Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 113

the personages he evokes are enacted and transmitted to the

community that gave rise to them.^30

In ‘The Beckett at the Gate’, Durcan’s dramatic monologue is
framed within the experience of another drama. The protagonist
of Durcan’s poem could also be read as an updated version of
the socially awkward Prufrock in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock’ ( 1915 ). In a slight but humorous swipe at
the consumers of cultural zeitgeist, our character bemoans that
he could not go anywhere that spring ‘Without people barking
at you, / Button-holing you in the street and barking at you’.^31
The key question posed is: ‘Have you not seen Barry McGovern’s
Beckett / have you not been to the Beckett at the Gate?’ (p. 131 ).
Durcan uses this questioning as a constant refrain in his work
which successfully builds up dramatic tension. Well known for
his delivery and oral performances, Durcan has eschewed his cat-
egorisation as a ‘performance poet’ in the narrowest sense of the
word, as a poet whose work is written only for oral performance.^32
Gahern proposes that Durcan’s dramatic poems echo the patterns
of dramatic monologue and duologue in Browning and Yeats to
create ‘an extremely effective method of poetic discourse, allow-
ing the writer a highly desirable amalgamation of objectivity and
subjectivity, it is a form which lends itself with great facility to
performance’.^33
The cultural ‘groupies’ have forced our speaker to attend and
hilariously he comments:

I got there in good time.

I like to get to a thing in good time

Whatever it is – the bus into town,

or the bus back out of town –

With at least quarter of an hour to spare,

preferably half an hour, ample time

In which to work up an adequate steam of anxiety. (p. 132 )

Without even having begun to experience Beckett on stage, as
readers we are already encountering a Beckettian performance.
In a recent article Erik Martiny draws attention to the shadow of