Before we begin, Paul Durcan produces a piece of paper.
Just ten minutes previously, he felt a sudden urge, he says, to remember the last verse from W.H Auden’s ‘Fall of Rome’.
He raises the note, which he’s scribbled on with black biro, projecting each word with a careful steady cadence:
‘All together elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ miles and miles of golden moss/ Silently and very fast.’
We’re here to talk about Durcan’s 22nd collection of poetry Praise In Which I Live and Move And Have My Being, but the conversation has strayed to a time when the naive 19-year-old poet arrived in London in search of work.
The year was 1964. He came with his friend and fellow poet: the late Michael Hartnett. Eventually Durcan found himself a desk job at the North-Thames-Gas-Board. “It was terrible, the end of the road. I’m ashamed to say that I bailed out after three months, but it seemed to me like an eternity,” he says.
Every afternoon on his lunch break — to distract his soul from the physical and mental ennui of his administrative duties — Durcan would walk into the vestibule of the Tate Gallery, to gaze in wonder at the paintings of Francis Bacon.
Although he has lived back in Ireland for many years, the country he left, in the early 1960s, was a de-facto theocracy: a state controlled by the totalitarian forces of the Catholic Church.
“Ireland at that time was like an eastern European communist country, all you had to do was to substitute the bishops for The Communist Party. It was all about conformity. If the rebels of the 1916 Rising aspired to some sort of free country, by the mid 1950s, all their dreams were completely gone.”
Durcan has never been one to shy away from the political in his poems, particularly his criticism of the IRA. In the poem ‘The Dublin Belfast Railway Line’ from his Whitbread -Prize-winning collection Daddy, Daddy, he said of the militant republican organisation:
‘I want to hear each of them/ Swear an oath on a copy of Mein Kampf/ To the unification of Ireland.’
While many of his peers such as: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and John Montague preferred to write about “The Troubles” rather obliquely, Durcan’s poems on the conflict seemed to evoke a direct and visceral rage against Republican violence. He face darkens when I ask him about this.
“Even though I come from a very nationalistic and Republican family, I am also a human being, so I loath all murders and killings, but particularly the atrocities that were carried out by the IRA, because they claimed to represent my nation and my people.”
Durcan’s verse is known for its satirical jibes, black humour and the zany images he presents to the reader. In the poem ‘On Being Collected at the Railway Station in Ennis’, from his latest collection, the poet is travelling in the passenger seat of a car where he imagines himself taking off in the air: ‘Flying low across the new suburban rooftops of Ennis.’
In ‘Crinkle, near Birr’ from, Daddy, Daddy, the poem enters into a world of farcical surrealism:
‘Daddy and I were lovers/ From the beginning, and when I was six/ We got married in the church of Crinkle, near Birr.’
Being labelled a surrealist is a title Durcan is not entirely comfortable with, however, he admits his style was no doubt influenced by painters such as Magritte and De Chirico. He also cites the avant-garde poet, David Gascoyne, whom he became acquainted with, as someone who was instrumental in advancing how he thought about poetry.
“[Gascoyne] was the first to write about surrealism, and I read his work very closely through the early 1960s. He had drunk deep at the well of surrealism, and he knew a lot of them in Paris who were involved in the movement. So I suppose it just enters the bloodstream, but when I hear people talking about me as a surrealist, I am very circumspect. There is a danger of a poem being too clever, cerebral, and mechanical.
“These absurd arrangements of events can be really dangerous, because, for me, poetry must come from what Keats called ‘The holiness of the hearts affections’ or the ‘emotional recollected in tranquillity’ as Wordsworth put it,” he adds.
Durcan has always assumed the role of the public poet. Whether that is questioning political discourse — at both national and international level — or simply documenting his daily encounters with shopkeepers and bank clerks; the poems essentially attempt to capture — in a language that is highly accessible — the essence of what everybody else seems to miss, he says.
“I guess as a poet you are asking yourself, have you the capacity to look on, and continually observe? Because the truth of the matter is that so many of us are not listening, or really looking. I think when you feel you have accomplished a poem, that’s what you are aspiring to. But very often, because we are so limited as human beings, reality passes us by.”
By browsing through the thousands of poems Durcan has published, it becomes apparent how the language fluctuates between the darker shadows of the human spirit, and the lighter comedic moments that have audiences falling off their seats at his readings. A quick glance at some of the titles of his poems aptly delineate this dichotomy of humour and melancholy at work: ‘The Woman Who Keeps Her Breasts in the Back Garden’, ‘Diarrhoea Attack at Party Headquarters in Leningrad’, ‘Margaret Thatcher Joins the IRA’, Self Pity’, ‘Thinking About Suicide and ‘Reading Primo Levi by the Family Fireside at Evening’.
Our conversation over the course of two hours is mostly about other writers and books on various topics: philosophy, poetry, fiction, and history. Before he leaves, Durcan has one last anecdote. He tells me about the Jewish-Romanian existential-philosopher and poet, Benjamin Fondane, who spent his final days in a death camp in Poland in 1944. Even to his last, says Durcan, he was regaling the others in the camp with laughter and stories.
“To have the courage to be able to see a smile in the midst of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which epitomised the depths of depravity and evil, well that is really something,” he says.
And somehow we’re full circle back to the works of Francis Bacon. What was it that Durcan saw in the paintings that moved him? He hesitates, perhaps afraid to speak, because he feels his words might not do justice.
“It was what hit upon the nerves. To me, this was it. This was the furthest you could go.”
Does he aim for such profundity every time he sits down to compose a poem? His answers often take time, but they are certainly worth the wait.
“I like to quote Yeats and his poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. When he is talking about Keats and others in that dialogue, he says ‘while art is but a vision of reality’. That always meant the world to me.”
“That’s what poetry is about: getting out of your miserable self and opening your eyes.”
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