'Poetry is what I'm about, it's what I want to do from now until the end'

Most of us assume that when poets aren't locked away in an ivory tower grappling with couplets, they're off wandering in the hills in search of their muse. That may have been true in Wordsworth's day, but modern scribes like Simon Armitage lead a far more hectic existence.

The award-winning poet has dropped in to West Yorkshire Playhouse to talk about his new book, Seeing Stars. The night before, he was giving a reading to the Swedenborg Society in London, and once he's finished his whistle-stop visit to Leeds he's off to catch a train to Glasgow where he's appearing on the cultural love-in that is BBC's Newsnight Review. It's enough to make your head spin.

Armitage isn't one to rest on his (many) laurels. Seeing Stars is his 13th poetry volume in a career spanning a little over 20 years. Add to this his seven books of prose and drama, and you have a writer who is as talented as he is prolific. Since first bursting on to the poetry scene with Zoom! in 1989, he has established himself as one of our foremost poets.

His northern roots and canny ear for the cadences of the English language have made him popular with readers, along with the education tsars who've deigned to include his work in the national curriculum – an honour usually reserved for those who've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Until now, the Yorkshire-born writer has been known for his shorter, lyrical set-piece poems, but his latest collection is a notable change of direction – featuring as it does an array of dramatic monologues, parables and tall tales.

He draws on a variety of voices and characters: from the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life, to a Christian cheese shop owner in the wrong part of town.

"As a writer, you're always on the lookout for developments in your voice and I wrote a couple of poems in this style and realised I was enjoying it enormously. It was really liberating to let the poem

just wander."

This literary left turn followed his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a couple of years ago. "That was a classic Middle English poem full of all these rules and regulations and after I finished it I just wanted to run wild a little bit and write in an unrestricted way. Also, I'd been doing a residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and I found a sense of space and freedom there without any boundaries and

some of that seeped into my work."

His poetic monologues also bear the influence of one of Yorkshire's greatest writers, Alan Bennett. "I wouldn't be surprised if he has

crept into these poems," he says. "I've always admired Alan Bennett hugely, particularly his Talking Heads monologues, because you realise how intricately constructed they are. They're brilliantly written, they're not just casual conversations."

Armitage's work, like that of Bennett, articulates complex ideas to the common reader – a trait that was in evidence from the beginning of his career.

"I would like to think I've improved and matured as a writer. But it's interesting because I gave an anniversary reading from Zoom! and looking at those poems, some of which I'd not clapped eyes on for nearly 20 years, I was struck by a combination, and I probably shouldn't say this, of being startled by my own brilliance at such a young age and shocked by the naivety of some of it."

Interestingly, it was another great Yorkshireman who first turned him on to poetry. "Reading Ted Hughes at school when I was 14, that was the real light bulb going on moment for me," he says. But despite his love of literature, it was geography, not English, that he studied at university and as a post-graduate at Manchester University his thesis was concerned with the effects of television violence on young offenders, rather than the merits of TS Eliot or Philip Larkin.

It was only when he returned home to Huddersfield in the mid-1980s that he began attending poetry workshops where he honed his craft. "It's perhaps hard to believe but Huddersfield was a real epicentre for

poetry at the time. There were four or five workshops each week and a

huge number of people involved. There was a strong democratic feeling that anyone could do this, you just needed a pen and paper and a modicum of sense."

Despite being one of the country's most recognisable poets, Armitage has resisted the lure of London and continues to live in the South Pennine hills where he grew up. "It was a convenience to begin with but I think in the last 10 years I've really come to appreciate living here. It can get pretty wild so it's still a great adventure and a trip to Manchester, or Leeds, for me is like a trip to New York."

As if to prove his allegiance to his northern heritage, the 47-year-old is walking the Pennine Way this summer and writing a book about it. "I'm doing the walk as a poet, in the style of the old troubadours," he says.

"Wherever I stop for the night, I'm going to give a poetry reading. There will be no charge for the reading, but at the end of the evening I'm going to pass a hat around, and people can give me what they think I'm worth. I want to see if I can pay my way from start to finish on the proceeds of my poetry. So, it's basically 264 miles of begging."

It's a wonder he can find the time in between the writing, readings and TV appearances. "When I think about it I don't know how I've managed to write all the books I've done, perhaps I've got some little factory on a trading estate in Tadcaster making them," he jokes. His literary talents aren't confined to poetry, having produced several plays and novels and written extensively for TV and radio.

"You can't write poems every day; you don't want to exist at that level of intensity and people don't want to read poems all the time. But as a poet there's always the urge to create, and words are your tools. Inevitably you end up making other things with language."

Poetry, though, remains the shop window through which we view Armitage. "Poetry isn't for everybody and it's never going to be for everybody, yet what it offers is a single voice saying something in a very concentrated and thoughtful way and I think that's still very necessary and appealing. It's as valuable now as it's ever been, offering a counterpoint to all that other noise."

Above all else, it's what fires his imagination. "Poetry is what I'm about, it's the whole system of belief and it's what I want to do from now until the end."

n Seeing Stars is published by Faber and Faber, priced 12.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.