Carol Ann Duffy

Poet for Our Times

Jane Dowson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137415622
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137415639
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This is the only monograph to consider the entire thirty-year career, publications, and influence of Britain's first female poet laureate. It outlines her impact on trends in contemporary poetry and establishes what we mean by 'Duffyesque' concerns and techniques. Discussions of her writing and activities prove how she has championed the relevance of poetry to all areas of contemporary culture and to the life of every human being. Individual chapters discuss the lyrics of 'love, loss, and longing'; the socially motivated poems about the 1980s; the female-centred volumes and poems; the relationship between poetry and public life; and poetry and childhood and written for children. The book should whet the appetite of readers who know little of Duffy's work to find out more, while providing students and scholars with an in-depth analysis of the poems in their contexts. It draws on a wide range of critical works and includes an extensive list of further reading.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Jane DowsonCarol Ann Duffy10.1057/978-1-137-41563-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Poet for Our Times

Jane Dowson¹

(1)

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Carol Ann Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry—any poetry—for years. (Boland 1993)

The effortless virtuosity, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy’s verse have made her our most admired contemporary poet. (Winterson 2009)

It’s particularly apt to honour a laureate who so energetically challenges Auden’s oft-quoted line ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. (Wilkinson 2014)

End Abstract

Introduction: ‘How Poetry / Pursues the Human’

Due to her originality, unusual range, prolific output, and swelling influence, Carol Ann Duffy is a major poet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For over thirty years, she has been lauded as one of the most gifted, relevant, and versatile poets of her time. She has published ten main poetry collections—along with pamphlets, poetry selections, poems for children, and edited collections—starting with Standing Female Nude (1985) that received the Scottish Arts Council book award. The many subsequent prizes included: the Somerset Maughan for Selling Manhattan (1987); the Cholmondley (1992); the Forward and Whitbread for Mean Time (1993); the T.S. Eliot for Rapture (2005), and the 2012 PEN/Pinter Prize, aptly given for work of ‘outstanding literary merit’ that casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.¹ Duffy was awarded an OBE in 1995, a National Endowment for Science Technology and Art (NESTA) in 2000, and a CBE in 2002. In 2009, she became the first female Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, a post that crowned the ways in which Duffy raises poetry’s profile and that entrenched ‘woman’ and ‘poet’ as respected adjuncts. The laureateship further released her passionate labour towards enhancing the place of poetry in contemporary culture. In 2015, she was made a Dame, the female equivalent of a knighthood, and hailed ‘a great public poet who deserves her public honour’ (Wilkinson 2014).

When Duffy was appointed Laureate, reviewers concurred on how her appeal is both deep and broad: ‘As one of the bestselling poets in the UK, Duffy has managed to combine critical acclaim with popularity: a rare feat in the poetry world’ (Flood 2009); ‘Carol Ann Duffy is that rare thing—a poet whose work is loved by children and adults alike, critics as much as the public’ (Cooke 2009). Not only is her poetry printed in the broadsheets and analysed in academic works, but it also appears in popular magazines, tabloid newspapers, and Internet forums. She has worked in primary and secondary schools where her poems have long been on exam syllabuses at GCSE, Advanced, and Scottish National and Higher levels. She has published several poetry books for children, winning the coveted Signal Prize for Children’s Verse (1999), and edited A Laureate’s Choice: 101 Poems for Children (London: Macmillan Children’s Books 2012) and two anthologies aimed at teenagers, Stopping for Death (1996) and I Wouldn’t Thank You for a Valentine (1992). She has also edited: Anvil New Poets 2 No. 2 (1995); Times Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-First Century (1999); Hand in Hand: An Anthology of Love Poetry (2001); Out of Fashion: An Anthology of Poems (2004); Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past (2007); To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poetry (2009); Jubilee Lines: 60 Poets for 60 Years (2012); and 1914: Poetry Remembers (2013). Her individual poems have been claimed for several territories, appearing in exhibitions and anthologies organized by timescale, nationality, gender, sexuality, or theme—from childhood, generations, and love, to films, short stories, memory, and the millennium.² These anthologies target many audiences, including new parents, lovers, cancer sufferers, and poetry buffs. She is counted as British, English, and Scottish, and her poems are translated into Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. From the United States, she received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1995 and the E.M. Forster award in 2000. Duffy writes opera librettos, is sometimes accompanied by musician John Sampson, and performs with the poetry band LiTTLe MaCHiNe. Her poetry has been set to music and read on the radio.

The breadth of her readership, subject matter, and literary complexity, makes Duffy magisterial but also vulnerable to disparagement. A furore over ‘Education for Leisure’ (SFN 15) exemplifies the battle involved in being a fresh brave voice against the conservative watchdogs in Education and the Arts. As the title indicates, the poem captures the restlessness of a youth for whom ‘leisure’ is a euphemism for unemployment. The dramatic monologue invites sympathy for the youth’s disempowerment and subsequent impulse for violence: ‘I get our bread-knife and go out. / The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm’. In 2008, when an external examiner, Pat Schofield, complained that the poem glorified knife-crime, the AQA exam board ordered schools to remove from its GCSE syllabus an anthology containing the poem. Duffy’s riposte, ‘Mrs Schofield’s GCSE’ (Bees 15), displays her wit, compassionate politics, and how her imagination is first and foremost literary. She parodies exam-speak and cites fragments of violent threats or acts in Shakespeare’s plays, always compulsory on the National Curriculum—‘You must prepare your bosom for his knife, / said Portia to Antonio in which / of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife / insane with jealousy?’—then commends the purpose and power of poetry. Mrs Schofield allegedly called the poem ‘“a bit weird”’ and continued, ‘“But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that’s me”’ (Addley 2008). This ‘weirdness’ is, of course, what makes Duffy’s work original and affecting. A typical line, ‘a bowl of apples rotten to the core’ (‘Disgrace’, MT 48), blends the pleasant image of a fruit dish, evocative of a still life painting or homely domestic space, with a disturbing voiceover that all is not well. This tendency to make something familiar seem alien signals what Freud famously called ‘unheimlich’ (‘uncanny’), and pushes the reader to a new awareness, which in Freudian terms would be about something repressed. Thus, the speaker in ‘Education for Leisure’ is a recognizable stereotype whose social disaffection represents a segment of society that we might wish to ignore but are uncomfortably pushed to face, contemplate, and even find sympathetic. We also see how Duffy is ‘for our times’—historically specific and enduringly relevant—for although written during the 1980s, the poem is also pertinent to the economic recession that began in the mid-2000s.

