What influences from his life might we see in his work?

Armitage, or Professor Armitage, is a very interesting soul. He is a country boy. Before he was a poet, he did his MA on the effects of television violence on young offenders and worked as a Prohibition Officer, in Greater Manchester. I think Armitage is quite depressing, when he reads his poems he reads them like he is about to die of boredom, but I like him. 'The poems being carved into six stones at various sites along the South Pennine watershed between Marsden and Ilkley, now forming the 45 mile Stanza Stones Trail. The project was hosted by Ilkley Literature Festival. The mystery seventh stone, sited in an unnamed location, has yet to be found.' - Interesting! I think he does do really interesting work he is just a bit glum. 'Poems can be gloomy, and sometimes so can I' - Armitage. http://www.simonarmitage.com/biography.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFRunJuVpY8 - This episode is from a series where Simon talks about what inspired his own and other famous poems. We should watch this in lesson! It;s very good!

Maybe he just didn't really enjoy his life that much, he always sees the depressing side of things- I think he likes to pick out the bad/sad parts of life just to gently remind us and invite us to remember the world isn't perfect. He is a bit like 'meh'.

Writing.

Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches(1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on Northern England. He produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance)GCSE syllabus for English Literature in the United Kingdom. These include "Homecoming", "November", "Kid", "Hitcher", and a selection of poems from Book of Matches, most notably of these "Mother any distance...". His writing is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness."^[2] His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007), was adopted for the ninth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and he was the narrator of a 2010 BBC documentary about the poem and its use of landscape.^[4]

Armitage also writes for radio, television, film and stage. He is the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of Euripides' The Madness of Heracles. He is currently writing a fifth, The Last Days of Troy, to be premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in June 2014.^[5] He was commissioned in 1996 by the National Theatre in London to write Eclipse for the National Connections series, a play inspired by the real-life disappearance of a girl in Hebden Bridge, and set at the time of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall.^[6] Most recently he wrote the libretto for an opera scored by Scottish composer Stuart MacRae, The Assassin Tree, based on a Greek myth recounted in The Golden Bough. The opera premiered at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, Scotland, before moving to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Saturday Night (Century Films, BBC2, 1996) – wrote and narrated a fifty minute poetic commentary to a documentary about night-life in Leeds, directed by Brian Hill. In 2010, Armitage walked the 264-mile Pennine Way, walking south from Scotland to Derbyshire. Along the route he stopped to give poetry readings, often in exchange for donations of money, food or accommodation and has written a book about his journey, called Walking Home.^[1]

He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including The Sunday Times Author of the Year, a Forward Prize, a Lannan Award, and an Ivor Novello Award for his song lyrics in the Channel 4film Feltham Sings. Kid and CloudCuckooLand were short-listed for the Whitbread poetry prize. The Dead Sea Poems was short-listed for the Whitbread, the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Universal Home Doctor was also short-listed for the T.S. Eliot. In 2000, he was the UK's official Millennium Poet and went on to judge the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize.

In 2004, Armitage was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours.^[7] He is a vice president of the Poetry Society and a patron of the Arvon Foundation.

And plus, if he always walks in awful weather then he has to be a little damp in the soul.

Imogen Rogers

Simon Armitage was born in Yorkshire, and included a lot of Yorkshire history in his poems  and he said that walking around the moors gave him ‘great thinking time’  so the Yorkshire moors must be quite big as he’s written over 5000 poems as well as books and TV shows etc His first collection of poems was based on his time working as a probation office after his father so I can’t imagine these would be the cheeriest of poems likewise  he was also a member of the band the scaremongers  the dictionary definition being ‘a person who spreads frightening or ominous reports or rumors’. So he may like to keep his poetry closely linked to his past in the band buy writing depressive poems? Although he was also a choir boy and his family were involved with plays and performances in the local church and maybe he became quite depressive because his voice broke?

( Plus when typing into Google ‘Simon Armitage sad’ there were 31,300 more results than typing in ‘Simon armitage happy’ so if he balanced out the search result  a bit more by smiling etc then his poems might be a bit more cheery- but would they be as good?)

' Armitage’s family also features in his poetry; his father was a probation officer, as was Armitage himself until 1994, and he has written extensively about him in his collection of essays All Points North. Armitage writes about his father’s work in the tyre trade, as well as about watching a pantomime he directed and produced.

Adolescence and growing up are common themes in Armitage’s work and he visits schools and colleges regularly to discuss poetry and his own work with young people. '

Armitage wrote a poem about the Madeleine McCann disappearance called 'the Beacon' to mark the 1,000 days she has been missing.

this isn't the first time Armitage has written about, he also wrote about 9/11 too called 'out of the blue'

I also found a picture of him smiling kind of...

There is an collection of Simon armitage's poems

1. About His Person  1/3/2003

2. At Sea  11/29/2011

3. Cataract Operation  /3/2003

4. I Am Very Bothered  1/3/2003

5. I Say I Say I Say  1/3/2003

6. It Ain't What You Do, It's What It Does To You  1/3/2003

7. Poem  1/3/2003

8. The Golden Toddy  1/3/2003

9. The Hard  1/3/2003

10. The Jay 1/3/2003

11. The Tyre 2003

12. Zoom! (Bloodaxe, 1989)Xanadu (1992)

13. Kid (1992)

14. Book of Matches (1993)

15. The Dead Sea Poems (1995)

16. CloudCuckooLand (1997)

17. Killing Time. (1999)

18. Selected Poems (2001)

19. The Universal Home Doctor (2002)

20. Travelling Songs (2002)

21. The Shout: Selected Poems (2005)

22. Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus

23. The Corduroy Kid (2006)

24. The Not Dead (2008)

25. Out of the Blue (2008)

26. Seeing Stars (2010)

He was born in Marsden, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire on 26th May 1963. He first studied in Linthwaite, Huddersfield and studied Geography at uni. The first award he won was the Eric Gregory Award in 1988. The highlight of his career was winning a BAFTA in 2003 . Pretty much the only BAFTA from 2003 that wasn't won by Catherine Zeta Jones of Lord of the Rings: Two Towers.