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‘I feel as if I've been on the road for about 30 years...'

19 October 2015

‘I feel as if I've been on the road for about 30 years flogging around reading and going to schools and colleges. I can't count the number of times I've been on Wakefield station at six in the morning in order to go off and give a reading. It's something that I chose to do and see as part and parcel of the task of being a poet. But I was slightly thinking I would like to slow down a bit...

I think I've always written out of a sense of wonder. Someone in a review once said that I had a child's eye - which maybe sounds a bit disparaging, but I took it as a huge compliment. I have worried that there might come a time when the world starts looking regular, ordinary, completely understandable and that might mean the end of the poems - when I'm not astonished by ordinary things any more. Or, God forbid, if I start thinking of myself as being wise.'

Simon Armitage in the Sunday Times