Rebecca:
[Some bits snipped ...]
<<
>> Specifically, as dave pointed out,
>>without a context, it's difficult to read the language other than as
simple
>>cliché .
Well, Robin, I don't follow this at all. What other context should there be
for the poem other than the context it creates? And in the context which
this poem creates, it seems quite obvious that the poem is 'about' female
desire and intends to destabilize assumptions about class and gender.
>>
I was thinking about the lack of context specifically in terms of the
language -- a context to allow us to judge whether the elements of cliche in
the language are deliberate.
<<
but it seems to me a willful misreading to read the poem as if it were a
tawdry expression that uses its cliches unknowingly, as if the poet knew no
better.
>>
That's a telling point -- you could say that the (language) context is
Duffy's work as a whole. Here, I'm (still <g>) hampered by not having got
any further in reading her.
<<
>>comes, somehow, out of Larkin's "The Less Deceived", where these issues
are
>>also all at play.
>
>
<<
Well, I'm lost on this too, I don't know what it means to suggest that
Duffy's poem "comes, somehow, out of Larkin's 'The Less Deceived," somehow,
indeed, a most strange progeniture.
>>
Locally, I was thinking of the nexus of themes, but then more generally ...
On this, below ...
<<
Poems reply to other poems all the time. Sometimes the poet means to reply
to the earlier work with a kind of counter or revision or with that view
that was erased from the earlier work. I don't know Duffy's work well enough
to say, but perhaps her work is meant to reply in a way to Larkin's,
particularly its "mind-bogglingly" nastiness, though I don't know. To say
something comes out of something else implies that it is lifted or stolen or
plagiarized, and I don't think anyone intends to imply that here.
>>
No, I deliberately chose "comes out of" because I don't think it's plagarism
at all -- in lots of ways, the poems are very different. Perhaps filiation?
(An unfortunate word to chose in this context <g>.) Though Duffy goes out
off her way to deny any strong connection with Larkin.
<<
On the other hand, it could sound like the old rib argument, that out of
Larkin's rib, Duffy was created...
>>
[g]
<<
>>Anyway, I'm wandering -- how about this for what Hardy does with the
>>sex/class/language/history nexus? OK, the issue of female desire isn't
>>there (or maybe it is?) but all the rest is ...
Oh, well, Hardy is very interesting, but I have to say that this poem too is
"about" the issue of female desire, and has the same kind of intent to upset
prevailing assumptions:
>>
... right on.
<<
what it means to be ruined is given a very different interpretation in this
dialogue. Perhaps you meant that it wasn't about the issue of female desire,
in terms of one woman desiring another (as in the Duffy poem)?
>>
I was thinking that, initially, but ...
<<
though I can imagine an argument could be made that even that desire may be
present in that
>"bewitched by your delicate cheek" and "my dear," or even the degree to
which the change in the ruined one is noted by other's comparing her drabber
suffering self to her bewitching present incarnation.
>>
... then that occured to me, that there could be seen to be an erotic
relation between the two women in the Hardy poem. I dunno that I'd go with
that as a reading (it doesn't seem to me to fit the larger pattern of
Hardy's work), but I introduced the caveat: "(or maybe it is?)" for that
very reason. Though it's perhaps more about female empowerment than female
desire in either sense. Mind you, there's a (I think deliberate)
Significant Void in the way Hardy deals (comically) with the situation --
clothes but no sex!
I partly stuck the poem in (as well as it does seem to me apposite to the
issue[s]) because when I began to think beyond the specifics of Duffy/"The
Less Deceived", it occurred to me that, however the Duffy/Larkin link holds
(or doesn't), both she (based on some of Liz's comments) and Larkin are
working in a tradition of Plain Speech (something other than Wordsworth's
real language of men, which wasn't) where Hardy (at least for our time) was
the progenitor.
For me, Hardy is a touchstone in this area, that I measure Larkin against
(can you measure someone against a touchstone?) and find wanting. I'm not
sure just +who+ The True Heir of Hardy (pretentiousness and deliberate irony
intended) is, as the early twentieth century, the modernist movement came
smashing in, and all that Hardy was doing went on hold +till+ Larkin.
Perhaps U.A.Fanthorpe?
Cheers,
Robin
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