Sherry Chandler

Politics

As you may know, Carol Ann Duffy is England’s first woman Poet Laureate. Here, at The Guardian, is her first official poem, “Politics.”

How it makes of your right hand
a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh
a dry leaf blowing in the wind, . . .

Read it all.

An article accompanies the posting:

She could have chosen to write on Prince Philip’s 88th birthday or the sombre commemorations for the D-Day landings in Normandy. Instead Carol Ann Duffy has chosen a far more meaty subject for her first poem as poet laureate: politics. And she’s angry �more Duffy Furiosa in the words of one expert.

Duffy’s poem Politics is today published for the first time by the Guardian. It is a powerful, passionate commentary on the corrosiveness of politics on politicians and the ruinous effect on idealism.

. . .

John Sutherland, professor emeritus of modern English literature at University College London, called it an angry poem. “The motive force here is disgust. Disgust at the great machine and its dishonest mechanics who run our society. Duffy Furiosa. The poem’s technique is that of someone almost speechless with rage – a great tumbling catalogue. No time for structure.”

He said he rather regretted the fact that Duffy had given the poem a title “because it’s not until close to the end that this great heap-of-crap which has so got Duffy’s goat is identified.”

Sutherland thinks it may be a jab at Gordon Brown. I thought of the kerfluffle over the Oxford professorship.

But given the results of yesterday’s election in Iran, well, the poem seems to me to have a sort of universal relevance.

The Books Blog

In the Guardian’s Books Blog, Jay Parini tells us Why WS Merwin deserves his second Pulitzer prize:

This week, WS Merwin won his second Pulitzer prize for poetry with The Shadow of Sirius. It’s rare for any poet to win the Pulitzer twice in a lifetime. Robert Frost won it four times, but he was Robert Frost: the major voice of American poetry for half a century. And, although he doesn’t have Frost’s “name”, WS Merwin is also a pretty significant voice. He has been a force in American poetry since WH Auden selected his first volume, A Mask for Janus, as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1952.

And Carol Rumens explains to us why, for Great Britain’s first femail poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy’s talent is more important than her gender:

The excitement of welcoming the first woman to the post of poet laureate is similar to the emotion with which a supporter of an under-rated football team greets a goal. It’s all about that deep atavastic solidarity with your own tribe – if you’re a woman, that is. Then, of course, for both genders, there’s the moral satisfaction, and political buzz, in seeing the re-balancing of old inequalities. Women poets worth honouring have always been around, but rarely have they enjoyed full permission to be taken seriously (even if, as sometimes happened, their books sold exceptionally well). Excluded from serious education and its resultant networks and power-centres, most never came near to realising their potential. Things have improved enormously, of course. Women’s poetry has arrived.

And yet, on the most important level, gender is utterly beside the point. What matters is the quality of the work, and that the poet laureate should be the real thing � a genuine poet endowed with the power of language and the power of feeling.

Carol Ann Duffy possesses both. Her best poems have huge freshness and force. They are colloquial, energetic and contemporary but shaped with a strong sense of line and stanza. Under their sparkle they are solidly built.

They are also politically subversive. Duffy is an empathetic dramatist: from her earliest full-length collection, Standing Female Nude (Anvil Press, 1985) she has written powerful monologues that speak through those who are powerless. These characters may equally be marginalised young men as well as women.

And Adam O’Riordan asks Why are poets so fascinated with birds?:

The birds are back in woods behind my house. Wrens, nuthatches, tree-creepers; from first light their bright calls spill into my sleep. After a winter watching a monoculture of jackdaws floating over the lake like delicately made marionettes, the inhabitants of An Atlas of Breeding Birds in Cumbria have begun to spill into the peripheries of my poems.

What is that draws poets to birds? And why have so many turned to them at critical points in their own writing? The collective nouns we all remember from childhood speak of language’s innate fascination with all things avian: a murder of crows, a murmuration of starlings, a parliament of fowls. And it’s no coincidence we afford them the most poetic collective nouns: right from the birth of literature birds have been present.

Spend some time over there. It’s a great blog.

