Interview: Paul Durcan on poetry and art

Before we begin, Paul Durcan produces a piece of paper.

Just ten minutes previously, he felt a sudden urge, he says, to remember the last verse from W.H Auden’s ‘Fall of Rome’.

He raises the note, which he’s scribbled on with black biro, projecting each word with a careful steady cadence:

‘All together elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ miles and miles of golden moss/ Silently and very fast.’

We’re here to talk about Durcan’s 22nd collection of poetry Praise In Which I Live and Move And Have My Being, but the conversation has strayed to a time when the naive 19-year-old poet arrived in London in search of work.

The year was 1964. He came with his friend and fellow poet: the late Michael Hartnett. Eventually Durcan found himself a desk job at the North-Thames-Gas-Board. “It was terrible, the end of the road. I’m ashamed to say that I bailed out after three months, but it seemed to me like an eternity,” he says.