Carol Ann Duffy – ‘the world’s wife’

Carol Ann Duffy – ‘the world’s wife’ Contemporary Literature in English Natália Pikli ELTE

Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) • born in Glasgow – moved to Stafford (working class family, Scottish father, Irish mother, raised Catholic), writing poems since she was a child • read philosophy: Liverpool University • First poetry prize: National Poetry Competition, 1983 • Critic of poetry (Guardian) and editing the poetry magazine Ambit (1980s) • Manchester Metropolitan University: Professor of Contemporary Poetry/Creative Writing • 2009: Poet Laureate (first woman, Scot, Lesbian PL)

Major Poetic Works and Secondary Literature • Standing Female Nude (1985) • Selling Manhattan (1987) • The Other Country (1990) • Mean Time (1993) • The World’s Wife (1999) • Feminine Gospels (2002) • New Selected Poems, 1984-2004 (2004) • Rapture (2005) – a love story • The Bees (2011)

Other projects • Grimm’s Tales – plays for children, editions and volumes of poetry for children (eg. The Tear Thief, The Hat) • education: sheerpoetry.co.uk – helping British students to understand her poems • as Poet Laureate: poems commissioned (2011 royal wedding – Rings) or prompted by special occasions (David Becham’s injury – Achilles, death of the last two British soldiers of WW1- Last Post, The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009 – current concerns, Translating the British – 2012 London Olympics) • PLAYS: Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) Loss (1986), Casanova (2007) • Answering Back (2007) – 50 contemporary poets invited by Duffy, choosing and reflecting on poems by English poets (25 of them: women! → alternative canon)

‘ the most studied poet in Britain (after Shakespeare)’ v banning her poem 2008: AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (an Awarding Body in UK for specifications and holds exams in various subjects at GCSE, AS and A LEVEL and offers vocational qualifications) ‘banned’ Education for Leisure from exams/school anthologies as ‘celebrating violence’ Duffy: it’s ridiculous, "It's an anti-violence poem. It is a plea for education rather than violence." + a poem Mrs Schofield's GCSE

Education for Leisure – cf.Shakespeare’s King Lear: ”As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. /They kill us for their sport” Today I am going to kill something. Anything. I have had enough of being ignored and today I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day, a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets […] I squash a fly against the window with my thumb. We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in another language and now the fly is in another language. I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name. I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half the chance. But today I am going to change the world. Something's world. The cat avoids me. The cat knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself. […] I get our bread-knife and go out. The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

Carol Ann Duffy: Mrs Schofield's GCSE(publ. The Guardian 6 Sept 2008) 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? And which Scots witch knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy? Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt's death? To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark - do you know what this means? Explain how poetry pursues the human like the smitten moon above the weeping, laughing earth; how we make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing: speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.

What is poetry for? Duffy answers… • When asked if she thinks poetry ‘to some extent takes the place of religion' in a secular society. She replied, 'It does for me: I don't believe in God.' - secular spirituality, cf. Prayer • “Poetry is the music of being human” • ”Poets don’t have solutions, poets are recording human experience” • ”Every time a poet writes a poem it’s like it’s the first time. When you’ve finished a poem, you don’t know if you’ll ever write another one. Some poems arrive with a weight that’s more significant than other poems and you know it will take a lot of care to do it justice. Poetry, for so long now, has been the way I relate to everything. It’s like a companion. I can’t imagine ever being separated from it.” (interview in Stylist)

The Observer, 13 Nov 2002, Charlotte Mendelson • Part of Duffy's talent – besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety – is her ventriloquism. Like the best of her novelist peers ... she slides in and out of her characters' lives on a stream of possessions, aspirations, idioms and turns of phrase. However, she is also a time-traveller and a shape-shifter, gliding from Troy to Hollywood, galaxies to intestines, sloughed-off skin to department stores while other poets make heavy weather of one kiss, one kick, one letter ... from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets – that is, she makes it look easy.

Duffy’s poetry • ventroliquism (writer-persona-reader: it may be you) • conversational language (not the words are difficult but the concepts) – ‘deceptively simple’, humour and playfulness – postmodern not in style but in ideology • the construction of the self/identity • gender issues – dramatic monologues • love poems: Openheim’s Cup and Saucer, Small Female Skull – love poetry, desire and anxiety in love – not gender-specific • social ills and inequality/narrative poems and dramatic monologues: Model Village, Psychopath

Whoever She Was • ”The National Poetry Society Competition has again (see last year) failed to unearth convincing winners from a total of 12,000 submissions. The first prize of ₤ 2,000 was awarded […] to ‘Whoever She Was’ by Carol Ann Duffy. This is quite an effective evocation of some eerie moments in the relation between motherhood and childhood, but much of the detail is predictable, and the language is not very interesting, so that the poem doesn’t improve with repeated readings.” (Review, 1983)

