[New-Poetry] Carol Ann Duffy gets the laurels

[jforjames at aol.com]

Let's try that again...
Michael,
I don't want to make too much of that unfortunate juxtaposition of 'towering' with 'witty... minutiae', but it did strike me as funny.
Wendy Cope was the poet who that complained her poems were all over the web without permission (and payment). Clearly a towering
figure. Besides his wittier ones, Larkin wrote a number many great poems: his best were either aloof and foreboding or biting and satirical.
Not a towering figure but a figure worth reckoning with
Dickinson was of course not the 'Emily Dickinson' in her own lifetime so she's an odd case from the start. But I'd say her oeuvre and
rep was made not on the witty little ones, but the strange psycho-philosophical lyrics that to this day drop one's jaw.
Finnegan


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Snider <mandolin at mikesnider.org>
Sent: Fri, 1 May 2009 1:39 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Carol Ann Duffy gets the laurels





On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 1:11 PM, <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:

What do people think about this snip from the NYT article:


Ms. Duffy, 53, is known for writing accessible, often witty poems on a wide range of topics, many of them to do with the minutiae of everyday life. She succeeds Andrew Motion, who has just completed his 10-year term. 



The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, called Ms. Duffy “a towering figure in English literature today and a superb poet.” 
-
I know it's typical bureaucratic hyperbole, but do you think it's possible to be a 'towe
ring figure' in any nation's literature by writing "witty poems...many to do with the minutiae of everyday life"?
Finnegan 







Not so different from Wendy Cope, who rejected the post (wants it abolished) or from Philip Larkin (also rejected it), who many consider the finest English poet of the second half of the last century - or, for that matter, from Emily Dickinson.




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