Wayne’s World
Ian Sansom
- Selected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
Penguin, 151 pp, £5.99, August 1994, ISBN 0 14 058735 7
Reading through Carol Ann Duffy’s unremarkable early pamphlet publications, one despairs of finding any sign of promise, any sign that this romantic and dreamy adolescent (‘Cast off your thighs/and irrigate the desert of my body’s europe’) would one day be hailed as our best British poet, the voice of a generation. Then one comes across the poem ‘Army’, published by the preternaturally far-sighted Howard Sergeant in the pamphlet Fleshweathercocks in 1973, when Duffy was just 18 years old. It begins:
Hello mother!
It’s your eldest son back from the nuclear war,
well, half of me anyway.
How are you mother?
Oh it’s good to see you too,
considering the fact
that your little darling only has one eye now.
‘Army’ may not be a very good poem but it’s altogether preferable to the sentimental sludge and slurry of Duffy’s other juvenilia – you realise that here she has discovered her much-praised talent, her gift for imagining and recording voices that are not her own.
Duffy’s achievement is well represented by the new Selected Poems, which begins with a magnificent monologue, ‘Girl Talking’, from Standing Female Nude (1985), and ends with a feeble squib, ‘Mrs Darwin’, a poem from Duffy’s work-in-progress, The World’s Wife. This looks as though it may turn out to be a literary equivalent of Sally Swain’s Great Housewives of Art, a mildly amusing feminist stocking-filler of a few years ago which featured novelty paintings such as ‘Mrs Degas Vacuums the Floor’ and ‘Mrs Gauguin Has a Tupperware Party’. Duffy’s ‘Mrs Darwin’ reads, in its entirety:
7 April 1852.
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him —
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.
Between its extremes of the sublime and the ridiculous the Selected Poems contains a familiar medley of marginalised voices, a 147-page a capella extravaganza of old people, ugly people, children, dolphins, misfits and sociopaths, all of whom share in the predicament of being notable mainly for being pathetic and inarticulate. The children in ‘Comprehensive’ are typical:
Wayne. Fourteen. Games are for kids. I support
the National Front. Paki-bashing and pulling girls’
knickers down. Dad’s got his own mini-cab. We watch
the video. I Spit on Your Grave. Brilliant.
I don’t suppose I’ll get a job. It’s all them
coming over here to work. Arsenal.
Masjid at 6 o’clock. School at 8. There was
a friendly shop selling rice. They ground it at home
to make the evening nan. Families face Mecca.
There was much more room to play than here in London.
We played in an old village. It is empty now.
We got a plane to Heathrow. People wrote to us
that everything was easy here.
It’s boring. Get engaged. Probably work in Safeways
worst luck. I haven’t lost it yet because I want
respect. Marlon Frederic’s nice but he’s a bit dark.
I like Madness. The lead singer’s dead good.
My mum is bad with her nerves. She won’t
let me do nothing. Michelle. It’s just boring.
Letters
Vol. 17 No. 14 · 20 July 1995
From Fiona Pitt-kethley
I was fascinated to read in Ian Sansom’s review of Carol Ann Duffy’s Selected Poems (LRB, 6 July) of one of her recent verses, a four-liner entitled ‘Mrs Darwin’. The poem runs:
7 April 1852.
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him –
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.
This, surely, must have been inspired by my own four-liner of 1986, published in 1987 in the New Statesman and in my collection of the same year, Private Parts. For those who are not familiar with it, my poem, ‘Evolution’, runs:
‘Some men are very wicked!’ my Gran said,
while looking at a monkey in the zoo.
His spectacles of flesh and blue behind
reminded her of someone she once knew.
I suppose it’s all part of the process of evolution that one person’s poem should evolve into another’s. Whether such ‘evolution’ is up or down the scale is a matter of opinion. Some might call it monkey business. I leave it to your readers to judge whether Carol Ann Duffy’s four-liner is any improvement on its ancestor.
Fiona Pitt-kethley
Hastings
Vol. 17 No. 15 · 3 August 1995
From Alwyn Arkle
I don’t know enough about poetry to judge whether Carol Ann Duffy’s four-liner is any improvement on its putative Fiona Pitt-Kethley ancestor (Letters, 20 July), but I do know enough about evolutionary theory to wonder whether the two poems are not an instance of parallel evolution – i.e. the tendency for the same ‘selection pressure’, as we say in the jargon, to produce similar results from very different antecedents.
The difference is that Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Mrs Darwin’ seems to be about Charles Darwin himself. Mrs Darwin’s comment is double-edged in that her husband’s appearance in the 1850s was – as any glance at a photograph taken of him at the time will confirm – disconcertingly like an ape (in later life it was disconcertingly like God, but that’s another matter), and she might also simply be saying that the chimpanzee reminds her of his theories. Ms Pitt-Kethley’s poem contains no such suggestion, unless she is saying that her Gran is old enough to remember Darwin personally.
