:00:00. > :00:08.The American West Coast has always seemed, for many people,
:00:09. > :00:12.a Shangri-La over the horizon, all sunshine and freedom,
:00:13. > :00:17.the last frontier that's bound to be a happy journey's end.
:00:18. > :00:19.The poet Adam O'Riordan sets his collection of short
:00:20. > :00:23.stories, The Burning Ground, on that golden coast,
:00:24. > :00:26.where lives collide in Los Angeles, a city that sometimes seems the most
:00:27. > :00:31.artificial in the world, but always casts its own mysterious spell.
:00:32. > :00:50.You describe, in these stories, something of
:00:51. > :00:58.I think to me it's always been a place that's had that potential,
:00:59. > :01:01.that distance, that sense of it sort of being on the very
:01:02. > :01:05.edge the known world, or certainly the Anglophone world.
:01:06. > :01:11.You have a quote at the beginning of the book from Christopher Isherwood,
:01:12. > :01:15.which is very striking, and he uses the word
:01:16. > :01:20.On the one hand it's the home of Silicon Valley,
:01:21. > :01:24.its high tech, it's got Hollywood, it's everything, it's
:01:25. > :01:26.the most advanced place on earth in many ways.
:01:27. > :01:29.Yet there is this elemental feeling about it.
:01:30. > :01:32.I think it's the way in which those things
:01:33. > :01:37.So you can be at the very centre of the city, you can be downtown,
:01:38. > :01:40.but in an hour's drive, you can be in the desert or you can
:01:41. > :01:43.drive up to Malibu by the ocean, and you're constantly reminded,
:01:44. > :01:45.as Isherwood mentions in that quote, you're constantly reminded
:01:46. > :01:48.of the elemental, the vast, you feel the pull of those primal
:01:49. > :01:51.I remember very clearly the first night I'd spent
:01:52. > :01:58.I had terrible jet lag and I remember walking down
:01:59. > :02:00.to the beach and standing there as the sun, as the mist
:02:01. > :02:03.was burning off and the sun was coming up and looking around
:02:04. > :02:06.and seeing two or three drifters there beside me.
:02:07. > :02:10.I suppose it was sort of the opening up of the space
:02:11. > :02:14.The sense that once I was there, I could think
:02:15. > :02:17.I could go from writing poems to writing stories,
:02:18. > :02:21.It felt like there was so much space there.
:02:22. > :02:23.As you mention, you're a poet by background,
:02:24. > :02:29.Goodness me, you spent a year as Poet In Residence
:02:30. > :02:35.In the Lake District, which is about as poetic
:02:36. > :02:40.You've turned, in this volume, to the short story form.
:02:41. > :02:43.What do you think it allows you to do?
:02:44. > :02:46.I think it was the place, again, that dictated the form.
:02:47. > :02:49.So when I was in the Lake District at the Wordsworth Trust,
:02:50. > :02:52.I wrote a lot of sonnets, which were strangely in themselves
:02:53. > :02:56.Then when I got to Los Angeles and started spending more time
:02:57. > :02:59.there, I felt like the short story was the form in which I
:03:00. > :03:02.I was thinking about this earlier on the way here,
:03:03. > :03:06.I think one of the things that really drew me to it was this idea
:03:07. > :03:09.that you can, the idea of invention, the idea of making this counterfeit,
:03:10. > :03:12.There is a wonderful freedom to that.
:03:13. > :03:15.When you're sort of tethered to the lyric eye of being a poet,
:03:16. > :03:18.when you get that freedom to invent, that freedom to find the details
:03:19. > :03:22.I suppose if you're writing a sonnet of 14 lines,
:03:23. > :03:25.a short story seems as if you've got the whole world?
:03:26. > :03:27.Yeah, but interestingly the sonnet and this short story
:03:28. > :03:30.have the same thing in common, which is you can change something
:03:31. > :03:33.and get a complete overview, whereas if you're writing a novel,
:03:34. > :03:36.you can't really see the change that makes until right the way through.
:03:37. > :03:39.So you can fix both things in a day, as it were.
:03:40. > :03:41.The other device I suppose, that's very obvious in this
:03:42. > :03:44.collection is one of is the short story writer's favourite ones,
:03:45. > :03:45.where lives collide almost unexpectedly.
:03:46. > :03:50.There's always a sense of discovery, and you can have that
:03:51. > :03:51.moment of collision that's really very dramatic.
