Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944, but his earliest memories are of visits to relatives in County Mayo. After toing and froing between Dublin and London in the 60s, he moved to Cork, and in 1984 moved to Ringsend, where he has lived since.

How did you begin writing poetry?
When I was about 12, life was all about sports and trying to find a girlfriend. We had no tv in the 1950s- the biggest thing was cinema and music from the radio. Pathé News was the only place we saw newsreels. Once I saw Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hilary on top of Mt. Everest. This had an enormous effect on me, and I began writing some short stories for my own amusement- all basically the same, involving climbing high snowcovered mountains in search of a beautiful girl...When I was 14 or 15, I started to write poetry.

What writers influenced you?
T.S. Eliot was a huge influence as I knew all his work by heart.
Friendship played a huge part in my becoming a poet. In 1962, the poet Michael Hartnett and I enrolled in UCD the same day. I spent only one year in UCD, but we went down the road of poetry together. At one stage we went to London for work, and after two weeks enrolled in Securicor, with uniforms and truncheons. I lasted four months, while Hartnett stayed longer. He had read widely and deeply in world literature and religions. Brian Lynch came the next year,and MacDara Woods, and there was Liam Hourican, who died young. John Moriarity was finishing his studies in philosophy and logic, and he was the most brilliant of all.

In the winter of 62-63 there were rumours in pubs like McDaids and Dwyers that a brilliant Irish poet was coming back from Spain. We were looking forward to meeting him, yet there was an air of apprehension. I saw him one night in Leland Bardwell’s basement flat in Leeson St. Bardwell was another friend of Kavanagh’s, and she was incredibly kind to strays like myself- four generations of them.

That poet was Anthony Cronin. He was a friend of Patrick Kavanagh, but younger as he was born in 1925. He became my great teacher, though he wouldn’ t have thought of himself in that way. I was always learning from him. That first night I heard him say, “Life is a Dream,” and it really struck me. Later I learned it was the title of a famous play by Calderon, La Vida es Sueño.

How did you get your first book out?
Brian Lynch wrote to me in London and said Michael Smith of New Writers Press would be keen to publish us in a joint book. John Behan, the sculptor, did our cover. There were about 500 copies of Endsville –it’s long out of print. You always remember the first time you are published because it is so momentous to see your work in print the first time.

After it came out, Brian invited me to his house. His mother Celia said, ‘I see you two are in the paper today.’ Gus Martin had reviewed our book. He wrote, whatever about the other new poets, in the case of Paul Durcan, there were no prospects at all. Shocked, I asked Mrs. Lynch for a glass of water, and I really needed it.

But one day in the Bailey in Duke Street, Kavanagh told me he had read my work and said, “Ye have what it takes.” It was extraordinary that he had read my book and spoke to me about it, as he didn’t like talking about poetry. It was the summer of 67, the last year of his life. He offered to introduce me to his publishers, MacGibbon & Kee- [later taken over by Granada]. They had published Flann O’Brien and produced a fantastic edition of Kavanagh’s collected poems in 1964. You hear stories about Kavanagh being rude and drunk, but even though he wasn’t in the best of his health, he offered to go to the trouble of introducing me.

His editor, Timothy O’Keeffe, was a taciturn pinstriped man. Terrified, I handed in my manuscript and three weeks later got a letter saying he would publish my first volume. I had no money, no job, nowhere to live, but the letter burned a hole in my pocket.

On 1st August 1967, Kavanagh asked me to go with him to a wedding in Dalkey. There, in the bar of the Shangri-La Hotel, [people think I made that up] I met my wife to be, Nessa. She was visiting home but living in London. Soon after, I was off to London in search of fame and fortune and Nessa.

Then Kavanagh died of pneumonia. He had only recently gotten married and made his first home, in Waterloo Road. He had been almost Zen Buddhist in his feeling of repose, calm, and quiet humour. He had had a hard life, a life of poverty and degradation. The following winter [68] an independent filmmaker in London was making a documentary around people who knew Patrick Kavanagh. Tim O’Keeffe was very sad, as he had been close to Kavanagh.” A man of few words, he just said, “That was a golden summer,’ and it had been.

Nessa and I married in London and had two daughters. We lived in London’s South Kensington, and then later moved to Cork. Trying to get published again was a nightmare. After my first book, I couldn’t get published then for about 8 years – it was only when I got the Kavanagh prize in 1974 that John Ryan of Anna Livia Press published that collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor. Ryan had been a friend and companion of Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin. He edited the magazine Envoy from Grafton Street in the 50s. Cyphers was also hugely important- Bardwell, Hutchinson, Woods, and ni Chuillenean were its mainstays.

