Desert Island Armitage

Prof. Simon Armitage was shipwrecked on another island in R4's teeming archipelago yesterday and made a tremendous job of it. It began promisingly with not quite the track one might expect from Hunky Dory but one gradually becomes aware, over the years, that the choice of records isn't the main point - it's the interview. Simon is very good at an interview and has disarmingly self-deprecated his way to poetry eminence. He still tends to present himself as Mr. and Mrs. Armitage's lad from Marsden.
As well as music by John Tavener, a poem read by Ted Hughes and some homely Yorkshire , he took the whole shebang of the OED with him,
Armitage Desert Island Discs
He has enough good stories in his repertoire that he didn't repeat any of those I've heard before. Most notably, though, it's when a poet says things that you'd say yourself that one feels some kinship.
While making the usual claims for something special about 'poetry' and its unique power, I was more with him when he gladly declared himself 'mainstream' rather than claiming some ground-breaking poetics for himself, which seems to me a mature thing to do.
While I would prefer to direct anybody to an interview with Norman MacCaig that is on You Tube, rather than be interviewed myself, Simon presented something like a list of things I would say, too.
His influential example was Hughes, as opposed to my Gunn, but the point is you probably have to have one even if you don't write much like them in the end. He also feels comfortable with poetry's minority status and says if it wasn't thus, he would most likely not be doing it. And whereas he kept his first cheque as a 'professional writer' as evidence, I photocopied mine as a momento and still cashed it.
It's worth hearing and I think the link will last forever in the BBC archive there.