Gobsmacked

Much has been made lately of Sarah Palin’s attempt to ban books when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, though I think more should be made of the fact that the local librarian was having none of it. (Speaking of acts of individual courage. Time says “The librarian was aghast.”) The currently-circulating list of books Palin supposedly banned is erroneous because the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons Baker, stopped her in her tracks.

(Side note: You can read the much-circulated e-mail from Anne Kilkenny about Sarah Palin here at Washington Note, where Steve Clemons has also pasted this interesting photo of the Wasilla Public Library circa 1950.)

(Second side note: I’ve seen Wasila, Wasilla, Wassila, all from good sources. Google goes with Wasilla.)

I must say that I have developed a great deal of admiration for librarians over the last eight years. I remember how they resisted the Bush administrations attempts to secretly pry into citizens’ library records by using National Security Letters.

Anyhoo, from my husband’s favorite newspaper, The Guardian, apparently the U.S. is not the only nation given to censorship, Poet’s rhyming riposte leaves Mrs Schofield ‘gobsmacked’:

“Today I am going to kill something,” says the unnamed protagonist of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure. “Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God.”

Duffy, one of Britain’s most admired poets, might have been tempted this week to feel the same way, following the news that the exam board AQA had ordered schools to remove from its GCSE curriculum an anthology containing the poem because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

Happily, in a move that may suggest she did not intend her work to be taken literally, Duffy has chosen the more measured response of penning a poem in reply. The verse, entitled Mrs Schofield’s GCSE and published here for the first time, makes reference to acts of violence in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello killing Desdemona, Macbeth’s dagger delusions, Tybalt’s stabbing in Romeo and Juliet.

“What it seems to me to be saying is that Shakespeare – the greatest writer – some of his stuff is a bit dangerous [too],” Duffy’s literary agent Peter Strauss said yesterday. “It’s saying, look at what’s been written previously before you criticise this.”

He described the decision to remove Education for Leisure from the syllabus as “absolutely ridiculous. It’s an anti-violence poem. It is a plea for education rather than violence.”

…

The Mrs Schofield of the poem refers to Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, who complained about the poem and who welcomed the decision to ban a poem she described as “absolutely horrendous”.

…

Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt “a bit gobsmacked” to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as “a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that’s me”.

You can read the riposting poem at the link.

Addendum: More on the subject of libraries via Lambert at Corrente, this McClatchy article on libary use as an economic indicator:

Check it out.

That’s what users of public libraries are doing these days. In an effort to stay entertained and informed without breaking the family budget, people across the country increasingly are taking advantage of the best deal in town: everything � books, CDs, DVDs � is free.

“That’s pretty typical,” Stanislaus County Librarian Vanessa Czopek said. “When the economy goes in a slump, libraries see more usage.”

The American Library Association says use nationwide was 10 percent higher in the past year than during the 2001 economic downturn, when it tracked a similar spike in visits and circulation. Libraries recorded 1.3 billion visits and patrons checked out more than 2 billion items from April 2007 to April 2008

Addendum the Second: Via Heraclitean Fire, Scottish poet Rob MacKenzie says it is high time the authorities clamped down on gangs of poetry-reading teens:

It�s good to see the authorities finally getting to the root of the problem of street violence. For years it�s been obvious that studious poetry-reading youths have been terrorising our streets, and how it�s taken so long for the authorities to make the connection between poetry readers and knife crime is beyond me. In almost every knife-related murder in London this year, a copy of Carol Ann Duffy�s poem has been framed on the offender�s bedroom wall. In one case, a recording of the poem being recited backwards was found, with the words, �Kill for Satan� clearly audible around 1.12min. One knife-wielding teenager told me, �It�s all Duffy�s fault. Before I read that poem, I liked to play Risk every evening with my friends. And look at me now! I�m out on the street every night with my bread knife and a copy of Mean Time in my jacket pocket. My best friend, who�s just sawed a goldfish in half, he�s into Wallace Stevens, and he just can�t stop reading Harmonium when he�s not beating up innocent passers-by.