IT'S nearly a decade since Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate following the untimely death of the much-missed Ted Hughes.

At the time he wasn't everyone's preferred choice, but after Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison distanced themselves from the post, he suddenly found himself the front-runner.

Motion admits that Hughes was a hard act to follow and says he hasn't always been comfortable in the role. He recently hit the headlines for saying that writing verse for the Royal Family was a "thankless" task, although he claims some of his comments were mis-reported.

"What I stand by is that it is a mixed blessing for the poet himself. I think Ted found it difficult and he admitted this," he says.

"What I didn't say is that the Queen never said anything nice about my poems. It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether she likes them or not, but she actually said some rather warm things."

Motion is talking ahead of his visit to the former laureate's birthplace in Mytholmroyd later this month, when he will present the Ted Hughes Young Poets Awards at a festival marking the 10th anniversary of his death.

He is keen to clarify his views on the laureateship.

"I read somewhere it being described as a 'double-edged chalice' and there are things about it which are quite difficult. It's particularly difficult to write poems about events in the royal calendar, because you don't have the close association that you need as a lyric poet, and also a lot of people aren't interested in the Royal Family."

But he feels there is much to enjoy about the post.

"It gave me the chance to stand in a public space and talk about poetry and champion it in schools and with politicians."

It also enabled him to create the Poetry Archive, the world's biggest collection of online recordings of poets reading their work, where more than a million poems are listened to each month.

So while some people feel the role of Poet Laureate has become redundant and should be scrapped, he disagrees, saying it just needs a change of emphasis.

"It is antiquated and peculiar but if you loosen some things, like the expectation there will be regular Royal poems, and make it more akin to being an ambassador for poetry, then I think it has great value."

During his tenure he has regularly visited schools and colleges in a bid to turn on youngsters to poetry.

"The idea of a living poet coming to the school and talking about their work was absolutely unimaginable when I was growing up. It wasn't quite as bad as saying that the only good poets were dead poets but it was nearly like that," he says.

For Motion, though, being laureate has been both a kiss and a curse.

"I did stop writing poems and that was partly to do with certain pressures that the laureateship brings, because you're being looked at with narrow eyes by people waiting for you to fall over, and it's hard to look when you're being so looked at."

However, in the last couple of years his creative streak has returned. His latest book, Ways of Life: Places, Painters and Poets, published last month, is a collection of essays spanning a 30 year-period and ranging from articles on Keats to the high priest of modernism, James Joyce. While next May, to mark the end of his laureateship, he's due to publish a new collection of poems, The Cinder Path.

"I have written more poems in the last year than I would normally expect to write in five years and I think when this collection comes out it will surprise a few people," he says.

Motion was an eager, young poet in 1976 when he landed his first job teaching English at Hull University and he confesses it wasn't by chance that he ended up there.

"These were the days when Margaret Thatcher had gone through the universities waving a machete chopping away jobs, but I knew Philip Larkin was there and this gave me the chance to meet him."

He remembers his fellow poet fondly. "He had a reputation for being grumpy and fierce, someone who didn't suffer fools gladly, someone who was shy and withdrawn. But he was also incredibly good company, amazingly gentle and capable of great acts of kindness.

"We hung out together as friends do, but always talking about poetry. He was very nice to me. I would hesitate to use the word paternal,
but he was a bit paternal to me.

"Maybe he saw something in me that reminded him of his younger self, I don't know. But he made me laugh more than anyone else I've ever met," he says.

Motion is now one of our most respected and prominent poets, and the debate about who should succeed him as laureate will doubtless gather pace over the coming months.

But the man himself remains tight-lipped on the subject.

"It's not for me to say who should succeed me, but it's a big job in poetry and it would be nice if the next person feels the same way and can help make poetry part of the national conversation."