FOR A SHORT TIME, during the 1980s, your correspondent was a sphinctertighteningly dreadful poet. Most of my poetry didn't bear repeating and the remainder shouldn't have been written in the first place, but I somehow contrived to end up in Paul Durcan's creative writing class, one of two that he took as part of his term as writer in residence at TCD.

I was the cuckoo in Durcan's poetic nest, the proverbial turd in the punchbowl of verse endeavour.

I like to think that I contributed something to that class, if only by making everybody else look better by my presence. I can still recall the expression on Durcan's face as I read one of my heart rendingly obscure poems, the literary equivalent of throwing small stones at a stained glass window. Durcan looked like a man forced to watch a loved one being dismembered, little bit by little bit.

Despite occasional glitches like your correspondent, the writer in residence programme has been operating successfully in a number of universities for some time, offering students the opportunity to read their work aloud in front of their peers and an experienced writer, with the opportunity for critical discussion which this allows.

For the writers, the programme gives them breathing space in which to complete their own work, while passing on some of their experience and love of the medium to the students. The programme has attracted a number of high profile writers to Irish universities, including Durcan, Brian Keenan and Paula Meehan in TCD Glenn Patterson, Carol Rumens and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill in UCC and Cathal & Searcaigh and Rita Ann Higgins in UCG.

Vona Groarke, whose first volume of poetry, Shale, was published in 1994, is currently working on her next volume, Keeping House, while acting as writer in residence in UCG. "I feel my own work benefits enormously from the discussion and analysis of material in the work shops," she says. "I am more interested in the technique of a poem, how it's crafted, rather than the emotional content. I like the language to be spare, taut and lean.

"Students, on the other hand, tend to regard writing a poem as an exercise in the release of their emotions, what I call the `Californian approach'."

She says her work in UCG has forced her to "appraise and clarify"

her own approach to writing. "Writing can be a solitary and isolating experience. The contact with writers for whom literature is of primal importance has been very valuable and enjoyable."

Groarke's creative writing work shops cater not only for English students but for other students and staff in UCG, as well as adults from the greater Galway community.

"Many of the adults have been writing for years and have material which is almost ready for publication," she says. "What they often require is the final push, as it were, to complete the text and take the plunge to publish."

Novelist Deirdre Madden is currently writer in residence in TCD. where she studied English in the 1980s. She is also, like Glenn Patterson, a graduate of the creative writing course in the University of East Anglia started by Malcolm Bradbury/ Angus Wilson.

"For myself, I've been living abroad for quite a while, nine years or so," Madden says. The TCD programme, which includes a residence in the college, allowed her to return to Dublin for nine months with "a certain security".

Her workshops provide students with an opportunity not only to read and discuss their own work but to discuss literature in general. "The writer has a very different way of viewing books, literature and novels from the academic," Madden says. "It's not just helping them with their own work, it helps them to think of literature in a different way. It's good for the students to have that different view.

The pleasant surroundings of UCC are a considerable change from the far less salubrious surroundings of HM Prison Wakefield, a maximum security establishment for murderers and sex offenders. Wakefield was a previous writing residency for English born playwright Mike Harris though, thankfully, his visit was voluntary rather than at Her Majesty's pleasure.

"That was a lot different, yeah," recalls Harris, now UCC's writer in residence. "But they're both institutions."

As part of his duties with UCC, Harris is working with local people on an estate in the north of Cork city, putting together a play that will be performed in the city's Granary Theatre and in local community centres. He is also hoping to stage a series of workshops based on ones previously given to 10,000 primary school children in Manchester which examine the problem of young people driving stolen cars and try to prevent the kids from getting in the cars in the first place.

It was successful in Manchester and, Harris says, it could be worth a try here.

LIKE THE OTHER writers in residence, Harris also deals with students in workshops, helping them to develop their own skills. His view of the process is similar to that of Deirdre Madden working with a professional writer, he says, gives the students a different perspective not only on their own work, but on literature in general.

"Most of the students will be pursuing literature or drama courses, but they are essentially academic courses, so they are essentially analytical," Harris says. "The writer is probably dead and the text is fixed."

In the scripts that the students are presenting, by contrast, "everything is moveable". The workshops encourage students to look beyond first drafts and perhaps dauntingly to move towards 11th or 12th drafts, perfecting their work, with Harris emphasising the "paramount importance of narration".

Few writers can ignore the degree of financial security such a post offers. The main attraction at TCD, as Madden suggests, is a room for nine months, while Groarke lives in Dundalk but spends three or four days a week in Galway, where she has an office.

Harris, who spends part of his time in Birmingham, says writer in residence posts give a writer struggling with his or her work money, which is not to be sniffed at", but there are other benefits for practitioners of what, after all, is a solitary profession.

"What writers normally do is get up in the morning, sit in front of the word processor and make things up on their own," he says. Any employment which gets you out of the house and meeting people is actually good for the imagination and the writing process.