‘Whether such “revolution” is up or down the scale’ I don’t know, but I think it’s only fair to warn your poetically, rather than evolutionarily, minded readers that ‘up or down the scale’ is a very tricky concept. However common it may be in popular ideas of evolution, it causes problems to professional evolutionary biologists (see the first chapter of Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life). A tapeworm is as ideally evolved to its environment as a cheetah (and in evolutionary terms can be considered far more successful both in terms of present numbers and future survival), and brachiopods, which have quietly lived in the mud at the bottom of the seas for many geological eras without changing very much, can be considered equally far ‘up the scale’ in terms of their own needs as parvenu species like Homo sapiens.
Alwyn Arkle
London N17
From Janet Montefiore
Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s claim that Carol Ann Duffy’s squib ‘Mrs Darwin’ copies her own lines about Man and Monkey is highly implausible. In any case, Anon of the Playground was there before both of them with an even more memorable quatrain:
Happy Birthday to you,
I went to the zoo,
I saw a fat monkey
And I thought it was you!
I first heard this chanted by subversive elements at a birthday party in 1986; but it’s obviously older than that.
Janet Montefiore
University of Kent
From J.F. Fuggles
How clever you are: in the tradition of Joe Orton’s Edna Welthorpe, Humphry Berkeley’s Rochester Sneath and more recently Francis Wagstaffe you have invented the improbable Fiona Pitt-Kethley. She appears in every edition of the LRB: currently complaining about apparent plagiarism – quoting a frightful poem and then an even worse piece of verse which she alleges she wrote. May we see a photograph of her?
J.F. Fuggles
Rothley, Leicestershire
From Anon
Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s ‘Evolution’ must itself derive, evolutionarily no doubt, from a much better-known poem by myself. ‘For those not familiar with it’ (to use Pitt-Kethley’s rather presumptuous introduction to her own self-quotation), my old poem, in one of the many versions I have published, runs:
A widower born in Peru
Saw a female baboon in the Zoo.
It reminds me, he said,
Of someone who’s dead.
But he never would tell us of who.
Carol Ann Duffy must also have had me at the back of her usually inventive mind. I leave it, like Pitt-Kethley, to your readers to decide whether either of their poems is an improvement on their common ancestor.
Anon
Crediton, Devon
Vol. 17 No. 16 · 24 August 1995
From Fiona Pitt-Kethley
All of your readers who wrote in response to my letter (Letters, 20 July) missed an important point. My four-liner was entitled ‘Evolution’, thus sowing the idea of the connection between humans who look like monkeys and Darwin and his theories. Anon and the nursery rhyme quoted do not make the same connection that I made first and Carol Ann Duffy second.
May I suggest to J.F. Fuggles (Letters, 3 August), who believes I am an invention and wants to see my photograph, that he go out and buy a copy of one of my books? Almost all of them have a picture on the back.
Fiona Pitt-Kethley
Hastings, East Sussex
From Matt Hackett
Fiona Pitt-Kethley notes the similarities between her four-line poem of 1986 and Carol Ann Duffy’s work quoted in a review in the previous issue of LRB (Letters, 20 July). She also asks readers to judge which work is ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ in the scale of creative evolution. However, this question is irrelevant, as both poems are entirely derivative and stem directly from a far superior body of work, which I first came across in the early Seventies, but which, I suspect, had surfaced long before then. I refer, of course, to that most profound verse, sung by countless primary-school children to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’:
Happy Birthday to you.
I went to the zoo,
I saw a big gorilla,
And it looked just like you.
Another popular version along the same theme is the following classic four-liner:
Happy Birthday to you.
Squashed tomatoes and slew,
Bread and butter in the gutter,
Happy birthday to you.
Matt Hackett
Hong Kong
Vol. 17 No. 17 · 7 September 1995
From Barry Simner
Ian Sansom offers a provocative explanation for the popularity of Carol Ann Duffy’s verse (LRB, 6 July). He suggests it ‘has undoubtedly made a lot of English teachers very very happy’. It’s ‘accessible’, i.e. it’s easy, so kids like it.
I sympathise with teachers who are nervous of poetry: it is difficult to teach, especially if you neither like nor read it yourself. But anxiety can make one easy prey to unscrupulous ‘experts’. Witness the amount of mediocre contemporary poetry on English syllabuses and exam papers and crowding stock-room shelves. Outside the narrow world of contemporary poetry most of this stuff would pass unremarked. Good stand-up comics are wittier and more perceptive; much TV drama (including soaps) more skilful and thought-provoking; most popular music more fun. But here’s Ian McMillan telling teachers that this very ordinary poet is ‘at the height of her powers’ and Sean O’Brien placing her ‘high on my list’ of exemplars. Come off it.
Barry Simner
Tywyn, Gwynedd
Vol. 17 No. 18 · 21 September 1995
From Alan Benfield
Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s ‘idea of the connection between humans who look like monkeys and Darwin and his theories’ (Letters, 24 August) is hardly an original aperçu. Darwin was famously pictured as a monkey shortly after the publication of The Origin of Species, a caricature which is reproduced in Peter Washington’s excellent book Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon. Washington also reports that Blavatsky was so enamoured of this image that she kept the stuffed baboon in her rooms, dressed in a frock coat and wing collar, with a copy of the Origin tucked under its arm.
Alan Benfield
The Hague
