 Happy and delighted to be able to introduce our next speaker Professor Joseph O'Connor is the award-winning internationally acclaimed author of eight novels But just as importantly he has been a teacher all of his life Some of our most profound teachers are our novelists our storytellers and our poets and Joseph O'Connor is all three of those things We are Ireland's national forum and there are important aspects of our Irish identity Shared with those of other national identities that I think distinguish us and Make education in Ireland full of a special kind of potential and promise that I think It is desperately important for us to pay attention to and I think at the heart of that potential is the relationship We have always had with stories and with words And with storytelling and it's why I'm so glad that one of our most cherished storytellers is here today Joe is going to explore the diverse ways in which learning happens throughout education and life By talking about his ten greatest teachers Proving that teaching happens in many ways and encouraging us to recognize the value and Resonance of our own greatest teachers too. It gives me huge pleasure and pride to welcome to the stage Professor Joseph O'Connor Thank you. Thank you very much Sarah and thank you to everybody for being here today. I Want to start by embarrassing Professor Sarah Moore who in another part of her life is a very accomplished writer and Sarah would be too modest to tell you this herself But a couple of days ago her very fine and widely acclaimed second novel the apple tart of hope Won the prestigious Jack Hart bursary at the Irish writer Center. So congratulations to Sarah for that I was having breakfast with my ten-year-old son Marcus this morning and Asked him what what was he going to do in school today and he's working on his end of term History project. So I said what's that about? He said it's it's it's great. It's it's about your least favorite person in history and In his case he told me that it's a man called Haroun al-Rashid who was a Potentator from Arabia in the 9th century. So I said what was why is he your least favorite person in history? And he said because he invented school So So he won't be attending the summit on teaching and learning though he perhaps he should Learn Ian is an old English verb That means to learn and it also means to show or to walk and I'm interested in this conception of learning as walking by taking a stroll around knowledge My mother and father were born in Francis Street in the Dublin liberties a five-minute walk from where we're meeting today In my boyhood. I had relatives living there as indeed I still do So for a suburban child, I spent a great deal of time walking the city of Dublin And I think of the city in a way as my first teacher Because it taught me that learning is also seeing a way of looking again at the world And in that Dublin of my childhood It seemed that you were living in a compendium of stories a kind of anthology a tarot pack of narratives You walked the streets of Yates and Pierce Brendan Behan and Phillip Blinnett Bold Robert Emmett the darling of Aaron and Joyce and O'Casey and Zosimus and Beckett Patrick Kavana, Bob Geldof, Lady Gregory and as a young person That's how I felt that all of these storytellers were my neighbors Each of them attempting to teach me something and each of them attempting versions of perhaps the same thing Taken perhaps on a school trip to visit Kilmainham Jail You would be given few facts or at least few you would remember But you'd come away enthralled by the story of Joseph Mary Plunkett who had married Grace Gifford before his execution If you went to see the band the Virgin Prunes You would hear lyrics written by Oscar Wilde now screamed with the punk fury of the era Phillip Chevron's band the radiators from space had been saturated in the city's literary traditions With song titles like Faithful Departed and Kitty Ricketts It was as though James Joyce had discovered a fender telecaster in some foul rag and bone shop on the keys No other city in the world had rock music like this if rock music isn't too narrowing a label But then the street songs and ballads of the city had always been short stories touching Scabrous satirical tender as alive to the stench of the eddying Liffey as to the possibilities of truth and beauty This world of songs taught of tough survivors Jacks of all trades Wide boys fish wives and chancers who had far more in common with the braggadochi of the Chicago blues Than with the tweedy jollities of sanitized Irish folk music Our history itself was taught in ballad form, which is to say that it was told as a set of carefully worked fictions Chaucer never invented darker characters Father John Holly the old priest who taught me English for the intercert in 1979 the greatest real-life teacher I have ever had Had one seen more gone crossing O'Connell bridge when we came to Yates's line that she had beauty like a tightened bow He paused and looked down at us with immense seriousness and gravitas before saying I saw her boys and Yates was right Other teenagers in the world might read that extraordinary poem and wonder about the Troy it attempted to burn But thanks to Father Holly. We knew we were living there He had the knack of all great teachers He allowed an idea to rise over the horizon and shine there like a new minted star And he taught me something I try to remember every day in my own teaching Teaching isn't something we do but something we allow to happen Often the skill