Liz wrote and asked if anyone else was unfamiliar, or if there were different points of view concerning Carol Ann Duffy.
So, having lurked, having been on then off the list, then lurking again, and back again, I thought I would chime in, since I am writing from what Georgia O'Keeffe called 'the great faraway,' the desert of northwestern New Mexico, very far from any considerations of who might or might not be British poetry commander.
I first came across Duffy's work while reading Eavan Boland's Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. I found it an interesting book in general, and in particular, the last section where Boland discusses Duffy's "Warming Her Pearls," as well as Louise Gluck's "Mock Orange," a poem by Keats, and one of Boland's own works, in terms of the erotic object and how the woman poet must disassemble the traditional elements of poetry, in order to be the subject where she has been traditionally object, and so the "erotic object of the traditional love poem--such as Julia's silks--witnesses the orderly progression of power between poet and perception (what Boland defines elsewhere as the erotic being traditionally a drama of expression), the pearls restate the fixed decorum of that relation by deliberately suggesting a breakdown of power."
Perhaps this is passe to most on the group (and pardon the missing accent, though truthfully, most where I live would, in saying "passe" forget the accent altogether and just say it like it looks) but I find it deeply interesting, and part of the continuing difficulty of being "that emblematic figure" (to quote Boland again) the woman poet, which still seems to be the case, as suggested by the degree to which on this list, at least from my lurking view, women poets often become emblematic figures, representative of 'all that may be wrong with poetry.'
I haven't kept up with Duffy's work. Most of the time, I have too much to read and do, but what I have read is interesting, as is the work and speech of many women poets, for its own merits but also because of the disassembling of the hierarchial orderings of speech and being involved, just in order to be able to speak. And so I read her remarks, whatever they were, as a disassembling of those hierarchial orderings, rather than the installation of some new poetic order. Her preference for the 'simple' word, if there is such a thing, seems to be a statement of her own practice, rather than an advocacy. I am reminded of Hayden Carruth, an American poet, who similarly prefers the simple word, and who says so forcefully.
Best,
Rebecca
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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