Carol Ann Duffy: Business as usual

Ten years ago, Andrew Motion’s appointment as poet laureate was overshadowed by rumours surrounding a rival candidate: Tony Blair had ruled out the hugely popular Carol Ann Duffy, alleged Downing Street sources, due to fears of how Middle England would react to the selection of a poet then involved in a lesbian relationship. Duffy responded with what looked like bitter mockery of the laureateship itself, reportedly telling The Guardian: “I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.”

Laureate at last after her predecessor’s retirement in May, Duffy is keen to play down the notorious remark. “I don’t know if I did say that,” she laughs wearily from a cottage in the Lake District. “I tend not to talk in that soundbitey way. It would be perfectly possible to write a poem about a royal wedding, or not. It’s down to the muse, really.”

The same muse that abandoned Motion? “Writing for the Royals was a hiding to nothing,” he griped last October. “I dried up completely about five years ago and can't write anything except to commission.” It looks an ominous warning of the pressure that Duffy can expect to produce poems for official occasions – but she’s quick to defend her artistic integrity.

“The idea that you have to write to order is a myth; it’s just not true,” she insists. “In the 21^st century there’s no expectation that the laureate does anything – it’s just an honour for poetry. The laureate thing’s just kind of fitted into my existing life as a poet. I think that’s as it should be, really.”

It’s hard to imagine any of Duffy’s forerunners referring to his position as “the laureate thing”; untarnished by lofty airs or a taste for publicity, the poet’s simple love of language has lost none of its innocence since a precocious childhood in Stafford. Hers “were good parents once they realised I loved reading,” she recalls, and the young Duffy received a reliable stream of books at Christmas and birthdays. But it was at school that her poetic sensibilities were awakened. “I was very lucky with my teachers,” she reflects. “Studying poetry for me at school was a joy. I had Ted Hughes for my exams, and that was thrilling for me – to have such a great poet as part of my education.”

Following in her idol’s footsteps once more, Duffy is now familiar to thousands of schoolchildren thanks to her poetry’s inclusion in myriad exam syllabuses. This led to a burst of controversy last summer, when her poem ‘Education for Leisure’ was removed from the AQA board’s GCSE anthology after complaints that it glorified knife crime. “It puts violence in a student’s mind,” claimed Pat Schofield, a part-time invigilator from Leicestershire. Duffy’s response: a poem entitled ‘Mrs Schofield’s GCSE’, pointing out the ubiquity of knives in Shakespeare, which she had published in the pages of The Guardian.

If that seemed a prickly reaction to an oversensitive 68-year-old, Duffy now appears in more forgiving spirits. “I think sometimes people who don’t read poetry, don’t have it in their lives, find it difficult to know what a poem means,” she says. “So I felt sympathy on that level: this was simply a woman who misread the poem and felt that she was doing something for the best. But I think that censorship is not the answer to misreading. Perhaps discussion and explanation would have been a better route to go down.”

Duffy’s liberal values likely owe much to her years as a philosophy student in Liverpool, where she enjoyed a passionate romance with the artist and poet Adrian Henri. Yet she narrowly missed the heyday of the Liverpool poetry scene in which Henri was so prominent. “It was very much a playwright’s city,” she reminisces. “Most of the Liverpool poets had moved to London by the time I got there.” And it was as a playwright that she began to make real money from her writing, albeit without wholehearted commitment: “that was very much to subsidise the poetry,” admits Duffy, “because there was a lot more money in theatre.”

It must be a relief to be freed from such constraints, I suggest, now that Duffy’s hit the summit of her profession. She’s quick to put me straight: “Even now I have to teach in a university; that’s how the bulk of my income comes. I teach on the MA course at Manchester Metropolitan University, and if I didn’t do that I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage. We all have to do things like residencies, or teaching, or workshops. You can’t just sit at home, write a poem, publish it and live off the proceeds. It doesn’t work like that.”

Duffy’s literary success might not have brought her riches, but it dragged this humble, understated woman into the media spotlight, with sometimes painful results. “I hate the way journalists twist things for a story,” she complained in 2005, after untrue reports that her then ten-year-old daughter was being raised without a father. Four years on, her attitude seems to have softened. “I think sometimes people might put something down without having checked the facts, which can be hurtful. But it isn’t as bad as real hurt, and the things people have to put up with. By and large, my experience has been quite positive.”

Certainly, Fleet Street was keen to celebrate her accession to the laureateship this summer. But Duffy’s outstanding talent seemed largely forgotten amid the acres of newsprint devoted to her status as the first female laureate, and—still more sensationally—the first to have been in a gay relationship, with the Scottish poet Jackie Kay. Pressed on the issue, however, she seems comfortable in the pioneering role that would be thrust on her regardless.

“Making much of the fact that it’s the first woman who’s been in a gay relationship,” she maintains, “is very empowering for people who might feel less confident about their sexuality. I think it’s a nice thing; I was pleased about that. I think we are all a lot more grown-up than we would have been ten or 15 years ago.”

Duffy has not flinched from baring her sexuality on paper – even if it means putting up with the likes of a BBC interviewer who smirked: “Carol Ann, I can count four breasts in one of your poems.” Her searing love poems made an appearance at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, with readings from the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Rapture. And she’s similarly unafraid to make waves where politics is concerned: her first official poem as laureate was a vitriolic response to the MPs’ expenses scandal.

Such weighty subjects are balanced, however, by Duffy’s extensive forays into the field of children’s literature – a serious interest that brings her to the Fringe this year, with a musical adaptation of her fairy tale The Princess’s Blankets. “I started writing for children when I had my daughter, who’s 14 now,” says Duffy. “And I found it very liberating. Children’s writing is like paddling in the ocean, whereas adults’ writing is more like swimming in it.”

This open approach to language has enabled her to scale the dizziest heights of critical acclaim, while retaining her appeal to laymen put off by the opacity of other contemporary poets. Asked to explain the breadth of her popularity, the self-effacing Duffy seems uncomfortable.

“I don’t think it’s good for poets to analyse their own work, because the danger is you’ll try to imitate yourself, or try to please people. So part of me has to shut off from praise, and indeed from criticism. Obviously I read reviews and things; I can’t pretend I don’t. But you have to try not to let that come between you and the poetry.” So far, it seems, she’s managed it.