is in knowing when to get out of the way Joyce and John Singh had walked the seafront at Dunleary There were summer evenings when their ghosts seemed to hover as he queued for an ice cream at Teddy's or walked the breezy expanse of the pier Shaw Mangan and Stoker had once lived in Dublin Swift had preached the gospel in the liberties Statues of Burke and Thomas Davis stood century over the streets poets had been among the 1116 revolutionaries not for nothing perhaps was the greeting of Dubliners an understated question. What's the story? Through a story indeed. I met my third great teacher all these years later. I'm still learning from him The first short story I wrote was a work of genius It was austere and lovely full of elegant sentences and sharp insights any reviewer would have called it amazingly Impressive because the first short story I wrote was by John McGahn It's called Sierra Leone and it appears in the 1979 collection getting through a copy of which had been purchased by my father and was lying around the house in The story a couple meet in a Dublin bar to analyze their complicated affair. I was 16 that year complicated affairs interested me My English teacher John Burns a wonderful man who had raged like King Lear or weep at a line of Yates Said writing could be a beneficial hobby for young people. It was the one thing he ever told us that was completely wrong Writing was like attempting to juggle with mud. I would sit in my bedroom Gawping at a blank jotter wishing I had the foggiest inkling as to what might be written about McGahn often wrote about rural litram But we had no hedgerows or Lloyds in the 1970s Dublin estate. I called home We had no thwarted farmers no maiden aunts on bicycles no small town Solicitors no cattle dealing IRA veterans simply put there was nothing in Glen Aguirre to write about You could call it the original failure of the creative imagination without which no writer ever got going Whenever I tried to write there was only frustration. I felt as pent up as one of McGahn's lovers That's how I recollect these youthful efforts at fiction a haze of self-conscious fumblings and awkward gropings second-hand sentences sentenced to fail One evening in dismal hopelessness. I found myself copying out Sierra Leone word for word I ate to write a story. So I wrote one of his I must have felt that the act of writing would make the words somehow mine But if so it was an act of literary adultery I smoldered to know what that feeling was like to write out a beautiful text from start to finish I suppose this was comparable to wannabe pop stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in the bathroom mirror But something richer and more interesting was going on too McGahn was teaching me to read Not to write But to see the presence is hidden in the crannies of the text the realities the words are gesturing towards Perhaps this is what pulses at the core of the desire to read the yearning for intense Relationships with words that we love not just with what they're saying, but with the words themselves Perhaps every reader is rewriting the story The next evening I transcribed the McGahn piece again this time I dared to alter a couple of names The male lead became Sean my father's name. I christened his girlfriend Debra after the punk singer Debbie Harry Our next-door neighbor Jack Mulcahy had his name nicked for the barman. This felt taboo It was like editing the Bible. I was raised in a home where books were revered My parents considered it Disreputable even to dog gear at volumes pages to interfere with the story would have been regarded as a form of sacrilege But under the spell of John McGahn, I became a teenage blasphemer Every few nights. I would guiltily rewrite the latest adaptation Changing the grammar here a phrasing there. I'd move around events break up the paragraphs or tell the same story But from a different point of view in which case of course it would not be the same story at all I must have written a hundred versions the heroine's beautiful hair became auburn or black and finally Exultantly strawberry blonde I learned the importance of punctuation in a story a question mark could change things a well-placed full stop Had the force of a slap Before long I was murdering McGahn's characters Replacing them with my own pitifully scanty puppets the pub where they met every week became a discotheque the couple acquired flares I engaged them married them brought them a house in the suburbs and a collection of Planksty records and a second-hand lawnmower The lovers in the story were starting to seem familiar They would not have appeared out of place in Arnold Grove, Glene Geary. I rechristened them Adam and Eve After the church on the Dublin keys. I altered their appearances their way of speaking I was afraid to admit it, but I knew who they were becoming They roamed this fictional other world this Eden designed in Litron Talking to each other about all sorts of things how much they loved novels how books shouldn't be dogged Sometimes they quarreled Occasionally they wept I could almost feel the firelight of that pub in my face as I watched my parents materialized through the prose I Would look at Sierra Leone it became a friend to me I wanted to know it better to learn how it ticked at one point in those years I feel almost certain I could have made a fair stab at reciting the entire text by heart It was breathtakingly simple as though it had taken no effort to compose in that and in other ways It was like an old Connemara ballad