Carol Ann Duffy reading a new poem, The English Elms, to tie in with a Newsnight report:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8922106.stm

More laureate piffle. I thought she was supposed to be good?

Ok Steven, you're not a fan of Carol Ann Duffy. Which poets do you admire?

Basil Bunting, Roy Fisher, Geraldine Monk, the New York Poets, umpteen others, mainly experimental/post avant.

It wasn't meant as a terribly serious comment. She's alright, not particularly sparkling or original, a bit like whippy ice-cream when you could have proper vanilla ice-cream...

Why did they add music? (I must say I find her voice unattractive, but I guess that shouldn't matter?)??

Carol Ann Duffy has always done a kind of "social realism lite" - nothing wrong with it, nice little observations, and isn't the poet wise for having these little "insight" that pretty much everyone could have.

It doesn't really do anything more than that.

I'd like to pin you down a bit more on this, Steven. Are you saying that it's possible to be objective, and conclude that some kinds of poetry are better than others? Indeed, that "social realism lite" = accessibility = anyone could do it, whereas experimentalism = cleverness and difficulty/inacessibility = a better kind of poetry? I must admit that I prefer the kind of poetry that a greater number of people are able to understand and relate to; making it less of a private club, if you like. I don't agree that they would be able to write such poems themselves.

Experimentalism doesn't neccessarily = cleverness or difficulty/inaccessibility (investigate Edwin Morgan, for instance.) The "difficulty" of a lot of "experimental" poetry is often exagerated anyway (not that some of it isn't very difficult.) It's often a matter of approach: a non-mainstream poem tends to use juxtaposition, cut-paste, concision, disjointed narrative etc; but so do a lot of films (beyond the usual Hollywood rom com pap).

There's nothing wrong with CAD's poetry, and I don't think it's possible to be objective about art. I have my preferences; they're not "better" than anyone else's.

As to whether anyone could do it, I suspect that's where many experimental poets started. It's where I started. Could I do it now? I probably could, but I'd be unhappy with the results. It wouldn't seem "true" to me.

A lot of these arguments become very mod vs rocker. I get very tired of that.

I have only just picked up on this discussion and I would take issue with your comments, Stephen.I agree that Carol Ann Duffy does not do justice to her writing when she reads it. Her voice is not clear enough to bring out the music in her words. You started by calling it 'piffle'. and use the term 'lite'. Actually there is a lot of craft in her work. In this poem, for instance, you may think- 'very little rhyme' but in fact the poem is built around the word 'elm'. Almost a quarter of the words in the poem contain an 'm', mostly ending a syllable, but as a sort of counterpoint here and there the word begins with 'm', which gives a contrasting emphasis. You may think that ending the poem with 'overwhelm' which contains 'elm' is just a bad pun, but it is only one of so many words - names, farms, rhymes,palms, storms, films, poems, etc. which give the poem its sound structure. This structure does not necessarily make it a good poem. I think she is trying to produce a sound landscape, with the calm pastoral scene, but threatening storm which you see in a Constable painting. It is an elegy to the loss of the elms. Maybe I can relate to it because I remember the Warwickshire landscape with its fields lined with stately elms, all now destroyed by the disease. Maybe younger people only remember elms as gaunt skeletons with all the bark stripped away. the full grown elm was a magnificent tree. We have many elms around us in the woods here, but they never grow to the full galleon size before they die again.

Thanks for your response, Freda. I'm sure the poem is well-crafted. So, however, is a macrame doily. I was being somewhat rhetorical. It's probably a perfectly fine mainstream poem that evoke nice nostalgic feelings in the reader. I'm just not that interested in fine mainstream poems that evoke nice nostalgic feelings in the reader.

You are great on put-downs Steven. What is this 'mainstream' you evoke? Poets write according to the values they absorb from the exmples they have around them. Carol Ann Duffy is an academic, and is no doubt influenced by a wide range of styles and choices. When you say 'perfectly fine' and 'nice' and 'nostalgic', these are just sneers. They are not arguments. A macrame doily looks like every other macrame doily, and is not original. Are you saying the craft of writing is irrelevant? Do you prefer a rant with no skill in it? Maybe you are still being rhetorical. What is that? Does it mean your words are not serious?

This discussion reminds me of when Brian London fought Muhammad Ali. London was outclassed by the far more skilful Ali. The result a third round KO.

I remember that fight. Some people thought that London took a dive. They said it was a capital offence.

No Freida, I'm not saying that craft is irrelevant. I'm saying what Ezra Pound said: “The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

You need certain skills to write any kind of poetry. But you also need to be able to say something that hasn't quite been said before, in a way that hasn't quite been used before, if you're to write something that isn't just a pretty decoration. The point about doilies is that they are decorative; but as Susan Sontag says, "Real art has the capacity to make us nervous."

In what way does the Carol Ann Duffy poem makes us feel nervous, rather than merely nostalgic?

Constant 'nervous' poetry would put an end to the general pleasure derived from poetry altogether; so, Steven, IMO, your stance is deliberately academic, not wrong for the group you embrace, but not applicable as a generality. Like most arts/crafts, macrame doilies can delight the eye with amazing subtleties of design. Consider the tapestry of Coventry which is 'mere needlework'. Ah, but is it ART? And the debate continues forever. Fabulous to hear from Freda so powerfully again.

