Anxiety, Apprenticeship, Accommodation: Paul Durcan and his Poetic Forefathers

Abstract

Anxiety, Apprenticeship, Accommodation:Paul Durcan and his Poetic Forefathers Erik Martiny Throughout the considerable poetic outpout of Paul Durcan (b. 1944), one encounters work, often occasional poems, that concerns his literary forefathers. These poems, in turn, interact with the abundant presence of the father figure in his oeuvre. Looking at the forefathers portrayed in Durcan's poems about older male writers can help us to assess in what ways, and to what degree, Durcan adopts his literary precursors as substitute father figures. Durcan's conception of the father as "New Man"—a product of 1980s feminist progress—allows him to reject Freud's and Bloom's patriarchal visions of the forefather as "great inhibitor." It may well be, too, that his predilection for writing about male poetic precursors can be accounted for as a symptom, among other things, of his need to assert his vision of the New Father in opposition to the repressive, patriarchal values of his actual father, John James Durcan, the former president of the circuit court of Ireland. Arguing from a feminist perspective, Ruth Padel expressed her dismay that a poet so engaged with the depiction of women as Durcan shows seemingly little regard for female poets. Padel argues that poetry for Durcan is "perhaps inevitably a male journey, male game—except occasionally, when there's a special woman ('Woman Footballer of the Year'), or a specialist sport that does not involve balls. . . ."1 There is some truth in Padel's remarks; but she fails to explain in what way this tendency is "inevitable," and largely overlooks the homage Durcan paid to Sylvia Plath in his collection Daddy, Daddy (1990). Durcan's fascination with earlier male writers should not be read as an exclusion of female writers, but rather, as a means of taking stock of and coming to terms with his troubled relationship to his own father. Since Padel's dismissive remarks, Durcan has also eulogized another American foremother, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, in Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999); in "The Who's Who of American Poetry," he states that Bishop is, among much else, "the Patrick Kavanagh of [End Page 92] Rio de Janeiro."2 This is a supreme tribute, coming from such a Kavanagh-worshipper as Durcan. Yet it is true that few, if any, contemporary poets can compare to Durcan as a prolific adopter of poetic fathers. Writerly figures both living and dead are a staple feature of his work, finding their way into every one of his collections—almost as if he needed to feel the reassuring presence of older male writers.3 Up to a certain point, Harold Bloom's time-honored "anxiety of influence theory" is helpful in explaining Durcan's concern with forefathers. Bloom's much revered, and much reviled, theory of poetic creation remains a cornerstone in any study of a poet's relationship to his forebears. Despite the theory's appeal, its flaws are glaring: as Gilbert and Gubar have pointed out, Bloom fails to deal with the existence of literary foremothers and like the Freudian model it is based on, it ignores the issue of how women deal with their Oedipal precursors.4 Moreover, the paucity of Bloom's examples and their insufficient development make his six revisionary ratios seem vague, and sometimes arbitrary and interchangeable. Like Freud, Bloom tends to over-universalize his concepts, too rigidly reducing and structuring the study of what is inescapably multifarious. Edna Longley largely ignores Bloom, dismissing him as a nugatory example of "individualism and Romantic subjectivism run mad."5 And yet, Bloom remains, and his ideas on influence are still alluded to decades after their publication. Neil Corcoran—despite his misgivings about how Bloom's work "chimes too harmoniously with American masculinism" and that it delivers the "distressing news that poetry is the sublimation of aggression"—has recently made a convincing case by applying some of Bloom's theories to Paul Muldoon, Heaney, and Joyce.6 Durcan, from his early collections Endsville (1967) and O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975), to his most recent work has never ceased to interact—perhaps more in an interpersonal, rather than strictly intertextual way—with his forerunners...