Swimming Through Bricks

A Conversation with Simon Armitage.

- Rob Roensch & Quinn Carpenter Weedon

Prolific poet Simon Armitage (b. 1963, Marsden, UK) is also a novelist, playwright, lyricist, librettist, translator, and author of several books of nonfiction. In this interview, conducted while visiting Oklahoma City University in April as part of OCU’s Thatcher Hoffman Smith Poetry Series, Armitage discusses poetry as his original inspiration, writing from West Yorkshire, and translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Rob Roensch: You work in so many different genres, different kinds of writing, but for you, you said, “It’s the poems which count.” We were both struck by this quote. So why, and what does it mean to count?

Simon Armitage: The poetry was the reason I picked up a pen in the first place. That was my first powerful experience of writing. I couldn’t not respond to these intense blocks of language as I first encountered them at school. I knew from that moment that I wanted to be involved with poetry. I don’t know if I knew that I wanted to write it at that stage, but I knew that I wanted to read it, that it was going to be something for me and a place to go. I guess it’s first-love syndrome. Everything else that I’ve done has been an excursion from poetry, or a wider adventure within it, but poetry is at the heart of everything, and it’s poetry that I keep coming back to, and it’s poetry that I want to keep writing until the end.

I suppose it counts because I see it as a very sincere form of language. In a workshop yesterday, I was asking people for their definitions [of poetry], on the basis that if we work with the stuff, we should know what it is, and I was talking about how difficult it is to define as a substance and as a subject, but I like the idea that it’s language at its most subtle and its most supple, a language that is very flexible but precise as well.