They see me always as a flickering figure on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands, still wet, sprout wooden pegs. […] The film is on the loop. Six silly ladies torn in half by baby fists. When they think of me, I’m bending over them at night to kiss. Perfume. Rustle of silk. Sleep tight. […] Where does it hurt? A scrap of echo clings to the bramble bush. My maiden name sounds wrong. This was the playroom. I turn it over on a clumsy tongue. Again. These are the photographs. Making masks from turnips in the candlelight. In case they come. Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her as she shapes a church and steeple in the air. She cannot be myself and yet I have a box of dusty presents to confirm she was here. You remember little things. Telling stories Or pretending to be strong. Mummy’s never wrong. You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror Which they are holding to your mouth. Identity: mother/woman/object or living being/ dream or reality - who? fresh perspective – no idealisation/stereotype of motherhood pain/anxiety/ambiguity of reference ‘making masks from turnips’ – for whom (the children/herself?) She: title – last stanza She=I=persona=you Dramatic monologue: whose voice(s)? (ventriloquist) Turning points: mirror – beauty – death Conversational language, stereotyped phrases of mother-child relationship vs eerie ‘flickering’ surrealism. problem of identity Whoever She Was

Psychopath • Projection of the self – Hollywood heroes/myths (Brando, James Dean, Bogart – ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ - Casablanca, Elvis) – a masquarade of masculinity • Confronting different reflections of himself: in the shop-window, looking-glass, mirror in a bar: ‘My reflection sucks a sour Woodbine and buys me a drink. Here’s / looking at you.’ – who is looking at who? • Cf. Lacan’s stade du miroir • Duffy: ‘I come from a working-class background which, in many areas, was inarticulate. Not politically, but on those levels where one speaks of the personal, the feelings, the private inner life. What I mean is that language was often perceived as embarrasing or dangerous’ (cf. ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ Tony Harrison)

Dramatic monologues • dramatic monologues: ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ object/subject blurred • confessional (Romantic) poetry vs Psychopath • Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination – heteroglossia • the narrative unfolding behind the monologue (Model Village)

Love and desire – surrealism and Lesbian love: Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer She asked me to luncheon in fur. Far from the loud laughter of men, our secret life stirred. I remember her eyes, the slim rope of her spine. This is your cup, she whispered, and this is mine. We drank the sweet hot liquid and talked dirty. And she undressed me, her breasts were a mirror and there were mirrors in the bed. She said Place your legs around my neck, that’s right. Yes.

Oppenheim, 1936, Déjeuner en fourrure – the surrealist object

Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer • Lesbian love /seduction vs men/loud laughter • Drinking tea/sexuality/’religious communion’ – extraordinary and everyday simultaneously: coupling – in couplets • Animate/inanimate – the fetish as substitution for the whole (pubic hair) • Deceptively simple style vs alliterations, internal and half-rhymes • Mirrors – sameness: eroticising and objectifying themselves

Small Female Skull With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.What is it like? An ocarina? Blow in its eye.It cannot cry, holds its breath only as long as I exhale,mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,press my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh. For some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my headin my hands, appalled. It feels much lighter than I’d thought;the weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse,but with something else, as though it could levitate. Disturbing.So why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone, and take it to the mirror to ask for a gottle of geer?[…] Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind. No. I only weepinto these two holes here, or I’m grinning back at the joke, this isa friend of mine. See, I hold her face in trembling, passionate hands.

Small Female Skull - surrealism (ocarina) - objectified AND alienated self – whose skull? (I and she/lost lover) - banality and humour (lavatory seat vs Rodin’s The Thinker) • inside/outside – weeping in/out • mourning a dead lover and existential questioning • Memento mori, Hamlet (Laurence Olivier as Hamlet), the ‘skull beneath the skin’ in Jacobean tragedy • love and death - skull

Social problems and identity/language Sean O’Brian: The Deregulated Muse • history ‘has gone missing’ (vs male poets) – female history written from the ground up • Duffy ‘being in but not entirely of England’, witnessing the ‘dismantling of the nations’s hitherto broad consensual understanding of itself’ • postmodern anxiety about language – clichéd expressions (eg. Where do you come from?): both failure of expression and revealing some truth

Carol Ann Duffy: Originally […] All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenuewhere no one you know stays. Others are sudden.Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,leading to unimagined, pebble-dashed estates, big boyseating worms and shouting words you don't understand.My parents' anxiety stirred like a loose toothin my head. I want our own country , I said. […] I remember my tongueshedding its skin like a snake, my voicein the classroom sounding just like the rest. Do I only thinkI lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first spaceand the right place? Now, Where do you come from?strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.

The World’s Wife (1999) • reworkings of well-known fairy tales, history and myths – change of persective: Mrs Lazarus, Mrs Midas, Mrs Tiresias, Mrs Faust,AnneHathaway, Queen Kong, etc. • beyond straightforward feminism (cf. Angela Carter): Duffy’s refusal to confirm to any stereotypical notion offeminity • instead of ‘taking apart’ mythology – re-constructing (cf. Hughes, Heaney) from a different (feminine) viewpoint

Little Red Cap – ‘ars poetica’ – coming of age story of the woman poet – male tradition (canon) vs ‘my grandmother’s bones’ and ‘singing, all alone’ […] He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loudin his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big earshe had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry. […] Lesson one that night,breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, forwhat little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?[…] I took an axe to the wolfas he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and sawthe glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones.I filled his belly with stones. I stitched him up.Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

Alphabet from Auden (excerpts) When the words done gone it’s hell Having nothing left to tell. Pummel, punch, fondle, knead them Back again to life. Read them When you doubt yourself and when You doubt their function, read again. Conclusion?

Carol Ann Duffy – ‘the world’s wife’