of the kind I'd often heard with my father on our holidays in Galway So direct so alluring so subtle so economical It reminded me of the song the rocks of Bond you wanted to know how it would turn out It read in fact as though nobody had written it as if it had somehow grown on the page I recall one of the sentences her hair shone dark blue in the light That strange ache in the heart caused by simple precise words placed carefully in order quietly What a deep teaching is there for anyone who wants to learn and I wanted very much to learn Oscar Wilde wrote each man kills the thing he loves and so the vandalism continued night after night With me editing and rewriting this once perfect story until gradually over the span of my teenage years Every trace of McGarren had been squeezed out of the text Sierra Leone had become Glen Aguirre. The story had been desecrated But at least the resulting ruin was mine and when once in my later life I had the opportunity of confessing this tale of destruction to the gentle master whose work I had so abused John McGarren said to me somewhat gravely. I think you owe me a pint Perhaps all writers have the story they will tell forever The idea they will go on exploring consciously or not until they run out of masks or find their own way of seeing the world McGarren Sierra Leone helped me find mine Every fiction I've begun every story. I've struggled and failed with I see now has been an attempted reaching back To that heart-stopping moment of first encountering the power of his art It's a mistake as doomed as Annie in the history of love stories, but you could spend your time chasing worse desires My mistakes in fact they have taught me so much that I think of them collectively as my fourth greatest teacher My horrible mistakes. I can even personify them I see them very clearly a great ugly morbidly obese monster grinning up at me like a gormless Egypt Sometimes shooting me a ghastly wink a man's mistakes wrote Joyce are his portals of discovery In my 20s through his work. I met my fifth great teacher The Easter island god of Dublin writing the genius who spun the meanderings of a handful of fictitious Nobodies into the greatest novel in the history of the form The city of Ulysses is long dead now, but somehow the ghost of Joyce still wonders Dublin's margins The lost city he immortalized is a shadow place of contrasts a provincial Edwardian backwater Throbbing with petty emnities it has crusty elegance and pitiless squalor The desolation of a scandalized diva now reduced to the dull Chandeliers illuminate her mansions candles grow in chapels red lights flicker in the back street brothel doorways Joyce described his hometown as having a faint odor of corruption A pungency that arises from every page of his masterwork For all that few novelists have written more beautifully about any city and in his wonderful character of Stephen Dedalus Nobody has ever depicted with such scrupulous precision what it is to be a teacher in a self colonized place But I can remember the moment around christmas 1987 when I realized that Dublin fiction would never be the same again A student at ucd. I had bought a little book in the campus bookstore A volume that had been self published by a north side school teacher It was called the commitments and there was only one copy on display dog-eared shopsoiled and reduced to 50p Here was a Dublin novel like no other in history. It ripped up the rule book. It laughed at the rules No dark-eyed collings. No descriptions of rain. No unnecessary adjectives. No guilt It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that it was the first Irish novel I had ever encountered that didn't contain the word crucifix This Dublin wasn't a city But a disregarded suburb whose denizens listened to Motown rather than Danny boy I knew plenty of people like that But until Roddy Doyle emerged. I didn't know it was permissible to write novels about them It's a very short book, but its influence on subsequent fiction set in Dublin was profound There was no longer possible to recycle the other world that appeared in Ulysses That melancholy little london of gaslight and parasols that had long possessed the imaginations of irish writers to their detriment The commitments taught many lessons the main one being to tell the truth And another one being that music itself is teaching Music There are many many musicians who've taught me a lot But the one i'm going to talk about now has a special place in my heart Perhaps because I can remember the precise moment she came into my life September the 20th 1978 It was my 15th birthday and an aunt who lived in london had sent me 10 pounds as a gift I was in a grungy little record shop on the north Liffey Keys Free bird records an evocative place Dark a bit dank Populated by aesthetic hipsters and wisecrackers it reeked of rising damp petulia oil and rebellion There I stood leafing through the racks of second hand punk records with their lurid neon imagery and black male style lettering When my fingertips came to a sleeve that stopped me in my tracks The photograph was in black and white very plain almost stark like a still from one of those cool french movies It was taken by robert maple Thorpe Though I wouldn't have known who that was at the time It showed a skeletally thin slightly androgynous looking young woman But was this a woman you couldn't be sure? Lionly eyes jacket over the shoulder self possession glowing She had the raffish air of a young keith richards The record was horses by the great