Poet Simon Armitage has been a frequent visitor to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and once described it to me as “a safe zone outside the normal world”.
Back in 2017, during the YSP’s 40th anniversary, he was asked to take up a year’s residency there and create a personal response to the 500-acre West Bretton site, which is now the leading international centre for modern and contemporary sculpture.
Simon, who was born and raised in Huddersfield, had originally thought he might produce a sculpture, but in the end opted for what he knew best – poetry.
It’s perhaps not surprising, given the otherworldliness he feels within its green boundaries, that he decided to write a collection of poems about an imaginary country, Ysp (pronounced eesp). He placed himself in the position of an exiled stranger visiting it for the first time, thereby seeing it with fresh eyes and from a different perspective.
The resulting book, Flit, features 40 poems and is illustrated with his own photographs, taken throughout the year. Some pictures have been coloured and others overlaid with collaged elements from historic engravings. The poems vary in length, featuring everything from a talking fox to a vengeful sommelier, and the collection has been described as ‘often combining a dark and unsettling atmosphere with the poet’s characteristic dry humour’.
Flit is work of wild imagination. Simon explains: “I wanted to think of myself as a visitor or immigrant to this place, investigating its customs, legends and traditions, wandering with a notebook and observing its latter-day comings and goings.”
He describes Ysp as a ‘small mid-European state’ and the visitor as someone who is ‘disillusioned by the domestic cultural scene’. In Ysp he rents a small apartment in a former leprosy hospital and spends a year exploring medieval back streets, latter-day shopping malls, housing districts, redeveloped docks and rural hinterlands.
Photographs from the book and a film of the poet reading on site in the park are featured in a new display at the YSP Centre from now until Sunday, June 10. On Thursday, June 14, Simon will read from Flit at a special event. Entry to the park is free and it’s open every day, but tickets need to be booked for the Flit event (ysp.org.uk/events).
Flit by Simon Armitage is published by Yorkshire Sculpture Park at £15 (if bought from the site). For details visit ysp.org.uk/SimonArmitageFlit
