<snip>
I'm hard-pressed to understand how Duffy's poem----not what others may say
about it or assume she means by it----nails education as producing violence.
[JP]
<snip>

Here is the whole poem. The point (in her terms) is that 'leisure' is
actually unemployment: 'Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town /
for signing on. They don't appreciate my autograph.'

'Autograph' links the emptiness of the speaker's life with the vicarious
experience of following 'superstar(s)'. Compare the narrator of Aldo Nove's
*Puerto Plata Market*, who wonders whether life might not in fact be what
the dead watch on television. However, Duffy is actually much less
interested in this aspect than in the rhetorical ventriloquism of 'bog',
'panicking' and so forth.

*Education for Leisure*

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something's world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don't appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he's talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

CW
_______________________________________________

'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
might call it life.' (Judith Revel)