‘Keep slaying the dragon inside’: Simon Armitage pens poem for World Cancer Day

Poet laureate tackles ‘daunting’ commission from Yorkshire Cancer Research to mark charity’s centenary yearCancer is a subject the poet laureate Simon Armitage has always shied away from. “I find it very daunting,” he said. “I’ve lost friends and family to cancer.”But when he was commissioned to write a poem to mark World Cancer Day, he was forced to confront the realities of the disease. “I think I saw part of my task as being slightly demystifying and maybe de-mythologising or de-demonising cancer a little bit to myself,” Armitage said. Continue reading...