Carol Ann Duffy

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Carol Ann Duffy
June 2009
Born	23 December 1955 (1955-12-23) (age 53) Glasgow, Scotland
Occupation	Poet, playwright
Language	English
Nationality	British
Education	B.A. (Hons) Philosophy
Alma mater	University of Liverpool
Notable award(s)	OBE 1995; CBE 2002; poet laureate 2009
Children	Ella (born 1995) with Peter Benson
Relative(s)	May Black (mother) died 2005; Frank Duffy (father)

Carol Ann Duffy, CBE, FRSL (born 23 December 1955 in Glasgow) is a British poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's poet laureate in May 2009.^[1] She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly bisexual person to hold the position, as well as the first laureate to be chosen in the 21st century.^[2]

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.^[3]

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Poetry 2.1 Style 2.2 In schools 2.3 Poet laureate 2.4 Plays and songs 2.5 Honours and awards 3 Works 4 Notes 5 Further reading

[edit] Early life and career

Duffy was born to a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, a rough part of Glasgow, in 1955, the first child of Scot Frank Duffy, an electrical fitter whose grandparents were Irish, and May Black, who was Irish herself.^[4] The couple went on to have another four children, all boys, the family moving to Stafford, England, when Duffy was six years old. "I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space/and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?/strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate."^[5] Her father worked for English Electric. He was also a trade unionist, and stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party in 1983, managing Stafford Rangers football club in his spare time.^[4]

Duffy was educated at Saint Austin's RC Primary School (1962–1967), St. Joseph's Convent School (1967–1970), and Stafford Girls' High School (1970–1974), her literary talent encouraged by two English teachers, June Scriven at St Joseph's, and Jim Walker at Stafford Girls' High.^[4] She was a passionate reader from an early age, and always wanted to be a writer, producing poems from the age of 11. When one of her English teachers died, she wrote: "You sat on your desk,/ swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats/ to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed/ as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree/ in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air." ^[6]

When Duffy was 15, June Scriven sent some of her poems to Outposts, a publisher of pamphlets, where it was read by the bookseller Bernard Stone, who published some of them. When she was 16, she met the poet, Adrian Henri, and decided she wanted to be with him; they lived together until 1982. She applied to the University of Liverpool, and began a philosophy degree there in 1974. She had two plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse, wrote a pamphlet, Fifth Last Song, and received an honours degree in philosophy in 1977.^[4]

She worked as poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988–1989, and was editor of the poetry magazine, Ambit. In 1996, she was appointed as a lecturer in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and later became creative director of its Writing School.^[3]

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Style

Duffy's poems "provide voices for fascinating characters, including a fairground psychopath, a newborn baby, and a ventriloquist's dummy. Many of her poems reflect on time, change, and loss."^[7] In dramatizing scenes of childhood, adolescence, and adult life, whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory, and language. She explores not only everyday experience, but also the rich fantasy life of herself and others:

Part of Duffy's talent – besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety – is her ventriloquism. Like the best of her novelist peers ... she slides in and out of her characters' lives on a stream of possessions, aspirations, idioms and turns of phrase. However, she is also a time-traveller and a shape-shifter, gliding from Troy to Hollywood, galaxies to intestines, sloughed-off skin to department stores while other poets make heavy weather of one kiss, one kick, one letter ... from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets – that is, she makes it look easy.^[8]

Of her own writing, Duffy has said, "I'm not interested, as a poet, in words like 'plash'—Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way."^[4] She told The Observer: "Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning."^[9]

In her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985), she uses the voices of outsiders, for example in the poems 'Education for Leisure' and 'Dear Norman'. Her next collection Feminine Gospels (2002) continues this vein, showing an increased interest in long narrative poems, accessible in style and often surreal in their imagery. Her 2005 publication, Rapture (2005), is a series of intimate poems charting the course of a love affair, for which she won the £10,000 T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2007, she published The Hat, a collection of poems for children. Online copies of her poems are rare, but her poem dedicated to U A Fanthorpe, Premonitions, is available online courtesy of The Guardian,^[10] as are several others courtesy of The Daily Mirror.^[11]

[edit] In schools

Her poems are studied in British schools at GCSE, A-level, and Higher levels.^[12] In August 2008, her Education for Leisure, a poem about violence, was removed from the AQA examination board's GCSE poetry anthology, following a complaint about its references to knife crime and a goldfish being flushed down a toilet. The poem begins, "Today I am going to kill something. Anything./I have had enough of being ignored and today/I am going to play God." The protagonist kills a fly, then a goldfish. The budgie panics and the cat hides. It ends with him, or her, leaving the house with a knife. "The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm."^[13]

According to The Guardian, schools were urged to destroy copies of the unedited anthology.^[13] Duffy called the decision ridiculous. "It's an anti-violence poem," she said. "It is a plea for education rather than violence." She responded with Mrs Schofield's GCSE, a poem about violence in other fiction, and the point of it. "Explain how poetry/pursues the human like the smitten moon/above the weeping, laughing earth ..."^[14] The Mrs. Schofield of the title refers to Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, who complained about Education for Leisure, calling it "absolutely horrendous".^[15]

[edit] Poet laureate

Duffy was almost appointed poet laureate in 1999, after the death of Ted Hughes), but lost out on the position to Andrew Motion. According to The Sunday Times, Prime Minister Tony Blair was worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might "play in middle England". Duffy said she would not have accepted the position anyway, telling The Guardian: "I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to." She says she regards Andrew Motion as a friend and that the idea of a contest between them for the post was entirely invented by the newspapers. "I genuinely don't think she even wanted to be poet laureate," said Peter Jay, Duffy's former publisher. "The post can be a poisoned chalice. It is not a role I would wish on anyone – particularly not someone as forthright and uncompromising as Carol Ann." She was also reluctant to take up the role in 1999 because she was in a relationship at the time, and had a young daughter.^[16]

In the first poem she published since becoming poet laureate in May 2009, Duffy tackled the scandal over MPs expenses in the format of a 14 line sonnet. Her second, Last Post, she recited on the BBC's Today programme.^[17] It was commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths and funerals of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, the last two British soldiers to fight in World War I.

[edit] Plays and songs

Duffy is also a playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) Loss (1986), Casanova (2007). Her radio credits include an adaptation of Rapture.^[18] Her children's collections include Meeting Midnight (1999) and The Oldest Girl in the World (2000).

She also collaborated with the Manchester composer, Sasha Johnson Manning, on The Manchester Carols, a series of Christmas songs that premiered in Manchester Cathedral in 2007.

[edit] Honours and awards

She holds honorary doctorates from the University of Dundee, the University of Hull, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Warwick. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002.^[1] Other awards include (each year links to corresponding "[year] in poetry" article):

[edit] Works

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Carol Ann Duffy

Cultural offices
Preceded by Andrew Motion	Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom 2009 – present	Incumbent