CAROL ANN DUFFY IS THE NEW POET LAUREATE!
I am happy as a bear in honey about this. This is the first woman Poet Laureate ever, and something to be celebrated. A few years ago I did an interview with Carol Ann for The Times, which is archived on the site, but which you can access HERE.
In 2006 Carol Ann published a collection of poems called RAPTURE. This won her the TS Eliot Prize, as she deserved, and it gave her a new push into that most elusive place – a real poet who can also speak to pretty much everyone. If you still haven’t got a capture of RAPTURE, go and get it now. I’ve featured Carol Ann again in Poem of the Month.
 
I feel a personal connection here, not only because I know her and like her, but because her first collection of poems, STANDING FEMALE NUDE was published in 1985, the same year as Oranges are not the only fruit. She and I were women, were northern, were gay, had huge literary ambitions, and were fighting through a time when women were not allowed to be the best – not creatively. I had just done a degree at Oxford where Virginia Woolf was not taught, and where we were told that as far as the Canon was concerned there were 4 important women novelists, (the 2 Bronte’s, Jane Austen and George Eliot), and maybe a couple of poets, (Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson)
So not much to hold on to there, girls…
This is a great moment.
I know that the poetry is one of the most visited places on the site, and I think that’s a sign of our imaginative and emotional need for connection. Poetry joins up the separated space between heart and head, between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. That is because our left-brain processes language as information, while our right brain recognises language as music and metaphor. We need both to be healthy. It is not enough to say ‘Pass the sugar’ not even enough to say ‘I love you.’ We might need to say,
‘I am in love as giants are/that dote upon the evening star.’
Or we might need to say: ‘Had we but world enough and time/this coyness lady were no crime.’ Or we might need to say, ‘the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.’ Or, ‘When such as I cast out remorse/So great a sweetness flows into the breast/ That we must dance and we must sing/For we are blessed by everything/ and everything we look upon is blest.’
I carry poems round with me in my head because the world is an unpredictable place and you never know when a few lines will help, It’s a kind of virtual iPod
But this matter of joining up the separate parts of the brain is real, and interesting. I don’t see how we can live whole unless we do it. My friend, the cellist Natalie Clein, tells me that when people arrive for a concert they often sit with their right hand over their left hand, and their right leg over their left leg, to begin with, then, as the music takes effect, their left side, ruled by their right brain, begins to take over, and the body language is swopped across.
It is probably healthy and healing to be using the brain sideways to its normal domestic and day-to-day functions. I know that when I am writing something important I have to let the messy bit of the brain happen first – well, it isn’t messy, rather it isn’t logical and things come out in a strange order and with odd connections.
Maybe we should make the month of May RIGHT BRAIN MONTH, and consciously try and use it more, or do things that naturally use it more – classical music, paintings, playing. Meditation if of course great, because it switches out the busy left brain.
I realised something last week which is probably completely obvious to everyone except me: I only ever feel disappointment, or am disappointed, if there is already a scenario in my head that has failed to happen.
Sometimes I don’t even know I have that scenario; something happened to me last week, not a big deal, but I was disappointed, and when I was able to look at it, being a meaning-seeking creature, I saw that the problem wasn’t the actuality, or even the thing in my head, but the gap in between them. So then I trawled about to recall other disappointments and found that the same picture was in play.
Interesting… I mean I not disappointed that often and I don’t find life disappointing at all, so maybe that’s why this simple insight has never occurred to me. However, I leave it here in case it helps.
And I am thinking about the Buddhist business of trying to approach new situations without memory or desire…
So what’s May look like ?
If you are in Sussex, come to the Charleston Festival on May 20th and hear me and Lynne Truss and Kate Atkinson at our event for Midsummer Nights, the new short story collection I have edited, which you must get because it’s a great read.
Or, Hay on Wye, the biggest book festival in the UK, is always fantastic fun and I am doing what promises to be a lively event with Jackie Kay on May 25th. Book your tickets now.
Then it’s me to America.
There are two nice pieces of country-style journalism on the site this month – one from the May issue of Harpers Bazaar about gardening, and one from the May 6th issue of County Life, about living in the Cotswolds.
I am a country girl at heart, even though I like my London life.
And I am reading the most glorious mad book called A PRICKLY AFFAIR – MY LIFE WITH HEDGEHOGS by Hugh Warwick.
This is a charming book and will take your mind off everything.
And, on the re-reads, I recommended Susie Orbach’s new book BODIES, last time, but why not go back and look at
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SEX. Published 10years ago, it was and still is, an extraordinary piece of work – she has a knack of getting right inside situations and, and whatever the state of your love life, there’ll be something here that helps.
 
Fiction-wise, I am very excited by a new writer CHLOE ARIDJIS,
Her short work A BOOK OF CLOUDS is well worth a visit
And just to end it all, here’s a bit of glorious Virginia Woolf… from her essay, THE PLEASURE OF READING
‘Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper - one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it . . . - we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick - the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this - we have loved reading.’
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