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.

An unreliable narrator

Well, I was going to start today by posting some lovely poetic ode to spring, which begins at 7:43 a.m. EDT (yeah, right), and I for one am ready to celebrate that moment of the sun’s crossing the equator, dividing day and night into equal slices. It’s been a long winter.

But the poem will have to wait because I got distracted, and amused, by this from Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (causing me at least one more time to have to put George W. Bush in my tag line):

There have probably been more English literature PhD papers written on “the unreliable narrator” than the sexuality of Shakespeare, but the literary trope has a less straightforward appeal in publishing. The former and much missed (by comedians) president of the United States, George W Bush, is to receive a rumoured $7m advance for his autobiography, or what will otherwise be referred to as $5m less than Bill Clinton got for his. Fortunately, George knows someone who will be able to sympathise – his good lady wife who has reportedly received a mere $1.6m for her memoirs, almost $6.5m less than Hillary and less even than her mother-in-law got back in the last century.

Meanwhile, with the kind of synchronised timing that makes one think there is a divine plan after all, their literary superior Britney Spears has reportedly rejected pleas from three publishers to write her autobiography. If only George was a good guy, we could have turned this into a “what a world of skewed values we live in” piece.

Now, in the interests of clarity, George’s book isn’t strictly speaking an autobiography but rather a series of explanations of decisions he has taken, including why he gave up drinking and why he decided Dick Cheney was a good idea, without having to bother with that boring crap called “narrative”. Think of it, as one suspects George does, as the York Notes to his autobiography.

I’m going to leap to the conclusion that York Notes are the British equivalent of Cliff Notes. Unfortunately, as Hadley points out, the narrator of The Dubya Diaries will be all too reliable:

Also, I’d wager that George will do a lot less lying in his book than one finds in the average autobiography simply because he’s not lying – he is perhaps the last person in the world who actually believes what he says.

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BTW, The Guardian has a poll: Was Obama a hit on Leno? Go vote if you will. I don’t know how it’s going because I can’t vote. I never watch Leno.

And just in passing, I’ll mention that it’s the 157^th anniversary of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

And here’s Obama’s book deal.