Inspired by Cumbria

By Stephen Blease

Last updated 05:34, Friday, 01 August 2008

Oxford University produced many of the 20th century’s most famous poets, such as Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and WH Auden.

But 21st-century poet Adam O’Riordan found he had to get away from Oxford and come to Cumbria before he could find his calling.

And now he is poet in residence for The Wordsworth Trust, at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, working on completing his first poetry collection and holding readings and workshops with visitors.

It may never have happened if his parents hadn’t moved to Cumbria.

Adam, 25, was born and brought up in Manchester and went to Brasenose College, Oxford, to study English. But despite that university’s reputation as a cradle for writers, Adam didn’t seriously consider taking up writing until he escaped to the Lake District.

His parents had moved to Ambleside and he came here during the summer holiday at the end of his second year, in 2002. It was then he discovered where his future lay.

“I was kicking around during the summer, and I decided to gatecrash a poetry workshop by Jacob Polley, who was poet in residence then,” Adam recalled.

“It was amazing. I came away feeling: ‘That’s what I want to do.’

“I had always been interested in writing, but I had never had the confidence to put it at the forefront of my life. It was as if being in Cumbria unlocked something.”

Adam finds the county an ideal place for a poet to live. It lends itself to poetry writing in a way that other locations do not.

“I feel very enabled by the whole area,” he said. “It is an environment that creates the right atmosphere for writing poetry.

“I find I am able to write poems I was struggling to write when I was living in London.

“I don’t mean in the sense of writing nature poems necessarily. But to be surrounded by such a wealth of natural beauty can’t but help you.”

Adam lives just yards from Dove Cottage, where William Wordsworth wrote much of his best-known poetry. It is an area still favoured by poets, with many other practising writers living nearby. Adam says having other poets around is also conducive to writing.

“Angela Kenney, the custodian of Dove Cottage, describes it as a place where poetry is everyone’s first language,” Adam said. “So it is not just the environment that helps but the local community as well.”

Once Cumbria gave Adam his initial inspiration to become a poet, he became successful very quickly.

When back at Oxford he would regularly take the coach to London to visit American writer Michael Donaghy, who lived in the capital and became a mentor to him.

When Donaghy died suddenly three years ago, at the age of 50, Adam had the job of putting together his collected prose, to be published next year.

He also won a scholarship to study with Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, at the University of London, and was the first winner of a new poetry prize there.

The following year he won a writer’s award from the Arts Council of England and last year published a first pamphlet of 10 poems, Queen of the Cotton Cities , which was well received by critics. A review in Agenda magazine said: “On the last page of this pamphlet the reader is left looking for more.”

Then in June this year he won an Eric Gregory Award for poets under 30.

“It allowed me to pay off my loan and overdraft,” he said, prosaically.

Adam was working for publishers Penguin when he was offered the position of poet in residence by David Wilson, director of The Wordsworth Trust.

He explained: “I was invited to read here last summer, and I thought it went well. The audience seemed to like me.

“I hoped that one day in a few years I could become poet in residence – it was always a dream. Then David wrote and asked if I would like it.”

As poet in residence Adam’s job is to promote poetry as well as to produce it. He divides his time between writing, holding poetry readings on Wednesday afternoons and running poetry workshops.

“At the readings I’ll read some work in progress and talk a little bit about what I’m trying to do, and what I think might or might not work.”

At the workshops pupils look at and discuss the work of other poets and then produce and discuss their own, and Adam said: “They are aimed at published poets and absolute newcomers. They are about looking at poems in an informal setting.”

He stresses that poetry is one of those many topics where there are no right and wrong answers.

“If 10 different people look at a poem together they will have 10 different views on it,” he said. “If you share those different ideas you can help one another understand it.”

And even failing to see much in a poem is a valid response, he argues.

“People think they have to know what a poem means straight away. But people don’t go to an art gallery or a concert and come away knowing exactly what a painting or a piece of music was about.

“Because poetry is verbal, people often think they have to respond to it at once.”

Adam accepts that many people have been put off poetry by the approach sometimes taken in school, where a teacher may prescribe exactly what a poem means, without much scope for debate.

Overcoming that dislike is something he sees as an important part of his job. Having been inspired to become a poet by Cumbria, he now wants to inspire others.

“I’m trying to share my passion for poetry with people who are at the beginning of their journey with it,” he said. “That is a great part of the role of the poet in residence.

“You can get a real kick out of poetry, and I want to show people the kick that can be got.”

Poetry readings take place each Wednesday afternoon at 2.30pm in the garden at Dove Cottage.

The poetry workshops take place on the last Friday of every month in the Jerwood Centre at The Wordsworth Trust, and run from 2.30pm to 4.30pm.

For more information phone The Wordsworth Trust on 015394 35544 or visit the website at www.wordsworth.org.uk

Goooogle

By Adam O’Riordan

A prayer then

for the men who sit,

pale as geishas,

by the glow of obsolete

computers.

Whose nights are never-