Simon Armitage: ‘You’re not going to get me to say anything bad about any bird’

If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be in it?

I’m gonna go for a toasted sandwich on what we call “plastic white bread” – bread that’s got no health or calorific value whatsoever. It’s just comfort eating and you need it.

So: two slices of that buttered on the outside with some grated Shropshire Red cheese and some sliced jalapeño peppers. That would go into a grilled sandwich maker for about five minutes. You know when you don’t know what you want to drink, you want a bloody mary? When you don’t know what you want to eat, you want a toasted sandwich.

Do you have a least favourite word?

At the moment it would probably be a phrase: “bus replacement service”. That’s the phrase you see when you go to my local train station, Huddersfield. That particular line has been so decimated by cuts and under-investment that the timetable is a work of fiction. Your heart falls into your boots when you see that phrase … it’s not one that I want tattooed over my heart.

Do you have a least favourite bird?

No, I don’t. I love all birds, they should all be protected and made sacred. I think that the birds that we tend to dislike as a species, they say something about us. So seagulls – well, particularly herring gulls – get a really bad rap in this country because they’re becoming very audacious, and they swoop down and take people’s grilled cheese sandwiches out of their hands. But they’re a reflection of our wastefulness and they do the job that rats would be doing otherwise.

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So, no, you’re not going to get me to say anything bad about any bird.

I can tell you my favourite bird: the cuckoo. They’re a good bird. All of the villages around these parts have a little legend attached to them, and it is said that the people in the village where I grew up thought the cuckoo brought the spring with it. They thought if they could catch one and keep it, it would be spring forever. So they called a cuckoo, and they built a tower to keep it in, but they forgot about one of the bird’s most impressive abilities – its ability to fly – and they hadn’t put a roof on the tower, so it just flew off. The motto of all these stories is that we’re all idiots.

What’s your most controversial pop culture opinion?

Abstract art is rubbish.

Do you want to say more?

Not really.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I once heard somebody say that as you get older in life, you should never wear anything diagonal, which I think at some level I practice. I don’t quite know how it translates, but I can see why that makes sense.

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My dad used to say, “if you can’t fight, wear a big hat”. Again, I don’t really know what it means, but I think I’ve been a practitioner of the big hat policy on many occasions.

What’s the last TV show you binged?

I’m currently binging House of the Dragon, which surprises me a little bit, because it’s not usually my thing, but I’m really gripped by it. I think it’s partly because I translate medieval poetry, so some of it feels quite close to that, narrative wise.

I watched the whole of Better Call Saul and really enjoyed that, and I just decided to watch the Sopranos again, because I haven’t seen that for years and years.

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It’s terrible though, for a writer, you know – if I’m at home and it’s lunchtime, I’m having a grilled cheese sandwich and think “I’ll just watch one episode of X” – and suddenly it’s four hours later and the police are ringing up saying, “Where’s that sonnet?”

What’s a book that you reread again and again?

There’s a book by Ted Hughes called Poetry in the Making, which is a little poetry handbook that he published in the late 60s. It was actually written as a series of radio broadcasts for teachers and students about how to write poems and why to write poems. It’s very light touch, a sort of starter pack – but Hughes can never really just be entry level. There’s some deep ideas in there, it’s just packaged in a really inviting and hospitable way.

I read it at an early age, and found it to be a great sort of encouragement. I go back to it every now and again when I want to press the reset button and remind myself why I want to write and how I want to write.

Would you rather die at the bottom of the ocean or out in space?

I’m not planning on dying. I haven’t signed up for that. That’s something that other people do, and I’ve never seen myself as a sheep – dying is so mainstream. People always say they would hate the idea of living forever, but honestly, fucking hell – if somebody gave me that choice, I’m definitely going for it. I would choose that every time. But of those two possibilities, absolutely out in space. Nobody wants to die at the bottom of the ocean. It’s really wet.

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When I was growing up and getting into music, I got confused between David Bowie and Jesus, because he was always singing about space and I got confused between space and heaven. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that if I go out into space, I’ll meet Major Tom and it’ll all be very Ashes to Ashes.

Who would you want to play you in a biopic about your life?

Cate Blanchett. With Emma Stone as the younger me.

What animal do you most relate to?

Not keen on horses. Very scary. I think horses scare themselves – you watch, they’re like, “Oh, Jesus, I’m a horse! That’s spooky!”

I think out of loyalty more than association, I probably want to choose a bird. I couldn’t choose a cuckoo, because they practice such dark arts and dirty tricks. I like what they say about swifts, that they barely ever touch the ground. They spend most of their life airborne. They can sleep on the wing. I could make a parallel between that and living in my head a lot of the time, and not necessarily having my feet on the ground.

• Simon Armitage is in Australia for Poetry Month 2024 and will appear at Contains Strong Language in Sydney, 28-31 August . Australian Poetry Month runs throughout August, including festivals, events, workshops and a commissioned poem of the day brought to you by Red Room Poetry. Find out more here .