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Paul Farley

A couple of old undergraduate students have been back in touch after seeing or hearing me recently doing NPD events (every time I type ‘NYPD’, and as I delete the ‘Y’ imagine Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits working on commissioned poems). It’s good to find out where they are and what they’re doing. It’s a little unreasonable to expect them all to be still writing away as they go through life and writing classes seem like a long time ago, but I’m always pleased to hear about it if they are. It made me think too about how different the Internet has made arts teaching generally, for example, how I can direct students straight to The Poetry Archive’s website and get them to listen to poets reading their own work: we almost take the speed and availability for granted, but when I was starting out writing this would have been amazing. They are moving my father-in-law to another hospital, and I hope this means the beginning of a long road to recovery. What else did I do today? I’m writing something about MacNeice, and have been re-reading his poem ‘Woods’, one of my favourites of his. I’ve got a little poem in The Guardian, the result of the power station visit. I was thinking of the play in MacNeice’s poem between ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’, and how this intrigued me about the power station: I’d (stupidly) assumed the danger to life and limb there involved huge electrical charges, but the main health and safety issue is heat and steam. We got to take a look inside one of the furnaces (once a suitable amount of ‘suck’ had been applied as an updraft) and it was extraordinary, incandescent heat. Like looking into hell. Strange to think there’s dozens of these, blazing away in the British landscape.