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After considerable dithering and havering, Carol Ann Duffy has agreed to take on the position of Poet Laureate.
It appears she had worries about her private life receiving unwelcome attention. She might well also have been worried about what she could usefully do as Laureate.
She has previously indicated her unwillingness to write what are effectively greeting card verses for the royals.
And her poetry has never really addressed broad public subjects at all, drawing mostly on her own experiences, notably her love-life, presented with a fervour few heterosexuals manage these days.
But perhaps she can reclaim the role for poetry proper, poetry not so humiliatingly in the service of an official agenda? She must believe so — and she obviously felt she should have had the honour 10 years ago.
It seems that she lost out then to Motion because, as a Downing Street official disclosed to a reporter, Tony Blair was “worried about having a homosexual as Poet Laureate because of how it might play in Middle England”.
Although she and Motion have cosied up since, Duffy claimed at the time that the decision showed “a shameful failure of integrity and imagination”.
This time, clobbered senseless by the recession and swine flu, neither Middle England nor Gordon Brown can care much about the sexuality of the Poet Laureate one way or the other.
What matters more is that Duffy can actually write. Andrew Motion has fulfilled the public duties of the post in exemplary fashion, save for this one little problem that just wouldn't go away — he's not produced a single line that's any good. After 10 years of that, choosing a candidate who actually has a way with words looks like a brilliant idea.
And Carol Ann Duffy has already won all the prizes that matter — from the Whitbread and the Forward for Mean Time in 1993 to the T S Eliot for her love-affair sequence, Rapture, in 2005. She's been a mainstay of the school syllabuses now for 15 years.
Dons report that, among applicants for university English courses, she is the most commonly read writer of verse after Shakespeare. In one poll, her touching short poem Prayer — which artfully ends with a cadence from the Shipping Forecast, “Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre” — was voted the nation's second favourite poem, trailing only The Whitsun Weddings.
Duffy looks a natural for the job, then. Speaking up for poetry in general will certainly be no problem for her. Poetry should be everywhere, she says: Milton on milk cartons. She even thinks “it's nice to have a poet laureate in the way that it's nice to have a football manager or a mayor”.
Yet, in other ways, it was only to be expected that she would hesitate before accepting. It is inherently an establishment post, to put it mildly, and Duffy prides herself on her difference. Last time, she announced: “I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.” Will William and Kate appeal to her more?
Let's not forget, either, that she has written negatively about the royals. In 1997, she produced a tribute to Princess Diana which included the disobliging observation: “England's crown / is rusting. The century bleeds to its end.” Perhaps the Queen never studied it?
The public honours available to poets being so few and so eagerly contested, it takes a special kind of integrity simply to refuse the Laureateship, as Philip Larkin did, though.
Ten years ago, Duffy maintained that it was only because so many women had urged her to do it that she overcame her qualms. Even then, she was “never really sure”. This time, presumably, she's sure as sure can be.
Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Aged 16, she went to a gig by the Liverpool poet, Adrian Henri, 23 years her senior, and fell for him. She applied to Liverpool University to read philosophy to be with him and the pair became a couple for more than a decade. Duffy's style is still perhaps best understood as a late flowering of the Liverpool poets.
She published her first collection as an adult, Standing Female Nude, in 1985, to immediate acclaim. Many of the poems were punchy monologues, effectively short stories in verse, often exposing the speaker, often male. (One of them, Education for Leisure, beginning “Today I am going to kill something”, was removed from a GCSE anthology last year, after concerns about knife crime.)
Mean Time, her fourth and best collection, published in 1993, was autobiographical, sardonic as well as lyrical, full of pain and eroticism. It contains her anthology pieces, such as Prayer, Adultery, and Valentine, in which the speaker proclaims: “Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion ... Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,/ possessive and faithful/as we are,/for as long as we are.”
In 1995, Duffy had her daughter Ella, whose father is the novelist Peter Benson — and moved from London to Manchester, to be with her partner, the black Scottish novelist and poet Jackie Kay, whom she had met on an Arvon creative writing course. It is generally supposed to be their relationship, now over, that is commemorated in her 2005 sequence Rapture, celebrating a passionate affair.
In Betrothal, for example, the poet begs to be made a wife: “I will obey, obey. /I'll float far away,/ gargling my vows./Make me your spouse.”
The volume has become a lesbian icon, set to music and recited by Fiona Shaw, wildly praised by such reviewers as Margaret Reynolds. The poems are trenchant, rhythmic, full of feeling, often affecting but they rely a lot on repetition, recurrent images and obvious rhymes (death/breath, heart/art) and they more or less give themselves up entirely on a single reading. There are some real clangers, too (“Falling in love/is glamorous hell”).
And many of the poems resemble creative writing exercises, however skilfully executed, in which hypothetical situations are systematically worked through or single images doggedly pursued.
Duffy's more recent collections have all tended to be schematic in this way and none too encouraging to men.
In The World's Wife (1999), every poem was in the voice of the previously invisible wife of a great man from history or mythology, vehemently putting the record straight about the dolt, brute or fool. Mrs Sisyphus: “That's him pushing the stone up the hill, the jerk.” And so forth.
The truth is Duffy has long held a
public post, as the Poet Laureate of Lesbianism, a role she has fulfilled admirably.
Perhaps, far from disqualifying her from being Poet Laureate proper, it may be the best possible preparation for the rigours of the new job?
It will be so interesting to see.
Reader views (1)
Come on David! Surely you know that hesitation last time was because of Duffy's well documented tendency to become 'over tired and emotional', not her lesbianism. Anyone with a remnant of critical sense would agree that Simon Armitage is the better poet. But he's a bloke, so doesn't fit the desire to have a female laureate (of whatever quality). Simona Armitage might have had a chance.
- Dectora, London UK, 02/05/2009 15:43
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