{"id":151070,"date":"2025-10-16T08:30:51","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=151070"},"modified":"2025-10-16T10:53:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T14:53:16","slug":"151070","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=151070","title":{"rendered":"“You cannot write and answer the phone.” — Paul Durcan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nToday is his birthday. I love him. He died in May of this year. <\/p>\n

Paul Durcan’s poems are chatty, observant, scathing, often very funny. He uses long humorous titles: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. (The humor, of course, just sharpens the points he makes.) Durcan has a strong sense of life’s absurdity, and makes merciless fun of humorless prudes. <\/p>\n

He had a rather horrifying time of it as a young man. His father was a judge, and their relationship was very challenging. To please this difficult man, Durcan went to UCD to study law, but whatever happened his first year in college was traumatic and his family essentially kidnapped him and institutionalized him. He was drugged up and given electric shock therapy. 45 years later Durcan said: <\/p>\n

I ended up in St John of God in a ridiculous way. There was nothing the matter with me. I’m sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest<\/em>. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it. I didn’t get a leucotomy, which would have finished me off completely, but I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name. I think I came out of it with a kind of melancholia.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “cure” made him sicker. <\/p>\n

His mother was the niece of John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary, executed after the Easter Rising in 1916. MacBride married Maud Gonne<\/a>. A legend. And so Durcan was born into this legacy, the myth of Irish nationalism and martyrdom. <\/p>\n

More, after the jump:<\/p>\n

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Once he got out of the mental institution, he was free to go his own way at last. He got married and had a couple of kids (the marriage fell apart in 1984: this “failure” haunted him). His wife worked in a prison, and Durcan was the stay-at-home dad for their daughters. He wrote poetry as the children played around him – and I think you can tell. (This is a compliment). His work is not belabored, it does not circle itself obsessively. It’s outward-facing. He was a very popular poet, and held the post of “Professor of Poetry” in Ireland, a national trust. Caitriona O’Reilly described the effect Durcan has on an audience in this piece in The Guardian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hilarity has always been Paul Durcan’s stock-in-trade. Anyone who has attended one of his electrifying poetry readings and been reduced to hysteria (a common enough occurrence) can testify to the unique flavour of his work, especially when read aloud by the poet himself. That voice, with its peculiar, precise sibilance, its mock-solemnity, its quavering rise and fall, is the voice that remains in your head when reading his poems afterwards. He is one of the few poets honest enough to admit (as did the hieratic TS Eliot) that poetry is a form of entertainment, yet intelligent enough to know that entertainment does not mean “cheap”. His populism, his popularity, as a poet are unusual – comparable only to that favour enjoyed in Ireland by his venerated contemporary Seamus Heaney.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s audio of him reading at the Irish Arts Center, in New York: <\/p>\n

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