'll be poet in residence on our desert island. Do you think you'll find promising material to inspire you there? The light of Marsden will be very far away, obviously.

Speaker 331:28

What?

Presenter31:30

I write more about Marsden when when I'm not in Marsden, so probably that's all I will write about on on my desert island. I feel as if I've become writer in residence in my own house for these last six weeks, so I've had plenty of practice.

Simon Armitage31:36

But

Speaker 331:36

There's a

Simon Armitage31:36

I don't think

Presenter31:44

Do you still look out of your bedroom window at night?

Presenter31:47

I suppose I do. I'm still a bit of a a stargazer and a wanderer. And that's uh that's important work for a writer, the day dream.

Presenter31:59

It's just time for one more disc from you. What's it gonna be, Simon Armitage?

Presenter32:03

This is My Heart's in the Highlands. It's a working, a reworking, a setting of a Robbie Burns poem by the Estonian composer Avo Pet. I recognise that, you know, I am drawn to the melancholic and the sombre sometimes, and that I deliberately choose to be sad sometimes and need things to provoke that condition. So, you know, what better than a bit of

Presenter32:33

East European neoclassical gloominess.

Presenter32:41

I hope my heart is not here.

Presenter33:05

Fort in the Highlands are chasing.

Presenter33:15

My Heart in the Highlands, composed by Arvo Pert, sung by soprano Elsatorp, accompanied by Christopher Bowers Broadband, on the organ.

Presenter33:25

So Simon, it's time to cast you away. You can take the books with you, of course. You can have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to help you pass the time on the island. You can also take a book of your own choice. What would you like? I'm going to take the Oxford English Dictionary. I'm going to take the twenty volume set in large print. So that should keep me occupied.

Simon Armitage33:43

So

Presenter33:46

You can also have a luxury item. What would you like? I'm going to take uh a tennis ball with me. I mean, I don't know what sort of desert island it is, but I think if I had a tennis ball I could improvise a game of golf and a game of uh squash and I could practise my leg breaks against a tree stump. So um no I don't want I don't want one of those rubbish ones that you buy, you know, on the promenade that sounds like a flat tyre when you let it bounce. I want a proper professional grade one that that's going to last me a couple of years.

Presenter34:15

It will have a delightful thwok, just for you.

Simon Armitage34:18

Yeah.

Presenter34:18

And if you could only save one disc from being swept away out to sea, which would you choose? Yeah, I would choose the Bowie Moon Age Daydream. I'd make a pair of stacker platforms from some Flotsam and Jetsam and go glam rocking around the seashore every now and again.

Presenter34:37

Simon Armitage, thank you very much for letting us see your desert island discs. It's a pleasure.

Presenter35:04

Well, we'll leave Simon happily throwing his high-quality tennis ball against a tree stump. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with him. If you'd like to hear more from other poets who've been cast away, you'll find them on BBC Sounds or via the Desert Island Disc's website. Among them are Gillian Clark, Benjamin Zephaniah, Derek Walcott and Sir John Betcherman.

Presenter35:24

In 2017, Kirsty Young cast away the Scottish poet Liz Lockhead. I wanted to be a painter. It had never occurred to me that I would write things. I found out that I was often not pleased with my drawings, so I started writing long, thin things down the side. And then I would think, well, when I'd type them up, or when my mum would type them up, I would think.

Presenter35:45

They don't have to go to the end of the line. And then I would think, what are they? Well, I suppose they'll be poemy. They don't have a tune. And they're not prose. I suppose they're poemy things. But I did start writing almost immediately I went to art school and it gradually took over with me. But I mean, I was preoccupied with getting my hair right and getting a date for Saturday night and things like that. Like all girls of that age, I was very self-conscious. I thought I just was wrong for 60s. I didn't look right. I felt you know the wrong kind of figure and I wasn't like twiggy. And you know, when you look back, you think, God, you know.

Presenter36:21

Sex and looks are wasted on the young, you know. I was quite lazy in some ways at art school, but I was really, really searching and thinking about the kind of painter that I would like to be, and I was floundering desperately. And writing things was I wasn't floundering in the same way. I felt I was finding out something. I remember my best friend Doreen, she's still one of my very, very best friends, says that the first time she met me, I was hiding, I was on the floor under the coats at the art school, and I was on the floor scribbling away. And she said, What are you doing? And she said, I looked up and I said, I'm writing a poem. And she said, She thought,

Presenter37:01

You know, how pretentious. And then she realised, once we got friends, about six months later, she thought, oh, she was writing a poem, that's what she was doing.

Presenter37:09

Liz Lockhead speaking to Kirstie in 2017. Next time, I'll be casting away disability rights activist and teacher Sinead Burke. I do hope you'll join us then.

Presenter37:32

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Presenter37:36

One two one two one two one two. This is a public service announcement for the BBC. Oh, let me just close the

Presenter37:46

Two more minutes, Nancy. I'm just recording some audio.

Presenter37:54

Working from home.

Presenter37:58

My name is Louis Theroux.

Presenter38:00

I'm doing a new podcast for Radio 4. It's called Grounded with Louis Theroux.

Presenter38:07

I've assembled a series of interviews from my own home.

Presenter38:12

For some episodes I may even be in my pajamas.

Presenter38:15

I'll be talking to people that I find interesting, people whose work I admire, people who in normal circumstances I might not have a chance to speak to.

Simon Armitage38:25

I told a couple of my good friends, and they were like, Oh my gosh, what have you done wrong? Have you done something wrong? Is it one of those weird documentary series? And I went, No, I think it's just a chat.

Speaker 238:33

The idea is that we can dig a little deeper. I walked out on stage once and the whole front row were blacked up. Peel back the layers and find out who they really are.

Presenter38:43

Uh

Simon Armitage38:43

I don't think a penis has ever been inside me. Will that do?

Presenter38:47

A free flowing exchange of ideas

Speaker 338:50

You spend your life catastrophising in the most kind of absurd ways.

Presenter38:53

Reflecting on what's going on now, but also looking back at the past.

Speaker 238:58

Malcolm X went to Smethick. Things were so bad in the West Midlands that the baddest black dude in America flew on his own dime and walked around. Alright, Malcolm. Two people.

Presenter39:11

Communing through the miracle of the interweb at long distance and yet so very close.

Simon Armitage39:17

I am not going to do ironing, it's just a rule I have.

Presenter39:21

That is

Simon Armitage39:21

So it's no good asking.

Presenter39:22

We've got to quite a real place all of a sudden.

Speaker 339:25

I'm feeling anxious just even going to the far end of this conversation like we are.

Presenter39:30

To hear new episodes as soon as they go live, just subscribe to Grounded with Louis Theroux on BBC Sounds. Let's face it, you've got nothing better to do. Although that's not quite true, because actually there is a lot to do. When I hear people on the radio going like, if you're at home, you're so bored because you're like, no, I'm not bored, I just have kids that need constant attention.

Presenter39:54

Put that in there.