patty smith and in 40 years of buying records I think it's the only one I ever bought purely for its cover To be honest, I didn't expect very much from the music Gloomy and dull I thought it would be but when I took that album home and put it on my parents record player The world burst into life like a fruit In every life there were moments we learn Moments remembered in a kind of emotional slow motion A first kiss a first date The first time your heart was broken The moment when your eyes met across a crowded party and you knew this feeling must be the one they sing about Well the first time I heard patty smith's voice is one of my moments If I live to a hundred I will never forget it It opened the record the way dynamite opens a safe It purred like a cello and throbbed like a saxophone It roared from a whisper to a scream in one beat It sneered and crooned and lullabyed and raged The most shockingly exciting sound I had ever heard in my life Joy defiance anger strangeness Here was a voice so soaked in human emotion that it didn't just thrill it intoxicated The band was on fire They swept between 16 wheeler guitar fueled riffs and loose low down barrel house blues Tied as a whip crack they played like they meant it soaring from climax to climax I must have played that record five thousand times by now But it always seems new minted from the core of a unique and passionate heart Kurt vonnegut once wrote that the only plausible mission of the teacher is to make you feel grateful for being alive And that's what horses does There are people who feel that fandom is limiting or even demeaning to the fan But in the case of my love for patty smith's music it was an education Listening to her was a seminar course in the outsiders of art For lane rambo the who bessie smith jackson pollock and jimmy hendrix were only some of her reference More than a touchstone. She was a teacher and a guide I read everything she said studied everything she did But I never felt enslaved to anything but a curiosity the admiration we feel for great artists like bob dylan patty enriched you She like dylan had started out of fan herself and at the heart of her music was the wide eyed innocence of a teen What she teaches is a simple thing that we must always be restless In our teaching in early learning never settling for the mediocre All of us who have the privilege of teaching Know that to teach is to learn And to my recent student at the university of limrick my fellow novelist hallena close I owe the lovely moment when michael hartnett and his work came back into my life I hadn't thought about that work in a while. I don't know why Perhaps it doesn't matter Poems seem to drift in and out of our emotional weather like certain friends We don't see for years but feel immediately comfortable with or frankly disconcerted by or both whenever we bump into them again in september last year When we began teaching the creative writing ma a jewel I asked the 11 members of my inaugural class in our introductory session To bring in a piece of writing that meant something to them and to read it aloud to the group We had extracts from novels and short stories and plays an n-write dickens and tim o bryan Kingsley amos bryan freel bob dylan and hallena brought two poems by michael hartnett The first was funny and wild and was distinctively hartnett in that the text included his very name It's called on those who stole our cat a curse On those who stole our cat a curse may they always have an empty purse and need a doctor and a nurse prematurely May their next car be a big black curse. Oh may it surely May all their kids come down with mange their eldest daughter start acting strange and the wife start riding the range And I don't mean the aga when she begins to go through the change may she go gaga And may the husband lose his job and have fierce trouble with his knob and the son turn out to be a job and smash the place Up may he give his dad a belt in the gob and mess his face up And may the granny end up in jail for opening the neighbor's mail may all that clan moan Weep and wail turn gray and wizened on the day. She doesn't get bail but mount joy prison Oh may their daughter get up the pole and their drunken uncle loses dull for our poor cat one day They stole may they rue it and if there is a black hellhole may they go through it Unfriendly loan sharks to their door as they beg for one week more May the seven curses of inch of core rot and blight them May all their enemies settle the score and kick their shite out of them I wish rabies on all their pets. I wish them a flock of bastard gets I wish them a load of unpayable debts tv inspectors to show them a poet never forgets his mala factors May rats and mice them ever hound may half of them be of mind unsound May their house burn down to the ground and no insurance May drugs and tugs their lives around beyond endurance may god forgive the heartless thief Who caused our household so much grief if you think I'm harsh sigh with relief. I haven't even started I can do worse. I am in brief yours truly michael hardness Never Never annoy a poet is the lesson of that poem And hearing it read in my seminar at the university of limrick on a glorious autumn afternoon in 2014 The memories of that great limrick poet returned to me The first poetry reading I ever attended was actually an event my friends and I had helped to organize as students at ucd in the early 1980s We were all members of the college's anti apartheid society And we were students of something calling itself