Ezra and Susan are not 'art-defining' gods; they just thought they were.

I'm reminded of something I read in the jazz/prog drummer Bill Bruford's autobiography. He said that he worked with a lot of musicians who were really technically proficient and amazing musicians. But he remembers an argument between two of them, where one was trying to get the other to play the exact same solo each time they performed it. The saxophonist in question was very offended by this: he just wouldn't produce things to order like that. Whereas the guitarist would, because it pleased the punter.That's the difference, said Bruford, between a technician and an artist. Or a craftsperson and an artist. Craftspeople may be incredibly good at what they do; but they can produce the same thing time after time after time for as long as the public want it.The artist, however, never can quite bring himself/herself to do that. They're the perpetual awkward sods who do what they feel is right at the time, and never sit still.An awful lot of poets, I would say, are really good technicians. But what makes them artists isn't the ability to produce a sonnet at the drop of a hat, but to produce a sonnet that is unlike any other sonnet that's ever existed.

The poet simulacrum becoming the hyperreal doily. Or Deleuze's 'those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself, as in knitting, macrame, crochet and poetry.' Or Baudrillard's four steps of reproduction ' (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality via knitting pattern; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model -- the knitter uses the needles in an ad hoc manner and the poet invents words and mispronounces them); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever where the resultant tat is indistinguishable from a concrete poem balaclava.' I hope you now feel enlightened and fricasseed.

But is macrame knitted, or is it knotted? Either way, I like elms and was sad when they all died. I agree with you Steven that writing things to order is not what makes for Art. The post of Poet Laureate contains this contradiction. Not all experiments make for Art either. The muse is invoked, not commanded.

"I like elms and was sad when they went" is, I suppose, a sufficient reason for writing a poem.

But it's not a very insightful way of seeing things: it doesn't ask why, for instance, there are no elms (why Dutch Elm Disease happened, for instance); it doesn't go deeper than a sad feeling of loss to examine that feeling (why do I feel sad when the trees die/ are chopped down (Charlotte Mew's The Trees Are Gone for instance)) or what does it mean outside the privatised world of my own feelings etc...

In other words, thinking deeper produces deeper results...

As for muses, there's no such thing, that's why it's a myth...

Thinking deeper in relation to a poem does not really mean pointing out all the things it could have covered. I don't find myself stunned by the poem's brilliance. I just feel that 'piffle' was an inadequate response.
As for muses, speak as you find, I guess.

This is a poem that could heve been written, frankly, by one of those deseverdly forgotten Georgian poets of the early 20th century. From a poet who has written some very perceptive political poems, this comes as a big disappointment.

It has no more depth than a Hovis advert. "Piffle" I think about sums it up.

I wish this thread would get Dutch elm disease - it is is getting very boring!

Sorry Ann, I like it! But then again, I liked the London-Ali fight.

i think she's brilliant<3

I've never really been a fan of Duffy after having her drilled into me by every English Lit. Teacher I pass; her and Shakespeare mean everything wrong with education these days. You're taught to appreciate someone without question.

Just, nah - not my cup of tea. And that's my opinion and I'll keep it!

The "worth" placed upon the product of poets by other poets reminds me of the comments from composers about
other composers output; like one notable name who admired Elgar but
was caustic about Vaughan Williams!
But that is the priceless reward of
the abundance of output...there is
something for everyone.
As with music, the layman might
wonder at the lack of generosity of
spirit since surely the aim is to
convey something worth telling to our fellows...
and that, in the final analysis, is
subjective - with time and fond memory the final arbiters.
The rest is fiddle-faddle!

Oh - just a thought. If writing to order does not make for art - perhaps we should consider the work of Mozart and Beethoven who most certainly did. Commissions have been responsible for many great works in various forms over the years.

Perhaps I should have posted this one on this board!

My noble Knight (Sir Geoffrey Hill of course),
do you really see the “wild-eyed poppies that raddle across the tawny farms”,from your ivory tower, your cow-crossed spire? Two fingers to yew, to Agincourt, to foolscap trees.

But see, the ash turns its silver underbelly to the muffled voices from the clouds and to the whispering shards of rain before the wind out the Hill carries in the dark drifting.

(Sire, I takest not the P P from thee for i do lyke u, u r the gr8est, 4 me)LOL,luv, Carol A. Duffy

To reach the rank of Poet Laureate is no mean thing. It tends to lend weight to any argument concerning good poetic ability.

Even the best can have an off day. I know I do. Do you?

Okay, prove it!

Every "dog" or bitch has its day whether their tail is pointing up or down and "It's the nature of poets to be difficult" - T.S. Eliot

"To reach the rank of Poet Laureate is no mean thing."

Takes a hell of a lot of spit for the royal arse-licking for instance,

I have to declare ignorance about how a Poet Laureate is chosen - and
whether they have to be asked if they want the job. (I'd certainly
consider the butt of Malmesbury wine which I seem to recall being
payment). Someone knew about the
effect of alcohol on the human imagination that bridges the years!
However, I hesitate to consider a poet like John Masefield being
tempted to unseemly lower region prostrations of the sort described
by Mr Waling.

Probably irrelevant but I just wondered how Steven knows how much spit it takes to perform the aforementioned obsequiousnesses?