Simon Armitage: ‘I never thought I'd want to scale up the slopes of poetry, they seemed too steep and slippery’

Armitage’s insightful chats were first aired by the BBC as part of the show The Poet Laureate Has Gone To His Shed, which started back in 2020 and ran for three series. Now he’s revived his talks as a new podcast programme The Shed, available on the likes of Spotify and Apple. “I'd noticed when I was giving readings or events that inevitably if there was a Q&A session, people wanted to ask about the shed programme,” he says. “So I really felt as if I wanted to give it at least one more go. I think it speaks a lot about who I am and where I'm from and demonstrates quite an essential part of my personality really.”

Among the guests Armitage chats to on his latest programme are journalist Reeta Chakrabarti, lexicographer Susie Dent and actor and comedian Frank Skinner. “The idea is to talk to people who make things, because I'm really interested in the creative process. But that can be a really wide brief,” he says. “I try to avoid people who are flogging things. We see enough of that on chat shows, people who've got a film coming out or a book coming out or a record coming out…It’s just interesting people, who I'm interested in anyway, and I'm curious about their working practice and their lives.”

Another of his shed guests this time round is Rotherham singer Self Esteem. “I was particularly interested in talking to her because she's somebody who's surfed the highs and lows of the music industry,” Armitage says. “She’s incredibly popular at the moment but I know she has gone through periods where she has questioned what she’s been doing and whether she's been doing things that are authentic to her character.”

“I also knew that she played cricket as well at quite a decent level,” he continues. “So we had long chats about playing cricket because that's something that I used to do, and about growing up as cricket orphans while our dads were playing. We would be hanging around the boundary for five hours with a packet of crisps and a bottle of pop.”

Armitage grew up in the village of Marsden, surrounded by the dramatic Pennine countryside. It was at the age of 15, when he began reading the works of Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin for his school exams, that he became hooked on poetry, an interest that continued throughout his time as a university geography student and later as he worked as a probation officer in Greater Manchester.

“Maybe it's just inevitable that if you're reading (poetry) for long enough, you'll start writing it and wanting to become that thing,” the 62-year-old muses. But as a teenager, achieving what he has now would have been “unimaginable”. “Partly because I was a very disengaged student and I didn't study English literature,” he says. “And I think looking at it from there, this kind of affirmation would have seemed like standing at the bottom of Everest really in a pair of slippers. I don't think I've ever really been enormously ambitious. I'm very stubborn and keep going with things, but I don't think I ever thought I'd want to scale up the slopes of poetry. They seemed too steep and too slippery.”

These days, Armitage’s shed offers a space in which he can write away from any distractions. For him, it represents a minimalist and simple life, a restful place where he can focus on poetry as the “art form of concentration”. The idea to invite guests in for a conversational programme came from Armitage’s recognition of his curious and inquisitive nature. It also offered an opportunity to work with his wife, who is at the BBC. The show has provided him with some memorable moments, from seeing Sir Ian McKellen’s Elvish Lord of the Rings tattoo to hearing The Smiths’ Johnny Marr absent-mindedly playing the guitar riff for the song Suffer Little Children, about the moors murders, with a chilling backdrop of Saddleworth out of Armitage’s shed window.

By his own admission, he was annoyed when it came to an end on the BBC, vocalising his feelings at the time on social media. “When I said that the show wasn't being recommissioned, that got the second biggest response on Instagram that I've ever had to anything. And the comments there were incredibly gratifying about how much people had enjoyed it,” he says. “The biggest response I've ever had on Instagram is when I said that we were remaking it. So again that was really gratifying.”

In order to revive it, Armitage needed a budget – and that has come in the form of show sponsor Yorkshire Tea. Each episode features a tea-break and sees Armitage present his guests with their choice of biscuits and a hand-picked selection from the ancient poem he’s been translating, Gilgamesh. He sees poetry as a “democratic art form”. “If you are interested in poetry, it's waiting for you with its arms open,” he says. “If you're upset about something or you're excited about something and you want to express that emotion, it's difficult to go and produce an opera or throw a pot but you can write a poem. You don't need much to get going.”

- The Shed podcast by Simon Armitage is available now.