Simon Armitage is one of the few poets who still look anything like their dust-jacket mug-shots: cropped hair, hint of a fringe, smile, as he once wrote, "like a melon with a slice missing". Still in his 30s, he is one of the most successful writers in a sometimes beleaguered genre. A "new generation poet", he has the broad appeal that Larkin enjoyed in a different era. Now he is the official millennium poet: his 1,000-line poem, Killing Time, is published this month, alongside radio and TV versions.
Killing Time covers the newsworthy events of the last year of this century, from the Colorado high school shootings and the London nail-bombings to the eclipse and the Thames-side celebrations. Much of it is grim - the volume wrily notes that "no news is good news" - but Armitage is as interested in the way in which the media create news, and the human stories between the soundbites and the images, as he is in parroting the year's headline events.
The piece was commissioned by the New Millennium Experience Company, which is running events across the country, most notably at the dome in Greenwich. Armitage's job - to come up with a long piece of public verse for a major occasion - brings to mind the fuss earlier in the year over the appointment of a poet laureate. Armitage was briefly in the running, but does not envy Andrew Motion his victory. "I was thinking about it recently, because of Killing Time being public art. What was liberating was not having to mind my p's and q's. I could mouth off." Killing Time is, indeed, an angry poem at times. "With this length of poem, you can keep coming back," Armitage says. "You can let the scab heal over and then pick it off again."
Armitage was born and bred in west Yorkshire, where he still lives. An inadvertently inspirational English teacher set his class the task of writing a poem about Christmas, with the best six to be hung on the wall. "I wrote about how my mum put sixpence in the Christmas pudding - which wasn't true - and he didn't put it on the wall. I thought he'd rumbled me, but he came up to me later and put his arm round me and said 'By the way, Simon, that was a really good poem', and I thought, 'Well, why didn't you put it on the fucking wall, then?' And I've wondered since then if I've just been pursuing a revenge career. Every time I finish a piece I think, 'Put that on your wall!' "
Larkin and Hughes were early influences, Paul Muldoon a later one, who offered the liberating possibility of employing ordinary speech in poetry - cliches, proverbs, idioms, "rubbing the phrases up the wrong way, making them pull a bit more weight, using the puns within them". After university, Armitage did a social work qualification, then became a probation officer. Rumour has it that he was once introduced with the words: "By day he reads them their rights, by night he writes them their reads." Crucially, he also attended Peter Sansom's poetry work shops in Huddersfield, where he was exposed to a range of exciting voices.
As his writing took off, Armitage scaled down then gave up the probation work. "There was an incident at work, and my boss said, 'You don't want to do this any more, do you?' " To make up for the loss of routine, he took on teaching, journalism, playwriting, readings... "I have an old-fashioned work ethic." The millennium brief was part of the Poetry Places scheme that has seen poets resident in supermarkets, law firms and zoos.
As Millennial Poet, Armitage went round the 12 regions covered by the NMEC. "My residency was seeing how people had interpreted the occasion and used the money. NMEC may have thought I would put some of that into the poem, but I didn't, not directly. I was talking about larger issues. I think they thought I was going to write about ferris wheels, which I did, but maybe not in the way they expected." His take on the "pie in the sky" concludes: "It's a hell of a drop from the fairy lights at the dizzy heights/to rock bottom."
Belfast made the most impact. "People seemed really optimistic. It's all about the peace process, and not just a knees-up." Armitage had visited the city before, but found it changed: "We drove through hardline areas, which is not something I dared do before. People were taking the opportunity to look over the garden fence, and see that the people on the other side are actually human and have the requisite number of eyes and ears."
Decommissioning, of a broad sort, occurs in the film that accompanies Armitage's poem, made in collaboration with Brian Hill. The actor Christopher Ecclestone travels around Britain collecting things that people have given up. At first he has a knapsack, but as the journey goes on, he ends up driving a truck. Alongside this surreal drama there is a documentary strand in which real people give things up: "A guy who used to be in the Provos, who's giving up his AK47 or whatever, and this chap who's had a sex change, who's, erm, giving up his gonads. It all culminates down at the dome, where they burn these objects."
Armitage began his career writing honed, lyrical pieces, and is the editor of Short and Sweet, an anthology of some of the shortest poems in English. In his recent forays into much longer work, he seems to be reaching for the epic, the communal and the spiritual. "I'm not a Christian," he says of his latest work, "but I was interested how Jesus had been deselected from the celebrations." In Killing Time, a quatrain wittily glances at this fact:
Scarborough beach on Good Friday,
sandwriting
says Jesus is Lord.
Letters come and go. On Sunday he's
lard, lurid, blurred.
By Tuesday he's bored.
Perhaps the spirituality is more a rejection of materialism. Killing Time is about "the age of cynicism, material goods, and communication and information", and uses brand names and news items to reflect those themes. While the poem thrives on stories and images from the media, Armitage can be scathing about his subject. "My gut feeling is that news is just as much about what we don't know is going on, what doesn't find its way into our living room. We use the news as a barometer of the world, and it tells how we're meant to feel that day. But there are issues of selection, presentation, authorial judgment. News is business, and it ends as entertainment. Sometimes I find that stomach-churning."
What Armitage does is to transform those familiar stories and images. One of the most striking sections deals with the Colorado high school shootings, substituting flowers for bullets. The switch from horror to beauty is unsettling, but as well as recasting events, Armitage can invert the way they are discussed in the press:
As for the two boys, it's back to the
same old debate:
is it something in the mind
that grows from birth, like a seed, or
is it society
makes a person that kind?
Armitage's partner has just given birth to their daughter. A millennium baby? Well, she is called Emily (for which "Millie" is a traditional diminutive). The family will not be down at the dome, but perhaps "keeping themselves to themselves,/ determined to opt out,/not to be moved by a fictional date and a fictional time". Simon Armitage has done his bit for this millennium, and is looking forward to the next.
The Paddington rail crash, from Killing Time
Meanwhile, the future waits at signal 109. And up ahead
the wires will cross again,
and lines will cross at any given point, like a train
bisecting a train,
and lives will be seen to be measured in pounds and pence,
human worth as hard cash,
and Carriage H will hide its secrets in its ghostly freight
of warm, weightless ash,
and mobile phones will call repeatedly across the great divide
to lives already lost,
and cars in car-parks back along the track will keep for winter
under sheets of frost.
• Killing Time will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Saturday at 10.45pm. The book of the poem is published by Faber, price £6.99. The film will be shown on Channel 4 on January 1.
