Poet Laureate Simon Armitage: We’re addicted to interruption – daydreaming should be a GCSE subject
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in If Disney are listening, give me a call,” says Simon Armitage, grinning. The Poet Laureate is pitching his latest volume of verse as a blockbuster. There is an arrogant king, a supernatural rival made from clay, battles in a cedar forest, terrifying monsters, the wrath of the gods and a desperate quest for eternal life. Friendship, adventure, spectacular violence – and, finally, grief. In an interview on The Independent’s The Talk Show with editor-in-chief Geordie Greig, Armitage also opens up about the agony of his own grief in losing his father, why poetry has never mattered more and why he will always fight the enemy of poetry: sentimentality and righteousness. The story he has translated is 4,000 years old. Its hero is Gilgamesh, and Armitage has spent four or five years bringing this quixotic Mesopotamian epic back to life as startlingly modern English poetry, published this year by Faber & …