anglo irish literature Which was neither anglish english nor irish nor particularly literary And putting these facts together we came up with the scheme for a benefit night called poets against apartheid If ever a phrase encompassed the naivety and yet the endearing idealism of student politics It is surely the butt clenching formulation poets against apartheid I very much doubt that the south african regime was shaking in its shoes But we were young and idealistic I say we were idealistic although in truth not all of us were my friend john mcdermott A tall lanky fellow whose dad was a garter sergeant from ross common advised caution when it came to the planning What exactly was a poetry reading another boy wanted to know? I told him it was a situation in which poets stood up and read out their poems Their own he asked their own I replied Who in the name of jesus would pay good money to go to that my classmate wondered Bad enough having to read their poems yourself without paying to hear the fuckers who wrote them read them Perhaps he shouldn't have been studying literature Our professor deklin kybridge the greatest university teacher I've ever had the honor to study with suggested a few names We might invite to poets against apartheid Derek mahan was good deklin told us and was very probably against apartheid And so were pierce hutchinson thomas kinsley and hugh maxton Nobody at this stage mentioned michael hartnett any of us. He wasn't invited to poets against apartheid But one of the other poets against apartheid fell ill and hartnett turned up in his place It's more than 30 years ago, but I remember him very well There was a gentleness in his manner in conversation. He didn't want to meet your eyes He had that particular mild courtesy and intelligence that irish country people sometimes do have And I put you at ease as you spoke to him like underground water We talked a bit about limrick because my father had worked there as a young man And it was a part of the country my dad had an affection for I said I was worried that not many people would come to the poetry reading Hartnett shrugged and pursed his lips and looked away into the distance as though hearing strange music in the halls Of his mind should there might be one he said Gradually one by one the other poets turned up And there came down upon the room that curious atmosphere that sometimes unfurls wherever poets are gathered admiration mixed with envy and mildest suspicion of each other Like the meeting of a dysfunctional family that has had a hell of a lot of therapy, but still not quite enough The poets looked at each other and then they looked at us. My friend John McDermott was unrelaxed Having never met a poet before and having often insulted their profession The sudden presence of five or six of them made him behave with false glee Hartnett glowered at him strangely and Hartnett was a man with a glower You didn't want to find yourself in its crosshairs The poets paced and pondered more of them arrived Soon there was a fair amount of tweed and bohemian polo neck in that room A redolence of recently rinsed but not entirely laundered insecurities avid for a language to play in It came time to decide the order of the evening who would read when and for how long And it was obvious despite his modesty and his great grace to his colleagues That michael hartnett had already decided who would be topping the bill and that would be michael hartnett I want to stress that this was communicated without rudeness or discourtesy of any kind at all And even so far as I can remember it with no words He merely made it somehow clear that he would be going on last the climax of poets against apartheid He then took what was in some respects a considerable risk By making it clear that not only would he be headlining the evening But that he wouldn't be listening to any of the other poets In fact, he would be going to the belfield bar this very moment And one of us probably my lanky friend john mcdermott was to go over to the bar for him Just as the second last poet of the night commenced reading a hartnett would return with john and do his thing It seemed at least to me a preposterous proposal But none of us dared to question it Perhaps the other poets were accustomed to these negotiations with reality Or perhaps they were even relieved that hartnett wouldn't be there while they were reading To glower at them like a sculpturally handsome rural county limrack maniac who hadn't bothered taking his meds that day I don't know but so we agreed Off strode hartnett to the belfield bar and the rest of the audience trickled in Things were not promising wind whistled down the concourse There was a girl I liked at the time the beauty of first year history I had sensed a bit of friction between us in recent days And I was hoping there might be a good bit more of it before the evening was through Perhaps behind the bus stop, but no she hadn't shown up neither had many other people myself And the other members of the ucd anti-apartheid society Began the ancient art of anyone who has ever put on a literary event spreading out and trying to look like a crowd Memory is a cruel and confusing sweetheart Let's say there were 10 students in that audience Which wouldn't have been so bad, but there were 11 poets on the stage That's not a comforting situation when the number on the stage exceeds the number of those in the auditorium Apartheid is going to survive Well true to the word the poets all read and the rain came beating on the windows The poems