Attack of the Middle-Aged Poet Laureates from the Planet Lesbos
That’s right, we have some similarities between the Poets Laureate of the United States and the United Kingdom – Kay Ryan and Carol Ann Duffy respectively.
This doesn’t mean that I regard their work as having comparable merit. I find Carol Ann Duffy’s work laboured and dull, almost always being full of imaginary full stops and pauses where you don’t want them. To give a few examples, here we have her poem about the late great U.A.Fanthorpe. It starts:
We first met when your last breath
cooled in my palm like an egg;
Cooled like an egg? This is a prime example of how she tries too hard to find unusual similes and often just ends up sounding silly.
Here’s another:
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
It promises light? Light. From an onion.
Finally this indicates something about her worldview. It’s from a children’s poem, ‘Your School’.
Your school knows your name-
Shirin, Abdul, Aysha, Rayhan, Lauren, Jack-
and who you are.
Your school knows the most important thing to know
You are a star,
a star.
As if the little ninnies aren’t becoming self-obsessed enough as it is. Apart from that, it’s just unspeakably corny.
Kay Ryan, on the other hand, writes well, has a good sense of rhythm and rhyme, and doesn’t feel the need to always be inserting quirky unusual out of place comparisons into her work or drawing contrived analogies.
Blandeur
If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.
I agree she is rubbish and writes ridiculous insincere poetry. She also threatens to destroy the post of Poet Laureate by a) declaring that the post should be made up of entirely women for the next 300 years to right the chauvinistic wrongs of the past and b) by saying that she will not write any Royal Poetry – er thats kind of the job!!
Instead she intends to go into schools and preach about “how homosexuality is a lovely ordinary thing”. This seems to be her hijacking the role for her own personal agenda – (by the way I’m not inferring that she might be trying to produce a generation of young lesbian girls for her own enjoyment rather that she may be using the post to change the attitudes of society in a way that she feels people should think!)
Interesting, I hadn’t heard that yet. I bet most people wish they could change their job descriptions. I’ll go with: go onto beaches and preach about how “bikinis are a lovely ordinary thing”.
However, she was congratulated by Gordon Brown, which means she’ll probably get hit by a bus tomorrow.
Somehow I don’t believe the third line of the ‘Your School’ poem made it into textbooks!
LOL, took me a second to figure out what you were referring to there, Ross. A reminder to take care with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-P. Corrected now, although I think “Advertisement – article continues below ยป” does add a certain something to the poem.