Carol Ann Duffy is arguably the nation’s favourite living poet. “Poetry is our
national art,” she tells me in her garden outside Manchester. Then she says:
“I’ve got bird shit on my jumper.” She gets up to find a cloth and turns
back: “Shall we have a glass of champagne?”
Within two minutes the essential Duffy is all there: her certainty about
poetry and its place at the heart of things, her earthy straightforwardness,
always present in her poetry, and, for such a serious person, a love of life
and its good things, to be enjoyed without elitism or embarrassment. When I
try to think of a poet she reminds me of — the presence, the personality —
it has to be Walt Whitman.
She is outspoken, direct, attractive in her ease about what she does and who
she is, and just the kind of Poet Laureate that Britain needs — not snobby,
not class bound, not seeking personal advantage, political in that she wants
to change things, still idealistic in that she believes she — and poetry —
can change things.
And, of course, she’s a woman, she’s a Celt, and she’s gay.
When the news came that she had smashed through 341 years of male bardship, it
was an incredible moment for women, as well as for poetry. She’s the real
thing all right, with that combination of untamedness and seriousness that
makes her exciting and hard to ignore. But the laureateship is an
Establishment appointment — how does she feel about talking to the Queen and
being Britain’s official poet?
“I don’t have to write royal wedding poems, if that’s what you mean, or dirges
on the fire at Windsor Castle. If you google Buckingham Palace/Poet
Laureate, you’ll see the brief . . .” She pauses, “Poetry has changed since
the days of Larkin — he’s a good poet, but poetry has changed for the
better. It’s not a bunch of similarly educated men — it’s many voices, many
styles. The edge has become the centre.”
She’s right. This is a very good time for poetry written in English, and
whether you prefer Alice Oswald or John Agard, Jackie Kay or Fred D’Aguiar,
poetry now is both popular — in that it is inclusive of experience — and
dazzlingly rich in terms of language, image and emotional range.
“Look at this.” She has an early copy of Don Patterson’s new book, Rain,
and she knows I love his work so she lets me read it while she cleans her
jumper a bit more.
“It’s wonderful isn’t it? What I want to do with my laureateship is spread
poetry around — it isn’t about me, it’s about poetry — and so I’m going to
bring in all kinds of different poets, bring them to people’s attention, use
the influence that comes with this appointment to commission and encourage
but, most of all, to show people what we’ve got, because there’s enough
poetry out there for everyone.”
She has already begun, bringing together her favourite women poets,
commissioning new poems on the war in Iraq. “Poetry isn’t something outside
of life; it is at the centre of life. We turn to poetry to help us to
understand or cope with our most intense experiences.”
It was her own intense experience of a broken love affair that sprung Rapture,
a sequence of love poems, exact, agonising, and redemptive. Rapture
won the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize and reminded readers that Duffy, who has been
on school syllabuses since 1994, was a poet who would go on doing new work
and pushing poetry forward — as an emotion, as an experience, and as an art.
“Poetry can’t lie,” she says, though she resists the modern obsession that
reads everything as autobiography. “The poem tells the truth but it is not a
documentary” — though she laughs when she remembers her mother saying that
she should learn to write articles to earn a living. “Poetry is a way of
being near something. The love poem is really about the person writing it,
but ‘about’ and ‘person’ are transformed in the poem, so that it is the
reader who can get close to the feeling.”
This feels right to me. It seems that the best writers perform the Indian rope
trick and disappear, leaving the rope — the poem — for us to hold on to.
What happens to the poet to allow the feeling to happen to us is not
necessary for us to know.
Duffy is private about her personal life. It is well known that for many years
she was involved with the poet Adrian Henri, and that the two of them
remained friends until his death in 2000. Her daughter, Ella, now 14,
benefits from the regular presence of her natural father, the writer Peter
Benson, and the continuing closeness of the poet and novelist Jackie Kay,
with whom Duffy shared a home, and a long relationship. After our interview,
Kay joins us for supper, and it’s clear that as well as her easy intimacy
with Duffy, she has a lovely connection with Ella.
