Where exactly does her expertise in politics, presuming she has any, come from? I mean, why exactly are we to take her political pronouncements seriously? They may be perfectly sound, but if so, it cannot possibly derive from her being a poet, but only from her being a sound and knowledgeable observer of politics.
Post bumped because I responded to a comment.
Post bumped because I responded to a comment.
Exactly! That's why I have put off reading any of Shakespeare's plays that involve issues of kingship until biographical research proves that he received some formal political training. I suggest that Duffy starts writing poems about autumn -- but only after she finishes that degree on plants' responses to seasonal changes.
ReplyDeleteActually, Donald, the reason we continue to read Shakespeare's historical plays is because they transcend the topical, rather than embrace it. Bear in mind, too, that he wasn't exactly protesting against the regime he was living under. That came at a price in those days. Duffy's costs nothing.
ReplyDeleteThe point I was responding to was not the quality of Duffy's ideas, but your own apparent view that before we take a poet's ideas seriously we need to have some assurance (derived from outside the poem) of her expertise in the area. Is that not what these sentences mean? "Where exactly does her expertise in politics, presuming she has any, come from? I mean, why exactly are we to take her political pronouncements seriously?" Here you seem not to be saying anything about her political ideas except that she is probably not qualified to hold any.
ReplyDelete'T'is a good point, Donald. Roughly like the argument that the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon HAD to be the author of Shakespeare's plays, rather than Shakespeare, because Shakespeare wasn't smart enough. The obviously educated guy had to be better qualified than the guy whose education we're not sure of, it says, which is bogus on the face of it. Moreover, it denies the possibility of genius unfettered by education or the lack thereof.
ReplyDeleteMost of the war poetry from the past, or the good stuff for the most part, has been from soldiers. The poetry from the underprivileged or the victims of tyranny can be political, even world-changing, and come from the experience of being put down, imprisoned, tortured and such. These are forms of political poetry.
ReplyDeleteThere has been a debate about whether a poet who has not been part of a war can write about war. The issue on the "yes" side is that if a poet is affected by the war, especially nowadays as we all are with the immediacy and vividness of our media channels, then the poet can write about it. There's poetry there to write, and it necessarily is going to be political.
Therein lies the trick, or where the deft hand needs to come. If I encounter a flower and somehow have a musing about it, I can write a poem about it and no one would question me. All I would need to do, which is hard enough usually for a poet to do, is write the poem and revise until it is moved in. My concerns on a flower poem would be if my angle is unique enough for my poem to be worthy enough to take up a reader's time.
The deft hand I would need to write a war poem or political poem, is to separate myself from being just another guy with a political point of view who happens to be able to run words down a page to get my opinion across with. The politics of the poem and how I am within it, can cloud my vision of whether I have a good piece going. If I happen to be anti-Obama or anti-UN or anti-what-have-you, just because I think up a new twist at being anti, does not mean I have a poem to write. But lots of times, those are the poems that get written. That's my complaint anyway.
One of my resolutions, was to take the artistry of a photographer who had been in Afghanistan where killing was happening, Tyler Hicks, and write a ekphrasic on his award-winning work.
Here is his pictorial essay (and click on each photo to see the next one in the series):
Taliban Execution
Here is my poem (from which the old link to Tyler Hick's photography no longer works):
Photo Seven of Seven
What I am conscious of as I write the piece, almost the reason I noticed that I could write the piece, is that I am aware that I am no expert on being in Afghanistan as the Northern Alliance soldiers are executing Taliban soldier along the road.
I'm sorry. Here is the link to the Tyler Hick photo essay:
ReplyDeleteTaliban Execution
If you click the picture, you will get to the next one in the series.
No, Ivanhoe, it has nothing to do with schooling. Andrew Jackson would be quite qualified to talk about politics - because he knew about it, not because he went to college and studied it. Schooled or not, it is a good thing, if you are a writer, to write about what you know about, not just what you have an opinion about.
ReplyDeleteAnd, Donald, I was responding to your Shakespeare analogy. Moreover, I suspect Shakespeare may well have been better informed of the politics of his day than Duffy is of the politics of our day. At any rate, the plays are less about politics than they are about persons engaged in politics and how that engagement affects character. Such is the stuff of poetry and drama.
As usual, you completely -- or, more likely, deliberately -- missed my point, which was about schooling or education only in the sense that YOU introduced: that we need to see credentials before we can determine that someone is qualified to write a pome. Which is in part the animus behind the support for the idea that someone "more qualified" than this guy Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. THAT sort of argument is clear in your original post.
ReplyDeleteNo, Ivanhoe, I didn't miss your point. I also didn't mention schooling or credentials. I mentioned qualifications. The point you missed being that being a poet does not, ipso facto, qualify you to comment on politics. Got that?
ReplyDeleteWhen Mahmoud Darwish wrote, usually his qualifications (as it were) were transparent through the poem, and required no one to question why we ought to listen to him. Here is a recent article with two political poems at the end of a brief article by Joshua Cohen in Tablet: Point of Departure
ReplyDeleteFirst, note that Darwish was a Palestinian poet, and then that this is self-consciously an item in a Jewish publication admiring Darwish. A poetic transcendence takes place when the poetry is that good.
It seems what Carol Ann Duffy is doing with her decision to accept the laureateship earlier this year, is to be radical with the position. She is writing much poetry. My hope is that she hits a groove, and begins putting out some quality work. But this is not it. The poem is too contrived. It's okay to rework the 12 days and be contrived, or even to be imperfect with it. That's human. But wouldn't it be better to hit a groove and make the impact with a stunning piece, instead of one that only shows one more person's political point of view?
My sense is that her goal to be outspoken and to make an impact through her poetry is worth the shot, and there's some courage to her going through with it, but there's no groove as of yet. And I'm not saying she should take lessons from Darwish, but just to come from what she lives, more than what she opines, as Darwish does.
For a negative-side critique of Duffy's poem here is an article in the Telegraph by Judith Woods: Carol Ann Duffy is the not-a-lot-of-laughs Poet Laureate. Here's an excerpt:
We expect our poets to be just that – poetical – to imbue the everyday with a lyricism that makes us pause, ponder and perceive afresh, not call a spade a spade or lazily reach for clichés, such as "another father… a bullet with his name on". Duffy prides herself on the simplicity of her language, so we won't hold our breath waiting for inventive neologisms, but as Edgar Allan Poe once said, "poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words", and thus far linguistic or any other brand of beauty has been conspicuously absent. Poetry should reflect, refract, distil, it should elevate the commonplace, not read like a laundry list of misery and woe – we can all do that ourselves, thanks.