Simon Armitage leaves some things to the last minute. He turns up late for an interview with Khaleej Times. It slipped his mind. He apologises. I tell him it’s alright. And it really is because something in the way he comes across makes it impossible to hold a grudge. Maybe it’s the kind eyes, maybe it’s the floppy hair. Either way, the tardiness is forgiven.

It’s more than scheduled interviews though — ours is conducted outdoors in the breeze. He doesn’t for instance, decide beforehand on the plane, what poems he will read out at poetry readings. He waits till he gets to the venue. He picks his poems then.

There is also a voice, a pitch-selection procedure to go through once at the reading. So if other poets on stage have been loud, his tone will consciously be mellow, softer. If people are being serious, he will be absurd. To his mind, that restores balance. And he reads out not from marketed copies of his collections but from his black graph paper Moleskin journal (“yes, it is a cliché but…”). His handwriting is tiny, left-leaning, near illegible: “Back in school I didn’t want the others to read what I was writing,” he says, and demonstrates the curved-in, hooked way in which he holds his preferably Biro pens.

Simon, for whom the poet Ted Hughes is “the reason I became a writer”, has most recently written a travelogue on having walked alone through the Pennine Way, giving poetry readings for free en route. In the time he spent walking, he says he wrote only four poems, because the part of his brain that he needs to write poetry is also the part of his brain he needs to keep him from getting lost.

Simon studied geography. He was going to be a cartographer. And yet he is most self-effacing about having more than once got lost along the walkway. The mist - getting lost in the mist - is what he was most afraid of, not of strangers or solitude or fatigue.

On stage, during a talk about the travelogue at the Emirates Airline Literature Festival, Simon, at one point, asks for a carousel film projection he had made to be screened. The film was a series of snapshots of his walk, documented for the sake of memory.

Seated on stage with his head turned away from the audience and towards the screen, he gave a context and background to the visuals:

“That’s a caterpillar … that’s a rainbow ... which brought rain; that’s a bull in a field… Foxgloves…” Next shot: a photo of a van, of trekkers, of a cow, of green fields, of rain, of wooden markings pointing to paths, and of cans of food at a grocery store marked 50p. The book, he says, has a lot of “nature writing”. The Telegraph says the book is ‘so observant, so funny and so intensely likeable you leave it wishing he’d picked a longer route’.

When you ask Simon how he knows about Foxgloves (little bells-shaped pink flowers), and if it is really a given that all poets must know their nature tidbits, he says his grandmother - on his mum’s side - knew all the names of flowers and was always pointing to them. But Simon furthers that. He doesn’t just know names of flowers, he knows even some of their properties. “Foxgloves”, he says, “are interesting because they contain a poison called Atrophine”. He wonders about the name though – “foxes seem to come with their own gloves” – and supplies you with a few of his favourite, off the top of his head. You marvel at the mind of a man, this poet, who in short of half-an-hour, because he was late, can leave you amused, wondering and equipped with the knowledge that there is such a thing as an Egg and Bacon flower. — nivriti@khaleejtimes.com

Author info

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire.

His poetry collections include Zoom!, Kid, The Dead Sea Poems, CloudCuckooLand, The Universal Home Doctor, Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, Seeing Stars, and The Shout. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award. In 1999 he was named the Millennium Poet, in 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2010 he was awarded a CBE for services to poetry. His 2012 travelogue is called Walking Home – an account of a walk along the Pennine Way giving free poetry readings en route – was praised by the Telegraph for being “so observant, so funny and so intensely likeable you leave it

wishing he’d picked a longer route”.