The Public Poet

Carol Ann Duffy has said that she accepted the laureateship on behalf of all women poets. This is a serious and unsentimental gesture from someone who has been supportive of emerging poets for more than twenty years. One of her first acts has been to showcase her female contemporaries in the Guardian and she has donated her £5,000 annual stipend towards a new prize.

She is, of course, a poet rather than a ‘woman poet’, although when asked about this label in an interview last week, she said she had no problem with it. This reminded me of what I learnt from her when starting out in the Eighties. At that time, there was a growing interest in women poets but a particular expectation of what a woman poet ought to be. Duffy showed us that you can, and should, have ambitions beyond those conventionally expected of the woman poet but that this did not mean resisting the fact you were a woman as well as a poet. She gave me a model of how to become, in my writing, myself.

She is certainly not a ‘poetess’ – a term still widely used when she published her first collection, Standing Female Nude, twenty-four years ago. Reviewing this book, Peter Porter identified Duffy’s combination of artistic ambition and political engagement: ‘It is good to see a crusading sensibility refusing to surrender any touch of art to the urgency of its cause.’

Around that time, Duffy edited a women poets pamphlet series for Turret Books and I was one of those she included. Receiving Duffy’s imprimatur meant everything not least because I was sure she was hard to impress. A Duffy poem looks you straight in the eye, holds your gaze, takes it where it wants you to go. Her work has an immediate appeal, which will serve her new role well, but it also has subtlety, gravity and force.

It is not only women whom Duffy will be promoting. She is a poet of society and history, with an eye to the dispossessed, something I expect her to pursue in her new role. The books she published during the late Eighties and early Nineties were an extraordinary articulation of the broken-down state of Thatcher’s Britain. This poet of dislocation (social, sexual, psychological, linguistic, political) met her subject in those bankrupt, disjunctive times.

The monologue form, traditionally the province of tragic heroes, has been used by Duffy to give a voice to those who cannot speak, from the ventriloquist’s dummy to the woman who fails to recognise her ageing self in the mirror to the Native American Indian of ‘Selling Manhattan’. She also uses it to explore the locked inner worlds of the kleptomaniac, the psychopath, a woman who imagines herself a man, a man who insists he is still a child.

In 1990 Duffy published The Other Country, which explores the relationship between past and present as it breaks down: ‘Where do you come from? / strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.’ Even language has become dysfunctional, as reflected in her wonderful satire of the service culture ‘Translating the English, 1989’. Its mechanized friendliness is out of kilter, just like the times: ‘Also history and buildings. The Houses of Lords. Docklands. / Many thrills and high interest rates for own good. Muggers. Much lead in petrol. Filth. Rule Britannia and plenty rape. Queen Mum.’ She skewered political cynicism in her sonnet ‘Weasel Words’, and inflated tabloid headlines to expose their brutal subtext: ‘CECIL-KEAYS ROW SHOCK TELLS EYETIE WAITER / ENGLAND FAN CALLS WHINGEING FROG A LIAR.’

I hope Duffy will be encouraged to be a public poet in the best sense: that is someone actively engaged with society at all levels and willing to offer a trenchant response. The signs are good judging by her recent reaction to the absurd decision of the educational authorities to ban a poem of hers that had been in an anthology on the syllabus for years. ‘Education for Leisure’ is about youth violence and begins ‘Today I am going to kill something. Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play god.’ An examiner’s complaint that it glorified knife crime led to the anthology being withdrawn from schools. Duffy responded in the form of another poem: ‘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?’ This witty and crushing deflection shows something of what Duffy’s detractors might be up against.

Carol Ann Duffy is possibly best known for her Feminine Gospels and The World’s Wife, which give the other side to some of our best known male figures from the perspective of Mrs Darwin, Mrs Aesop, etc., but there is another strain to her poetry which attends to the difficulty of retaining a sense of self: ‘Your own ghost, you stand in dark rain / and light aches out from the windows / to lie in pools at your feet.’ (‘Practising Being Dead’)

She is also a lyric poet, and writes love poems with the same force with which she takes apart modern life. Her ‘Valentine’ is typically subversive: ‘Not a red rose or a satin heart./ I give you an onion. / It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. / It promises light / like the careful undressing of love.’ When dealing with intimacy, she attends once again to the dislocation between what we want to express and what we are able to say: ‘For I am in love with you and this / is what it is like or what it is like in words.’

Carol Ann Duffy is a poet whose focus shifts from headline news to whispered secrets, from social disintegration to a broken heart. She is drawn to the unlit margins, the difficult angles, the unsettlement of assumptions and values. Doubtless she will be scrutinized and imposed upon, but she could also give us just what we need.

Read more about Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy’s poem, ‘The Woman in the Moon’, was published in Granta 103. Read Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem, ‘The Joy of Difficulty’, from Granta 100.