POET IN MOTION AND AT REST:

I catch up with the telly at home in Leeds, after some time away, on our Samsung, which is the size of a tennis court. I blew last year’s TS Eliot Prize shortlist money on it, so we call it the Telliot (though some poets at the prizegiving in London were appalled when I told them).

Channel 4’s Red Riding films have done David Peace’s books justice. He’s a writer I’ve admired for some time, not least for showing the Satanic side of God’s Own County. His work seems to me poetic in its intensity and its charged relationship with reality, having a true Yorkshire Gothic.

On Monday, I enjoy a journey on the Settle-Carlisle line visiting the artist Philippa Troutman, who lives near the Ribblehead Viaduct. Locals say a navvy died for every brick in it, and Philippa researched their work-camps extensively for the travelling exhibition The Shanties.

Her series inspired me: Jericho Shanty is the working-title of my next book, the title-poem of which is about to be published in Poetry Ireland Review to coincide with my reading at the Poetry Now festival at Dun Laoghaire. This is an event most poets would give their eye-teeth to attend and I sent the organiser my own eye-teeth in a velvet-lined antique box years ago.

Poetry events like this are far more exciting in Ireland than England. This is partly due to the higher status poetry has in Ireland, not least because the country is so good at producing wonderful poets. As a result you can have a conversation with almost anybody about it; getting the Irish to talk about poetry is like getting Brazilians to talk about football.

A CULTURALLY ENRICHING DAY:

St Patrick’s Day begins with me battering down through Chapeltown to meet Kester Aspden while listening to Sixteen Straws by the great Australian band The Drones. Kester and I are reading together on a short tour. We are fundraising for the Oluwale Memorial Appeal during the run of the play based on his book about this tragic Nigerian immigrant who was hounded to death by Leeds policemen.

One venue is in an area with the most concentrated British National party membership in the UK, and the BNP blog on the play was . . . well, let’s just say it wasn’t demanding Baftas for all concerned. I noticed in it, though, that “cultural enricher” was being used as a sarcastic term for “immigrant”.

Kester and I discuss exactly such a culturally-enriching immigrant to Leeds: Darach O Cathain. He was a sean-nos singer admired by everyone from Sean O Riada to Ciaran Carson. I heard him often in the Chapeltown Roscoe, a pub long since demolished to make way for a new interchange. For car traffic, not culture.

I spend the rest of the day cannibalising a play for some poems, and intermittently worshipping the Telliot, which makes the sets of old programmes look Brechtian in their disregard for bourgeois realism.

Later I play cards with friends including ex-Communist but unreconstructed loiner (Leeds-ite) Peter “Umbrage” Gomersall. Still angry about the Harrying of the North by William I, he bridles when I mention the old phrase “Mucky Leeds”. The air here was always like wine, he coughs.

HANGING OUT:

Shamshad Khan, a local poet, writes somewhere about always remembering where you were when Leeds Market burnt down; she compares its memorability to the day George Best died or the new Pope was appointed. However, they rebuilt it well and it is a pleasant place to loiter, waiting for inspiration. As Jimmy Breslin wrote of Damon Runyon: “He did what all good journalists do — he hung out”.

Owney Madden, New York gangster and proprietor of the Cotton Club, was born nearby to an Irish family, some of whom still work here, I’m told. In Bologna Markets I see pasta called Strozzapreti, which translates as “priest choker”, and think I ought to be able to sell tons on the Shankill, enriching myself more than merely culturally. In Leeds today, though, I just come away with the ordinary shopping.

GETTING OUT OF THE WAY:

The artist Tony Earnshaw, who used to live around the corner, would make “surrealist expeditions” — public transport taken and changed at random — and I do something similar when I’m stuck with my writing. My version is called Going to Jericho, from the old expression meaning to go elsewhere, anywhere.

Anyway, the point is the besideness of points; journeys help, but the abolition of destination is essential. With writing, it’s when I think I know exactly where I’m going that I hit contraflow. The traffic in ideas won’t follow road signs — though I wouldn’t try that on in court.

Ian Duhig is reading at DLR Poetry Now in the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire, at 6.30pm next Saturday

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