The 21st Poet Laureate …

… Simon Armitage: ‘I always thought, if Ted Hughes can do it why can’t I?’ | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

“I have chosen to dive into those occasions,” he says of his sense of artistic responsibility to engage with the world. But he’s always “tried to talk about the universal in terms of the particular”, such as the fictional British trader in the north tower of the World Trade Center in “Out of the Blue”. “That’s my modus operandi,” he says. Does a public poet require a new approach? “I can’t change my poetics over night. Big P political poetry rarely works anyway. Poetry is the art of subtlety and to try and meet these subjects head-on isn’t my style. I’m not even sure it is poetry’s style.”