Rapture

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CAROL: So, you’re thinking in terms of legacy, but I don’t think in those terms, so, I would have to say the idea of legacy has occurred to me.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - Pan Macmillan

RORY: Well you, y’know, your poetry and your former status as a Poet Laureate would’ve, kind of . . . You would’ve thought that it would’ve inspired more people, especially more women to get into poetry. Would you say that you’ve left, like, a legacy there then, for future female poets to follow their dreams? When the narrator says that there is “no name or number to the hour” what they are saying seems a little ambiguous. I think the point they are trying to make is that the time of the night is irrelevant. That they don’t really care about it because there is an emotion that is prevailing and making something that might seem important on an ordinary night seem unimportant. In the third line, Duffy uses Scottish colloquialism in the form of the word “skelf” this word describes a splinter and she is using it here to suggest that there isn’t even a hint of light. This darkness that is being described is a metaphor for the dark place that the narrator feels they are in. RORY: It seems to me that in your career, you’ve done everything that you could ever hope to do with poetry. I mean you’ve taught it at degree level, you’ve published collections, what would you say would be the highlight of your career so far? Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Love Poem’, is a collection of verses from other love poems, composed by a few famous poets like William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, etc. Such as the poet has taken:CAROL: who's, in my version, in danger of being touched and turned to gold; so how would you deal with that? MILLY: So like, the idea of subverting things and, like, looking at something that has already been written.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - Pan Macmillan Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - Pan Macmillan

Mrs Midas’. Another poem from The World’s Wife , ‘Mrs Midas’ takes its cue from the myth of King Midas, he of the ‘golden touch’. But what would Midas’ wife have made of her husband’s greed for gold? Duffy imagines into being the long-suffering wife whose life is marred by the selfishness of her avaricious spouse. CAROL: And it’s in a different context rather than the private world of the writer. What goes on in the poetry reading is a different thing. CAROL: So, you’ve got an audience there who might not have read the poem and you’ve also in a sense having to keep their attention or entertain them, you might introduce the poem by saying ‘I enjoy subversing this—The Love Poem’ by Carol Ann Duffy consists of three stanzas. Each stanza of the poem has 12 verses. However, the poem is modern or modern in some respects, as the term “modern’ came to be defined by modernism, wherein it departs from regular metrical schemes and is fragmented or semi-fragmented in appearance as well as in meaning. O my America! my new-found land” is extracted from another John Donne poem, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ CAROL: The poetic, literary. So, this interview is with a poet. I think in terms of the poem and how I might approach, um, a poem, how I might rewrite it, why am I writing it, what’s the poem about, how does the poem stand in tangent between form and content. I’m not thinking in any way other than in a literary way when I’m writing. CAROL: was retell the story from Ovid's metamorphoses of Midas and I decided to do that from the point of view of Mrs Midas—