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Duffy to donate Laureate money to poetry prize
Robert Mendick01.05.09
Carol Ann Duffy, who will be unveiled today as the new Poet Laureate, will give up her stipend to fund an annual poetry prize.
Duffy, 53, is entitled to £5,750 a year, but she has asked that it is given to the Poetry Society to fund the prize for the best collection of published poetry. She will be officially announced today as the new Laureate - taking over from Andrew Motion - at a an event in Manchester.
Her appointment was approved by the Queen, following a recommendation by Culture Secretary Andy Burnham. She will hold the post for 10 years and follows in the footsteps of poets such as John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, John Masefield, Sir John Betjeman and Ted Hughes. She is the first woman to hold the post.
Duffy, who was born in Glasgow, was a frontrunner last time the post was on offer but is said to have lost out partly because Tony Blair was concerned by her private life.
The professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University is a lesbian and single mother. She was awarded the OBE in 1995 and the CBE in 2002 for services to poetry.
Duffy said today: "I'm very honoured and humbled to become Poet Laureate, not only when I think of some of the great poets who have occupied the post, but when I think of the wonderful poets writing now. The Laureateship is important because it draws attention to the role poetry can play in the lives of ordinary people."
Gordon Brown said: "She is a truly brilliant poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting a whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly."
Reader views (4)
The donation of her princely stipend for a fund to honour other poets' work is a splendid first gesture. Readers need to stop carping and recognise that the Poet Laureate is an institution, a perfectly modest institution, that is worthy of support by anyone who has ever found any pleasure in a poem and that would be a surprisingly large proportion of the population. Poetry in one form or another is important to almost everyone, but it has to compete these days with a media that is stuffed to the gills with sex, drugs and rock & roll and while no one should seek to wholly deny poetry any of the glamour of that modern trinity, it does mean that good poetry is often simply drowned out.
- Bloke, London
Critically acclaimed, a towering figure? Most modern critics couldn't see that the emporer has no clothes if they tried. Here is an example of her so-called poetry:
Stuffed
I put two yellow peepers in an owl.
Wow. I fix the grin of Crocodile.
Spiv. I sew the slither of an eel.
I jerk, kick-start, the back hooves of a mule.
Wild. I hold the red rag to a bull.
Mad. I spread the feathers of a gull.
I screw a tight snarl to a weasel.
Fierce. I stitch the flippers on a seal.
Splayed. I pierce the heartbeat of a quail.
I like her to be naked and to kneel.
Tame. My motionless, my living doll.
Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell.
- Eric Legge, Ongar, Essex
Great start for the Poet Laureate. I hope she enjoys the sherry that comes with the job.
- Adrian, London.
Let's face it, the Poet Laureates of the last three or four decades have been pretty mediocre, and she is not an exception. She doesn't look in any way exceptional, looking like any other miserable-looking middle-aged woman, and in this case the cover matches the creative output.
On the BBC news, the report spoke of someone incredibly original. (Why is everying described as incredibly this and incredibly that these days when it is all too credible?)
Apparently, Gordon Brown said: "She is a truly brilliant poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting a whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly."
What's the betting that he got someone to write that for him and he hasn't even read this woman's poety?
I have read her poety, and trust me, there is nothing in it that struck me as being original. It's less original than Tacey Emin's unmade bed, which was only original because it had never occured to anyone that an unmade bed could be displayed as a 'work of art'.
- Brenda Blessed, Plymouth, England
