Carol Ann Duffy: first female Poet Laureate of Britain

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Not that I was paying any attention to who were British poets laureate up till now (don't mean to sound proud of that), but for the first time in 341 years the Brits have honored a woman as poet laureate. John Dryden 1631-1700, below, was the first. (Others were Tennyson, Wordsworth, Ted Hughes. It is a surprisingly short list - 19 - considering the span of time, but since appointments were for life, some served decades after their appointments.) The New York Times piece about Duffy's ten-year appointment is here. The news has been out a while, but I had stopped reading newspapers online when my job got stressful in March. Do you do that? Stop reading the news when you're blinded with stress? Then I got happily distracted by the upcoming wedding. Anyway, I started writing this back in May, and it kept getting pushed to the back burner. So it's old news by now, but maybe you missed it.

A Scottish playwright, poet and children's story writer (including adaptations of stories by the Brothers Grimm), as well as Creative Director of the Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School, Duffy calls herself “a poet and a mother — that’s all” and is both popular and brilliant. Apparently she took the job only because she would be the first woman in the role.

Meager book reader that I am - so no reflection on her or her popularity - I had neither heard of Duffy nor read any of her poems. If I lived in the UK I would have known her as the most popular poet for the past decade. I see that she has written some wonderful, edgy story poems, some of them about imagined wives of famous men.

Four things I found out about Carol Ann Duffy that interest me:

• She's 53, close to my age.
• She was considered for the job of poet laureate ten years ago, but they didn't choose her because she is a Lesbian. (Wow, first female and first openly gay person in the role.) But she says the media have been making too much of this, and she's tired of the imagined controversy. (Andrew Motion was picked that round.)
  
• She's a mom - to 13-year-old, Ella. (Ella's father is the writer, Peter Benson, which indicates she is actually bi-sexual. NOTE: thank you for the correction in your comment, Ginnie. This does not necessarily indicate that.)
  
• Besides her annual salary of 5,700 pounds, she will get a traditional reward of a "butt of sack" — about 600 bottles of sherry, donated by the Sherry Institute of Spain (Ten Star Tapas is their online guide for cooking with sherry). Back when Dryden received his butt of sack, dark libraries with roaring fires were full of men mumbling in flat British dialogue, fingers pinching sherry glasses. I wonder what she'll do with it. Maybe she'd share some with me after the wedding when it's time to relax. I would want a fino, dry and light, none of that sweet Jerez Dulce. Remember Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"? Amontillado is a bit darker than fino, because it is exposed to oxygen. I digress.
  

Her most famous collection of poems - it does sound intriguing - is the 1999 The World's Wife, a skeptical view of "great men" from the view of their wives, like Queen Herod, or Pope Joan, Mrs Lazarus and Mrs Foust. Mrs Darwin's words: "Seventh of April 1952, Went to the zoo. I said to him, 'Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.'"

Duffy's popularity with even teenagers in Britain, and now the attention she's garnering for being the first woman poet laureate (and the first openly gay one), seem to set her up nicely to educate the masses that poetry matters - as her predecessor Andrew Motion put it, poetry isn't a "weird addition to life but a primitive thing at the centre of life." In these days of Twitter poetry (hey, President Obama digs Urdu poetry; when did he have time to learn Urdu? I think it shouldn't be read in translation; I digress again) Duffy can remind us that poems should be NEW, kick us in the pants, shake up our brain synapses and leave us wondering why we never saw the world like that before - and yet as if you always knew it. But I'm not going to toss out my 17th Century Prose & Poetry anthology from college, which contains Dryden's essays, and also one of my favorite poems: "Upon Julia's Clothes" by Robert Herrick. Pretty sexy for 17th century (though Herrick died a bachelor). Oh wait. Shakespeare already showed us the 17th century was sexy.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES

by Robert Herrick

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

If you don't like or usually read poems, why not give it a go? This is history, my dear. Well, and that's the name of one of Duffy's poems - rather heavy. Read it and feel something shift.

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor.