Part of being a poet, he believes, is sharing his work with the public. As well as travel documentaries in Iceland and the Amazon, he has done projects such as Drinking for England, a television film for which he translated people's stories about their alcohol problems into poems, which they recited or sang. A campaign in Britain to woo the public back to poetry seems to have worked, though Armitage says it is possible for poetry to be too accessible. I'm talking about people who work for the tax department or the fisheries buying a book of poems by Seamus Heaney. In the United States, where he taught last year, he was disappointed to find the writing and enjoyment of poetry confined to universities.
Australian poetry is well into post-modernism.
I don't think I would want to read John Kinsella if I wasn't a poet. Even though bookmakers listed him at 7-1, he was never consulted and had no desire for the job, which went to Andrew Motion. He thinks Motion was exactly the right choice for laureate and has been a good ambassador for poetry. I don't know anything about the royal family except what I read in the paper - absurd things about absurd people. All rights reserved.