were all admirable in that one admired the craft and work behind them But I must admit that I wasn't touched by any of them as the penultimate poet stood up to read My lanky friend John McDermott departed for the bar charged with the mission of bringing back hartnett Which five minutes later he did I don't think I will ever forget the strangeness of that scene Hartnett now accompanied by a group of perhaps 25 students to whom he had somehow got talking in the course of the evening Came processing with a kind of stern Slowness down the concourse of the arts block preceded by my lanky friend John McDermott Who was bearing with solemnness reverence like a cardinal carrying a holy relic five pints of Guinness on a tray Hartnett was by now somewhat refreshed to put it mildly Seeding himself with no small difficulty on the edge of a desk He said that he would like to commence his reading by telling us what he called an ancient irish folktale He continued it's about this man who goes up to the attic of his cottage And he finds an old painting and an old violin Next morning he takes them down to the antique dealer in the village and the dealer says jesus, that's amazing Do you know what you found? That's a genuine Picasso and a genuine Stradivarius Unfortunately hartnett continued pausing to light a cigarette Stradivarius did the painting and Picasso made the fucking violin We laughed He laughed the other poets laughed And then hartnett stood up and read this poem and the air in the room seemed to change As though air can take on a color and it may have been the moment when poetry entered my life Ignorant in the sense she ate monotonous food And thought the world was flat And pagan in the sense she knew the things that moved at night were neither dogs or cats But pookas and dark faced men She nevertheless had fierce pride But sentenced in the end to eat thin diminishing porridge In a stone cold kitchen She clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand I loved her from the day she died She was a summer dance at the crossroads She was a card game where a nose was broken She was a song that nobody sings She was a house ransacked by soldiers She was a language seldom spoken She was a child's purse full of useless things Every rural cage has prisoners Every small hill sheltered townland Every whitewashed touristed village holds a heart that cannot speak out Lives a life of angered murmurs Over 11 pints of Guinness Over 50 bitter woodbines We have talked about our futures. We have found no quick solution If one is lax in adoration Still the priests have satisfaction by our appearance every Sunday If to small tyrant employers we bring the benefit of unions We are unemployed eccentrics If what we love is all corruption we must sacrifice our reason We must sit here in this townland talking always of the future Finding out no quick solutions Over 11 pints of Guinness Over 50 bitter woodbines Ordinarily I may say I'm not a fan of the poetry reading I wasn't then and I'm still not now The fact that a poet has a pleasant or sonorous voice means nothing at all, at least not to me If you've ever heard the recording of Yates reading his work, you'll know what I mean I think you lose so much by hearing poetry read to you The arrangement of the lines, the patterns, the stanzas The look of the poem on the page One of the reasons why a sonnet has the power of a sonnet Is that you know there'll be a detonation in the last two lines But at a poetry reading you're robbed of one of the most beautiful things any life can ever have The right to read alone You don't even know how long the poem is going to be But when Hartnett read something unusual happened I wouldn't want to overstate it, but it was a small revelation He read somehow from inside the poem Pointing out the nuances, the gaps, the allusions, the things the poem wasn't saying It was an insight into writing, but as much an insight into reading And I could see that reading poetry would need to be a part of my life For better or worse, a kind of marriage perhaps I could see that I would need poems the way I need songs Hartnett made that clear to me The great Cezanne remarks somewhere in his letters That he believes painters must stop painting like novelists and must paint like painters instead It's something all novelists need also to learn How to stop writing like a novelist And Hartnett, I think, was the first poet I ever came across who really didn't write like a poet Even our beloved Kavana, part of so many of our teenage infatuations with verse, couldn't resist The odd classical illusion, the occasional flourish Hartnett, a deeply learned poet where form was concerned Nevertheless tried to paint, not poeticize It seemed to me as a young man captivated by what he was doing That he wanted you to feel before thinking There was a lesson, and I've thought about it 10,000 times since What a writer does is create the sheet music But it's the reader who sings the song And the same is true of every kind of teaching It's the student who makes the music On the reading went until Hartnett reached the end I'd love to be able to tell you that he raised roaring ovations That students passing by were drawn into that room by the power and quiet authority of his voice But that didn't happen, which in itself is important Hartnett wasn't for everyone, and he taught you that no important artist ever is But those few of us who were there will never forget it Indeed, I noticed 30 years later, on the rare occasions when we meet That the subject of