:03:52. > :03:59.I guess in the same way you are in a filmic mode,
:04:00. > :04:01.you're thinking about the most intense moments in these
:04:02. > :04:09.You can think, how do you can condense a whole life to five or six
:04:10. > :04:11.key moments or regrets, or things they didn't do,
:04:12. > :04:14.places they didn't go, and then how do those things,
:04:15. > :04:16.what are the ramifications of those things, through
:04:17. > :04:20.In the very first story a man goes to California to meet his, I suppose
:04:21. > :04:30.I think that journey itself, that sense of returning to meet a lover,
:04:31. > :04:33.that sense of going to another place but there being, finding
:04:34. > :04:37.that person has to leave and being alone there...
:04:38. > :04:39.I think it's a city that lends itself to that kind
:04:40. > :04:42.of melancholy as well, in a strange sort of way.
:04:43. > :04:46.It's this sense of a place where you can be easily lost,
:04:47. > :04:52.because it's so big and sprawling and unformed, well untamed,
:04:53. > :04:57.But at the same time, it can be terribly intimate.
:04:58. > :05:06.It's in some ways, which is a very strange word to append
:05:07. > :05:09.to Los Angeles, but in some ways it's provincial.
:05:10. > :05:11.It's not at the centre of power, aside from Hollywood power,
:05:12. > :05:15.it's not at the centre, and because of that you get all
:05:16. > :05:18.You get different moods, you get different reactions,
:05:19. > :05:24.As a young man from Manchester, as I am, was, that felt sort
:05:25. > :05:29.It couldn't be further from Manchester, but in a way,
:05:30. > :05:31.there were these strange sort of similarities.
:05:32. > :05:34.It's also a place where you're allowed, in fact you're almost
:05:35. > :05:40.You can do anything, you can dress how you like,
:05:41. > :05:42.you can say anything, you can pursue some mad scheme.
:05:43. > :05:45.Absolutely, and I was always very interested, in this book,
:05:46. > :05:48.to think about lives that had somehow been subjected
:05:49. > :05:54.The Second World War, for instance, and how they then fit themselves
:05:55. > :06:00.How you live in a place like that, once you've experienced
:06:01. > :06:04.It's a natural subject for somebody who has got
:06:05. > :06:13.You are teaching poetry Manchester and obviously still writing poetry.
:06:14. > :06:16.A lot of people say that poetry is going through a pretty good
:06:17. > :06:20.What evidence is there for that, that people
:06:21. > :06:26.I think, again, it's maybe a digital thing,
:06:27. > :06:29.this idea that people can share their poetry now,
:06:30. > :06:31.people can think about it more, they can write about it,
:06:32. > :06:34.they can find communal interest, they can express themselves.
:06:35. > :06:37.I think also it strikes me, the first decade or so,
:06:38. > :06:39.the very strict sense of genre or place, whether its performance
:06:40. > :06:43.poetry or page poetry or poetry that is somehow linked to the visual
:06:44. > :06:47.arts, all of those things seem to have collapsed into each other,
:06:48. > :06:49.which makes for a very fertile, and fecund landscape
:06:50. > :06:54.A lot of the barriers have been broken down, I think.
:06:55. > :06:57.If you're talking about a contemporary world
:06:58. > :07:00.where there is a sense of drift, where people don't quite
:07:01. > :07:04.know where we're headed, after the economic crash,
:07:05. > :07:08.after 9/11 and so on, poetry, historically,
:07:09. > :07:12.has been the classic vehicle for distilling those senses,
:07:13. > :07:18.That's right, I think that's absolutely right.
:07:19. > :07:21.I think it has the political application, if you will,
:07:22. > :07:24.that sense that you can use it to protest, in a way, or at least
:07:25. > :07:27.to make your voice heard, to share your experience,
:07:28. > :07:34.You spent a year in the Lake District, which is a great place
:07:35. > :07:36.just to walk and to think and to write poetry.
:07:37. > :07:40.Do you find it easy to make time to let your mind wander,
:07:41. > :07:44.and to give time to that blank page or that blank screen?
:07:45. > :07:47.I think, yeah, the answer is you have to, with the poems
:07:48. > :07:50.you have to sort of let them amass quietly in the background, you have
:07:51. > :07:55.to let them pile up over time, and then sort of recognise
:07:56. > :07:59.when the collection is ready to be sort of tested,
:08:00. > :08:06.But as long as you have something else to focus on,
:08:07. > :08:09.whether it's a book of stories, or a novel or teaching an MA course,
:08:10. > :08:18.Annd you're confident that in the end they'll come good?
:08:19. > :08:34.Good evening. The main theme of the weather so far this week has been
:08:35. > :08:35.temperature driven and the story, as we move