Young writers and artists today in all media and forms - no way could they understand the way things were in Kavanagh’s day. There was an arts council in name only but it did virtually nothing- there were no grants or bursaries. It really only came into existence in 1974 with the first director, Colm O’Briain, and a new era began. Another landmark was when David Marcus became the literary editor of the Irish Press. His influence was astonishing, and he also was an incredibly courteous man. He wrote everyone little notes, and even when he accepted something of mine, he wrote to ask, for instance, if I was sure the 2nd line in the 3rd stanza had the right rhythm. I was.

You studied archeology and medieval history, not literature- why and did this have any effect on your work?
At first, I did study English literature, to become a schoolteacher- but I got poor marks in my first year exams and was told at the end of first year that I didn’t understand English or poetry. It was the most traumatic moment of my life. I had an interview with the Department, but they were very firm about the ill-advisedness of my going on in English as I had ‘no future’ in it. Of course, I felt despair, but at a very deep level I didn’t care, as I had had the word from Kavanagh. And at some deeper level still, I didn’t care what anyone thought.

Professor M.J. O’Kelley, who was excavating Newgrange, encouraged me to study archeology. He was a wonderful teacher. I can see things I would not have written if I had not gone down that road- for instance, the poem called A Snail in my Prime, and The Haulier's Wife Meets Jesus on the Road near Moone. I would never have noticed the Cross at Moone, except for O’Kelly.

The group that became known as the Cork poets studied with John Montague, and they were six to ten years younger than me. I didn’t really know them, though I did meet Thomas McCarthy separately and visited him in Cappoquin in Waterford. He even then was extraordinarily deeply read and a naturalist and serious gardener. Sean Dunne and Theo Dorgan were also studying with Montague.

Writing has been a way of life for me. When Aosdana was created in December 1981, I was one of the first 60 to be honoured - It was a bolt from the blue.

How do you write?
I usually do a lot of rewriting, maybe 40 drafts. You might be fortunate and do it first try, but mostly poems take time to germinate – they are at the heart of events. I like the novelist Richard Ford. I find a lot of poetry in contemporary prose fiction, sometimes more so than in contemporary verse.

I have recently been writer in residence for four weeks in Toronto, on a campus in the middle of the city, like a vast Trinity College. Toronto is a city of immigrants and the buzz was wonderful. To be with younger people is really great for the soul. It’s not just you sitting up there teaching; it is a two-way thing. I also spent three terms as Ireland Professor of Poetry one each in Queens, UCD, and Trinity.

There are serious drawbacks to being a writer and a poet in particular. The main one is isolation- so it is good to be part of a community - people are what make places.
I see a lot of change in my writing over time – like a graph of a patient in a heart attack unit - I try to write very different kinds of poems. Sometimes I see a poem and think how on earth did I write it, it is something I couldn’t write now. I would hate to go on just for the sake of going on. Writing can be 1% inspiration, 99% desperation.

I called my book 40 years of reading poems on purpose. I would advise poets to read read read. Go into bookshops and libraries and find the poets that speak to you. When starting off you imitate people, that is part of it. Read 19th and earlier centuries, read Hamlet’s soliloquies again. You have to want to make reading part of your diet, day in and day out.

'Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007' by Paul Durcan has just been published by Harvill Secker.The School of English in TCD is presenting a conference on Durcan's work on December 10, 11 and 12 in the Swift Theatre in the Arts building, free and open to the public.

The Cabinet Table

Alice Gunn is a cleaner woman
Down at Government Buildings,
And after seven o’clock Mass last night
(Isn’t it a treat to be able to go to Sunday Mass
On a Saturday! To sit down to Saturday Night TV
Knowing you’ve fulfilled your Sunday obligation!)
She came back over to The Flats for a cup of tea
(I offered her sherry but she declined –
Oh, I never touch sherry on a Saturday night –
Whatever she meant by that, I don’t know).
She had us in stitches, telling us
How one afternoon after a Cabinet Meeting
She got one of the security men
To lie down on the Cabinet Table,
And what she didn’t do to him –
And wht she did do to him –
She didn’t half tell us;
But she told us enough to be going on with.
“Do you know what it is?” she says to me:
“No,” says I, “what is it?”
“It’s mahogany,” she says, “pure mahogany.”