that evening with Hartnett almost always comes up A part that it is gone The world has changed with new horrors and strangenesses and new liberations too We felt we'd been present at something special, and we had But the electricity of recognition we felt that night is available to anyone still Any of us can have an evening with Michael Hartnett He's there in his poems, he's their ink The night ran late, we all went out drinking There was at that time a stretch of ghastly basements on Leeson Street in Dublin Rejoicing in the undeserved name nightclubs To one of these we repaired a joint called Susie Street Where the music wasn't bad and the prices were merely hefty as opposed to exorbitant Twenty punts, a colossal sum, bought you a bottle of Moroccan Beaujolais But if you could stretch to 25, a bottle of port could be had A faster route to annihilation I remember at four in the morning the sight of one of Ireland's foremost poets of the 20th century Not exactly dancing to the human league song Don't You Want Me Baby, but certainly bobbing his shoulders I wish I could tell you more That we all walked him home through the dawn, conversing of Yates, Plath and Larkin The truth is I don't remember, and I never saw him again It was my one and only meeting with that powerful and enigmatic poet Who achieved so much and who wrote with such passion And his work will always be celebrated by those who love poetry In one night he taught me so much that he changed my life I know I wouldn't be doing what I do now had it not been for that night Which means I would never have had the privilege and honor of becoming a teacher myself If his spirit hovers close, I want to thank him for his bequest To me and to my friends who were young He taught us poetry matters, it actually does Despite our teachers telling us it matters, it does matter Odin says poetry makes nothing happen But heartnuts unveiled our eyes and opened our hearts In more than 30 years they've never closed He did what the great teachers do, what must always be our watchword To reveal what is already there Thank you Now, these really good teachers are able to, like Sarah Moore And others in this room are able to do that without notes And that's something that I have to practice Now, I don't know if this time I waffled on a bit more than I was supposed to I think Right, there is time for questions Nobody ever wants to ask the first question So it's a special award for the first questioner today Yes, the gentleman over here I'm lucky enough to know Bob Galdorf slightly And anytime I tell him that I loved Patty Smith He gets very annoyed No, I mean, I love the Boomtown Rats I've written about them a lot I have a piece on the Irish Times website at the moment About kind of growing up with the Boomtown Rats And what it was like to I suppose for those of us who were young at the time That there had never been an Irish band who achieved those things You know, we had Rory Gallaher and the horse lips And they were great But to see Bob on top of the Pops You know, at number one Ripping up the picture of John Travolta It just when you're 14 that kind of thing seems revolutionary And it kind of still does And he had been to my school Bob left the school the year that I arrived He was in sixth year when I was in first year But he was already kind of folkloric figure He was famous for having turned up to school one day in pajamas And they're very nice Priest told him that's a disgrace, Bobby It's just terrible Go home this minute now and change And he got the bus back to Dunleary And came back into the school in a different pair of pajamas So he gives a completely admirable figure And I mean a great writer An absolutely great writer I think a song like Banana Republic As a reflection of what Ireland was like at the time You know, it's 40 years old now And it is amazing that in some of the Boomtown Rats songs There was a very trenchant critique Of what kind of a place Ireland was Long before many other people got around to it So I've huge time for Bob And in fact myself and my son went to see the Boomtown Rats On Sunday night in the Olympia Which is great fun And he scolded me again for liking Patty Smith afterwards Anyone else? Sarah Are you embarrassed that I told everyone about your award? But oh thank you One of the many insights that I have been absorbing From your beautiful talk Is the idea of mistakes as our portals to discovery And I think it's such a powerful idea for teachers And the permission to make mistakes And the responsibility to stumble And get things wrong before Something else emerges I'd love to hear maybe a little bit more About your experiences with mistakes Yeah, I mean it's difficult I was talking to you beforehand Sarah About grading my current students end of term assignments And it's very difficult with creative writing Because if they were perfect creative writers They wouldn't be studying an MA with us So you have to be honest with them When they make mistakes But at the same time do so in a way that respects their Creativity and the uniqueness of their gift So you do have to create that space I think as a teacher But it needs to be surrounded with a kind of respect And that only comes from trust As a writer I think your greatest teacher Is collectively the errors that you make Very, very simple things I tell my students now To try and think their way down to the end of a story You know if you have an idea for a character Or a situation Or even lines of dialogue That after you write a few pages you might just stop