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The Sunday Times
March 28, 1999Laureate favourite tells of lesbian love
by Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
THE frontrunner for the job of poet laureate is Carol Ann Duffy, a lesbian who was inspired to become a poet after she "fell madly in love" at the age of 11 with another girl at her convent school. "I wrote her 312 poems. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit. But there is no doubt that I was moved by love to art," she said last week. Even now Duffy, who lives with another poet, Jackie Kay, said: "It is for those girls I was at school with that I'm still writing." Last week Duffy talked for the first time about her childhood love and an English teacher at St Joseph's school, who encouraged her writing. "She was my inspiration," said Duffy. "I still go to see her regularly." The teacher, June Scriven, now retired, used to type out Duffy's handwritten poems. "They were ditties and ballads," she said. "There was an obvious and remarkable talent even when she was only 11 and 12 years old. "She was a crusader then and still is now. I'm very proud of her. She still sends me copies of her poems and we talk a lot. Carol Ann would be a fantastic poet laureate because of her poetry - and Carol Ann herself would bridge the gaps between people." Duffy's background is thoroughly Labour, with a father who was a long-serving councillor in Stafford and an active shop steward at GEC. This and her award-winning poetry, which is regarded as accessible, witty and touching, provide suitable credentials for the laureateship. An announcement is expected in April. Duffy, who is in her mid-forties and has a young daughter, believes that the post, which will in future have a 10-year tenure with a salary of about £8,000, must be "much more democratic". "The idea of the great poetic genius is a thing of the past. Poetry must also leapfrog out of the ghetto of simply being published in little magazines. More imaginative ways of publishing are needed. People must be able to read it more widely and in different ways," she said. While careful not to criticise Ted Hughes, whom she admires greatly, Duffy knows that it would be inappropriate for any new laureate to be a recluse. "The idea of an Auden figure is also a thing of the past. The hierarchy should go. We are more democratic now, as is poetry."
She initially read more traditional poets at school including Chaucer, Keats and Kipling. But Scriven also introduced her to the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Adrian Henry and Brian Patten. Duffy, who in 1993 won both the Whitbread prize for poetry and the Forward prize for her Mean Time collection, points also to her mother's Irish family as an early influence. "We were always listening to stories in the house," she said, adding that she believes she is a poet with a good ear rather than a good eye. "I was always drawn to the stories and their poetic nature more than prose or the theatre." She now tells her daughter similar stories: "As a mother you do it with more responsibility." Her own poetry (her next collection, The World's Wife, comes out this summer) uses both free form and rhyming. "I was pleased I learnt sonnets at school," she said. "Rhyme is very important, though it can also be used in the middle of a line. I think we're brought up in this country with rhymes in our heads because we are the children of Shakespeare."
Shortly after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Duffy wrote a short poem which was inspired by all the flowers and candles outside St James's Palace. It began: "Whatever 'in love' means, true love is talented. Someone vividly gifted in love has gone". The poem, more controversially, went on to declare: "England's crown is rusting" - a phrase which may not appeal to the Queen, who officially makes the appointment of poet laureate.
Duffy nearly failed to take her English A-level and therefore get to university. James Walker, her English teacher at Stafford High School for Girls, had to drive to her parents' house on the morning of the exam because she was missing. "Furnished with rather sketchy directions I chased around the Moss Pit area of Stafford and rang the bell," he said. "Carol Ann quietly said she had thought it was an afternoon exam." Walker, like Scriven, clearly regarded her as a precocious talent: "She was the widest read, in the literary sense, of any pupil I have ever known."
Several other potential laureates, including Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, both Nobel prizewinners, seem to have been eliminated. Walcott lives mainly abroad and Heaney is a known republican.
© 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd.