Adam O’Riordan tells me that a journalist once misquoted his description of poetic influence, ‘hearing the voices of dead poets when I write’, into something that made him sound schizophrenic, ‘Adam O’Riordan hears the voices of dead people’. So I’ve got to be careful here. Let me make it clear: despite spending a year in poetic isolation as the Wordsworth Trust’s (youngest ever) Poet-in-Residence, Adam O’Riordan is clearly both sane and utterly charming.  Describing his time in Grasmere, living in Wordsworth’s house, he recalls “a sense of being underwritten by the place”. Is rural solitude necessary for poetry? Perhaps not, but “the distance, makes you work harder – makes you work better; the isolation makes you go further”.

When one member of the audience inquired whether a pastoral retreat could be seen as self-indulgent, a withdrawal from the real world, O’Riordan became slightly indignant: “I was addressing those issues [‘deep dark inner places’] in the service of my art, not as a way of perfecting the self”. The year in the Lake District, he says, helped his writing but “if you go on living like that you turn into someone like Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath and…I don’t want that”. So, he moved to LA, and one of his sonnet sequences juxtaposes a poem on Dorothy Wordsworth's candlemoulds with the opener, 'this life isn't all hookers and blow, you know'.

He is unfazed by scaremongering about the death of poetry, of literature – “it makes good copy”, he agrees, but shouldn’t be taken to heart. Asked whether he worries about poetry being, or being considered, a ‘middle-aged’ art form, he replies “yes, I think it’s mainly the 18 to 21s and the over fifties who buy poetry books, but I don’t think that matters”.

“Look – poetry is a function of language, and as long as language is around – so will poetry”. He describes himself as “very lucky to have two female editors; that’s pretty rare in the poetry world”.  A reviewer himself, he says he sees each piece of writing – 500 words on a new novel, say – as a learning experience. Currently working on a novel of his own, O’Riordan nonetheless argues that everyone should be a poet first: “I’ve never trusted 21 year-old novelists – it’s like, what the fuck is going on with them?”.

I’m going to flagrantly disregard his warning about the perils of misquoting: Adam O’Riordan is probably nice enough to forgive my pun when I say that meeting him in the flesh (see the review of his reading if you’re feeling in the dark) was a humbling experience. O’Riordan wears his success lightly. If only all writers were this willing to come to Cambridge and drink wine with undergraduates.