“Ella is the reason that I began to write for children,” Duffy says. “It
started as soon as she was born — look at First Summer in the
collection, that was the first poem I wrote for her.”
I look. It’s poignant, beautiful, as the child learns her first words —
butterfly, bee — “first words/ seen through the throat of a flower”.
New and Collected Poems for Children is a big delightful book that
ranges from the sublime to the kind of crazy that kids love:
Miss Thunder, Miss Lightning, met in the sky:
Delighted to meet you
Likewise, I!
Do you take hail in your tea?
I do
One lump or two?
The poems can be wonderfully silly but they are never patronising. The
language is always as tight and fired with thought as her adult work.
“I haven’t published an adult collection since Rapture.
That doesn’t bother me. I am comfortable with letting poems come when they
will. Poetry selects its own occasions.”
She talks of her “double bereavement, like two heavy stones” — the loss of a
love affair and the death of her mother, so that she was unable to write for
a while, except for children. “I couldn’t hear words. I felt deafened. So I
walked to a different part of the beach — away from the noisy infested
waters. I walked to somewhere quieter, gentler. The alive part, away from
the wounded part. I had to do that for a while, and I couldn’t write about
my mother at all. Now I can.”
Duffy’s mother, Irish and working class, used to make up rhymes to entertain
her children, and that zest — which the small Duffy loved — bubbles through
her nonsense poems:
At Manchester High School for Cows
the favourite lesson is Mooing —
they all make a terrible row
then it’s off down to lunch for some Chewing.
Children love learning and reciting poems and I can’t think of a better way
for any child to jump head first into language than with this book.
Duffy has been committed to working in schools for a long time, but she
believes her laureateship has given her more power, and she is using that
power as part of the GCSE Poetry Live! initiative. From November to March
2010, schools across the UK can benefit from having syllabus poets come to
read and answer questions. Duffy is doing all of these gigs, from Hull to
Guildford, from Liverpool to Brighton. Gillian Clarke and Simon Armitage are
joining her as the core poets, and guest poets such as Grace Nichols and
John Agard will parachute in and out.
“Poetry is in your everyday life — that’s what I want children to experience,
and the incredible pleasure of language.”
As a child she collected her whole family’s library tickets and used them to
get books for herself. “I had 42 library tickets. But my adult tickets — the
blue ones — were confiscated when my father caught me reading The
Well of Loneliness. I used to wonder what an invert was — did it mean
you had sex upside down?”
She read everything — and talks with feeling about her love of D. H. Lawrence
— a writer who became a casualty of feminism for a while. She doesn’t
believe that political correctness should select a reading list, nor is she
worried by “message”. “I’ve always liked Martin Amis. I want good writing,
not an agenda.” Schools need to hear this, and children need directing
towards reading as widely as possible. The narrowness of much modern
education worries her, and her public role will not stop her speaking out —
quite the reverse. “I will go on living the life of a poet — that means
being involved, engaged, criticising and celebrating.”
We have a bit more champagne. She is particularly pleased that she gets to
present the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and, unlike Andrew Motion, intends
to award it as regularly as she can, “because there are very good poets
working now, and they should be more visible”.
Visibility is the focus of her plan to put poems in towns. On paving stones —
“under your feet”. Anywhere where a poem will be seen and read. She’s aware
that books seem remote to a lot of people, but as a live gig poet, who likes
the out-loud experience of hearing poetry, making poetry available in
different formats is a way of keeping poetry present. “A poem isn’t a
special occasion. Why should it be? Poems in town centres will be like a
light in the window.”
She pauses — she often pauses because she is articulate but not glib. “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.”
When she was offered the laureateship she had no intention of trading the
human for an institution, though she was fully aware of the laureateship’s
place in the iconography of British life. “There’s the Queen, the Prime
Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury; you can feel a bit like a chess
piece. So I asked Ella how she would feel about her mother becoming a chess
piece . . .”
Ella thought for a bit, and asked: “Can you move diagonally?”
For Carol Ann Duffy, the answer is yes.
New and Collected Poems for Children is published by Faber and Faber at
£16.99. To buy it for £15.29 call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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