Simon Armitage - Magnetic Field Recordings, episode 3

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage reads Kitchen Window from his latest poetry collection Magnetic Field, in a new weekly broadcast from Marsden.
Growing up in Marsden among the hills of West Yorkshire, Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those ‘private, moonstruck observations’ and the clockwork comings and goings in the village providing rich subject matter for his first poems. Decades on, that window continues to operate as both framework and focal point for the writing, the vastness of the surrounding moors always at his shoulder and forming a constant psychological backdrop, no matter how much time has elapsed and how distant those experiences.
Magnetic Field brings together Armitage’s Marsden poems, from his very first pamphlet to new work from a forthcoming collection. It offers personal insight into a preoccupation that shows no signs of fading, and his perspective on a locality he describes as ‘transcendent and transgressive’, a genuinely unique region forming a frontier territory between many different worlds. Magnetic Field also invites questions about the forging of identity, the precariousness of memory, and our attachment to certain places and the forces they exert.

[@timdenley6173]

your mum played piano for us at school. She was amazing was Mrs. Armitage lovely lady.

[@HerAeolianHarp]

Wonderful to see Simon read.

[@clecklass]

Belting. I'm guessing this was filmed from the lovely, unspoiled hamlet of Hartshead. Marsden is just below the right-hand side of the skyline in the distance some sixteen miles away - the left-side is Wessenden head at 502 metres in height and the right side is above Marsden. The location of this filming will shortly be concreted over with housing and industrial units. There is a local opposition to the desecration of the lovely countryside in which you see Simon reading out his work - I wish them well is all I can say.
I love the Stanza Stones and I'll be picking up a copy of this as well.

[@robinjastewart]

Honley, on the path up to the new cemetry