Testament

The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed

If the poets of the past sat in their garrets dipping their quills in ink, waiting for inspiration to strike, our current Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has a more mundane and domestic arrangement. From his wooden shed in the garden, surrounded on all sides by the Pennine Hills and the Pennine weather, he scratches away at his reworking of the comic medieval poem The Owl and the Nightingale, which could be described as a medieval Rap battle between two birds. That's just what hip-hop artist Testament describes the poem as when he drops by to distract Simon and to throw light on some of the poem's internal themes.

In The Poet Laureate has gone to his Shed, their conversation ranges from the Guinness Book of Records to spiritual faith and from West Yorkshire to New York. The shed soon becomes a classroom as Testament teaches Simon to beatbox and in return, Simon shows him how to imitate the call of a kookaburra.