While the spat over ‘Education for Leisure’ is amusing and Duffy the clear winner, the notorious comments from the Oxford Chair of Poetry in 2012 give more pause. In a lecture, ‘Poetry, Policing and Public Order’, Sir Geoffrey Hill made a denigratory remark about one of Duffy’s poems: ‘“My simultaneous incompatible response is this is not democratic English but cast-off bits of oligarchical commodity English such as is employed by writers for Mills & Boon and by celebrity critics appearing on A Good Read or the Andrew Marr show”’ (Flood 2012). Although Duffy graciously ignored the hubristic slight, it was reported in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Guardian—right wing and left wing, broadsheet and tabloid papers, all of which proved loyal to her.³ The Daily Mail clearly welcomed her appeal to readers who might not naturally read poetry: ‘She claims to have grown up in a “bookless house” and has become a passionate advocate for the teaching of poetry in schools and the popularization of the art among the young’ (Gayle 2012). It printed ‘Remembering a Teacher’, the poem that Hill dismissed as juvenile, and referred to an interview for The Guardian in which Duffy had allegedly said that mobile phone texts and Facebook could foster poetry writing due to their methods of condensing language. Importantly, Hill and the paper misrepresented her remarks and less reported was his approval of ‘The Christmas Truce’ as something ‘“radically different”’ (Flood 2012). Thus, the media can both shape and topple a poet’s status by stirring controversy and preferring gossip to plaudits. However, as Lemn Sissay comments on Hill’s attack, the dispute over what makes good poetry and who should read it prove that ‘Poets are at the heart of revolution because revolution is the heart of the poet. Poets see things because they won’t look anywhere else. They are single-minded in their pursuit of the poem’ (2012).

Given the accolades, it might seem unthinkable that Duffy’s rightful status is not secure but the atavistic chauvinism in classing Duffy as a ‘Mills and Boon’ poet echoes the fates of female poets over the preceding 300 years. Published and esteemed in their lifetimes, they lacked literary recognition and were subsequently side-lined or forgotten. In her day, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was suggested for laureate but passed over for Tennyson; then, after his death, Christina Rossetti was proposed but not appointed; and, rather than have a woman, there was a gap of four years. This book, therefore, aims to record the full range of verdicts on Duffy’s achievements, to consolidate current readings, and to find traits that run across her entire oeuvre. Primarily, it defines what ‘Duffyesque’ means as an evaluative benchmark for other poets, just as Duffy is frequently compared to Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, or Tony Harrison. The subtitle, ‘Poet for Our Times’, is taken from the title to a poem discussed later that dramatizes the crossover and distance between poetry and journalism. The phrase flags the relevance of Duffy’s poetry to the period in which she writes but does not mean the relevance is only to her lifetime. Duffy uniquely draws on the languages of both her contemporary culture and her literary heritages to probe what it means to be human, both in and beyond a specific time and place. As evidence, her date-specific ‘Translating the English, 1989’ (TOC 11) was included in a millennium anthology titled News That Stays News (Rae 1999), and her poems are read at ceremonies that mark the rites of passage from birth to death.

In ‘Mrs Schofield’s GCSE’, Duffy addresses the specific issue of censoring her poem then pleads: ‘Explain how poetry / pursues the human like the smitten moon / above the weeping, laughing earth; how we / make prayers of it’ (Bees 15). Such a poem says much more than the words through the vital vehicles of image and sound. Here, her favourite symbol, the moon, is ‘smitten’, as if with the love and pain it sees on earth, and the assonance of the long ‘oo’—in ‘human’ and ‘moon’—stresses the magnetism between poetry and humanity. In these few lines, Duffy condenses her sense of vocation and her belief that poetry can mirror, provoke, and sacralise tears or joy: ‘“Poetry isn’t something outside of life; it is at the centre of life. We turn to poetry to help us understand or cope with our most intense experiences. … Whether I am writing for children or for adults, I am writing from the same impulse and for the same purpose. Poetry takes us back to the human”’ (Winterson 2009). As discussed later and through the chapters, ‘To be human is to reflect on being human’ (Mousley 2013: 171) and this reflecting is what poetry does and produces most intensely. Duffy’s poems plumb our private interiorities in which we think and feel, and which we struggle to access or verbalize. They express and explore our attempts to put into words the knotty states of love, loss, and yearning for connection—to feel at ‘home in our hearts’ (‘Disgrace’, MT 48). They pinpoint our desire to shape ourselves from within rather than according to the sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Poet for Our Times
• 2. Lyrics of Love, Loss, and Longing
• 3. Voices from the 1980s and After
• 4. Words Between Women
• 5. Poetry and the Public Sphere
• 6. Poetry About and for Childhood
• Backmatter