And think your way down to the end So that there's a destination You know that every journey needs a destiny We could all decide this minute that we're going to leave here And get into a fleet of buses and go to Cork But you know there's 50 ways we could go to Cork Or we could go to Cork by basketball Or we could go to Cork via deli But you know the main thing is once you know you're going to Cork And I tell them that because I learned this from bitter experience You know with my first attempts at novels I mean I still have somewhere my first go at a novel Which I think was about 200,000 words And the best way to illustrate it actually is to tell you a story There's a fantastic place in New Bliss County Monaghan called the Tyrone Guthrie Center And this is a place It's a house that was left by the great Tyrone Guthrie To the artists and writers of Ireland And you can go there and finish your novel Or write your symphony or whatever it is So as a young man living in London I had this huge novel that I just hadn't got an ending for I just couldn't think of an ending So I wrote to the Tyrone Guthrie Center And asked could I go for three weeks So they said fine come on over So I went over and for the first kind of few days I didn't do much work Because the place is full of very interesting people To talk to and to go to the pub with And then it was the end of the first week And then I thought well you know I'll just mess around for another few days And when a half way through I'll really get to work And it just went on and on and on When I did go back to work I found that I couldn't find the ending I would sit down and say I'm going to find the ending today But I'd write 5,000 words or 10,000 words It was just longer and longer and longer And suddenly it was the day before I had to go back to London And still no ending And the book's sort of 50,000 words longer by now And there's a lake at Anna McCarrick And in those days before There were rules about health and safety They used to allow the authors and artists To row out into the middle of the lake If they felt like doing that So I go out into the middle of the lake I row all the way out And I say I'm not coming in Until I think of the ending I was like I'm going to go fishing in the lake For the ending of this wretched book And I sat there I smoked a lot in those days I had a packet of 20 cigarettes I smoked all of them And the boat just went round and round and round in the lake And finally, just as it began to get dark I had a revelation A moment of profound insight Which is there is no ending for this horrible book And what you've got to do now Is row back in and walk up to the house And take the 230,000 words And go back to London And put those in the bin And start to write again Which is what I did And that night, the night I got back to London I wrote the first page Of my debut novel Cowboys and Indians So a painful, painful failure And a terrible lesson But I suppose at least That's something that you can pass on To writers beginning now I mean, and you learn, you learn, you know, from You learn from reviews, I think, more than More than a lot of writers would like to let on I mean, a lot of writers claim that they don't read their reviews But a painful review is certainly Certainly teaches you a thing or two I had a play on at the Gate Theatre About 10 years ago now Which wasn't a success And it wasn't on a happy production And almost all of the reviews were appalling But I got the worst review I think that anyone has ever got for this It was in the Sunday Times And I have to swear in order to tell you this story But there's a line in the play Where somebody turns to One character turns to another And says, well, you can go and fuck yourself So there's a thousand words of hatred and invective For my play written by the reviewer And the end of the review was There's a scene in this play Where one character turns to another And says, you should go fuck yourself That is what Michael Colgan should have said To Joseph O'Connor when he sent in this play So you learn, you learn from that, you know So yeah, a very important failing Joe, I'm going to again reluctantly call this Very delightful session to a close Because we have to get on with proceedings But I do want to say that the What you've done for me And I'm sure for very many people in the room Is reminded us that With all of our responsibilities Towards research and an evidence base And using the right statistics and being scholarly The power of memory and words and stories Are so profound And that we must give them Respect and attention that they deserve In the context of teaching I've heard so much from you today Ripping up the rule book Being one of them mistakes Being the portals to discovery Being another and that very powerful sentence That you read If I live to be a hundred I will never forget it I think that those moments Those profound moments of change Are so important in terms of the Learning lives of people In your last comments And in your answer to the question around Failures and mistakes I'm struck by the fact that It's humility among teachers That gives students the courage The permission to fail And the courage to try again And I think that the resilience in the face of failure Is one of the important lessons That we teach all our students And you've reminded us of so many of those Important things And I think I speak for all of us When I say how grateful we are to you Thank you I'm very grateful for having been here Thank you very much Thank you