PAUL FARLEY

Poet Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. His first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and won a Somerset Maugham Award. His latest collection of poems, The Ice Age (2002), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. Paul currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. He also writes radio drama, and his play, When Louis Met George, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2003. In 2004, he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets, and in October 2005 he won the Forward Prize for best single poem (for 'Liverpool disappears for a billionth of a second'). 

Susan Tranter: Can I start by asking about your reading habits Paul... What kind of things do you like to read, and do you have reading which feels like 'work', and other stuff that feels like 'pleasure'?

PF: I don’t think I’ve ever read much out of a sense of duty. I’ll read because I liked a certain author’s previous book, because somebody has put me on to a title, or because something has caught my eye. So my habits aren’t really habits, but are often sure to be pleasurable. I’m reading Birds Britannica at the moment (and probably will be, off and on, for the rest of my life), and the last literary things I finished were The Finishing School by Muriel Spark and In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki.
 
Louis R: I noticed that you've written a radio play - have you considered writing in any other genres - a novel, perhaps?

PF: I’ve written two radio plays, as well as other long radio pieces, and love the medium. You can appeal to the ear and the mind’s eye and the imagination using voices and a bare minimum of effects and music, and I just find it utterly exciting when you go into the studio and start to hear your play being put together. Other genres have appealed less, though I wouldn’t discount the possibility of trying different ways of writing. I write quite a bit of prose. I’ve noticed some poets have an anxious relationship with the idea of The Novel, but the fact is that writers who excel in both forms are very, very rare. I’d probably prefer to write screenplays, which seem closer to radio drama and maybe even to poetry in a sense, though I’ve never tried to.
 
SDF12: Do you have a regular routine for writing poems Paul? Do you have regular writing hours, and a set way of working?

PF: I work best early in the morning. What I’ve found is, you can start assigning totemic significance to little things, which sound stupid in the light of day. I think poems can exist in my mind for a while before I have to write anything down, so I don’t need to sleep with a pad and pencil or anything. Being on an early train leaving a place I don’t know, complete with that scattered, hung-over feeling, has probably accounted for as many poems as anything else. But there is a discipline, for want of a better word, a way of going about things once you’re in the mood.
 
Liisa: I have enjoyed both of your collections, especially The Ice Age (and I loved the image on the cover too!). I would love to know what your next book will be and when it will be out. Can you tell us?

PF: Thank you. Yes, my next book is called Tramp in Flames and it’s coming out in the summer of 2006. I don’t know what else to say, Liisa, it’s more of the same, only hopefully more so.
 
Leonard Davis: Hello Paul. I wonder how you find combining the teaching of literature with the practice of crafting it yourself. Are there times when teaching poetry helps you look at your own work in a new way, or do you see the two as totally separate endeavours?

PF: I think I always leave some part of me at the gates when I go onto campus. But if we regard students of Creative Writing as fellow writers – and I think we should – then you have to bring some of your own experience to bear, and connect. Looking at form in poetry is largely a case of exploring a way of playing a game with a set of rules. Frost said writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down, and I’d agree a poem needs a set of conditions that give it an optimum shape and energy, and make it meaningful for reader as well as writer. So it isn’t just a case of counting syllables or looking at traditional forms – though I’d argue that you’d be remiss not to explore these things – and nor is it the taking of some position over what’s ‘experimental’ and what’s ‘accessible’, but a way of negotiating with language that works. Every student will bring their own stratagems and rules and instincts, and it’s fascinating seeing how they work things out. How this impacts on what I do it’s difficult to say, but I don’t think it’s entirely separate and discrete. I do know I have to keep reminding them, and myself, of ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure.’
 
Maj: Please can you ask Paul Farley what his favourite British poem is. Thank you.

PF: This is one of those tough questions I dread during readings. The short answer is, I couldn’t possibly name just one. But since you’ve asked: as far as contemporary work goes, I think I’ll always admire ‘Incantata’ by Paul Muldoon. Someone said you outgrow and outlive most poems, but I can’t imagine ever not liking this.
 
Malin A: I would like to know if Paul enjoys reading his work in public, and whether he gets anything from it, or whether poets see readings as just something they have to do to earn some money?

PF: I do enjoy it, and I regard reading poetry as an extension of writing it, not a bit on the side, and try to read from my work (and from the work of others) as well as I can. You’d have to ask other poets whether they see readings as something to be endured rather than enjoyed: I suspect you’d get a whole range of responses. Humphrey Bogart used to call a serious income ‘fuck-you money’, but even a modest job means you can take or leave these things. Frost and Nabokov read together once in a department store (I think in Boston), and I do love the idea of them agreeing to that, that kind of a thriving spoken literary culture, I suppose.
 
Elizabeth Martin: What do you think made you into a poet? What were your formative influences? And, if you weren't a poet, what else do you think you would have been?

PF: I used to recite nursery rhymes at a freakishly early age, so there’s that. Then there was nothing much for about fifteen years. I owe a lot to my friends, but I think I’ve been lucky to have met a couple of people, once in my late teens and once in my twenties, who have changed the course of my life more than any other single event. I absolutely do not want to be melodramatic, and I know there are far worse places on the planet to spend your formative years, but the place where I grew up was chaotic, proletarian and violent; literature just didn’t feature and an interest in it wasn’t a currency. What this has given me though is a resolve, a belief in art if you like.

Last year I spent a fine weekend in the company of the novelist Jim Crace, and it turned out Jim had been at university with a friend who’d gone on to become an English teacher and who’d taught me at a Liverpool comprehensive! Jim put him on to me and we’re in touch now – it turns out he writes poetry too – and this has reminded me how we had some good teachers; that things weren’t completely hopeless. But drawing and painting and writing poems did feel like transgressions in that time and place; they put me at a disadvantage and I hid them away.
 
Kai: Dear Paul, I am very interested in British poetry, and enjoy the work of Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Adrian Mitchell, as well as your own work, and many others. Can you recommend the work of some young British poets for me to try?

PF: Does the British Council have an equivalent to the Witness Protection Programme? OK: I’ve got my eye on Helen Farish and Kathryn Gray and Greta Stoddart. And I’m assuming you’ve already come across John Stammers and Kate Clanchy and Maurice Riordan? Or Michael Symmons-Roberts, John Glenday and Conor O’Callaghan? I don’t know how old any of these people are.
 
Susan Tranter: Many thanks Paul for answering our questions. What else is on the horizon for you?

PF: It’s a pleasure. I’m just in the middle of writing a book for the British Film Institute on the filmmaker Terence Davies, who I think really is a kind of genius. And I’ve established RNR PRESS with a typographer and designer: we’re going to publish Letterpress editions of poetry – established names, alongside new people – which is something I’ve wanted to do since art school.

Back to main page