“Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil’s Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous — and infamous — male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.”

So said the MacMillan publishers’ website blurb. I say amen.

The World’s Wife was sent to me as a surprise gift by a reader who had been taken by my blog about the invisibility of George Orwell’s wife. I have been reading the poems for a week now, spaced out so I could enjoy each unique, snappy, bright and at times sarcastic voice of the many wives and lovers:

Snooping around a bit on the net to see who the poet is – I had not encountered her before – I found numerous reviews that were of the “I’m a feminist, but …” kind, lamenting the sharp message that there comes a point where woman should not take it any more. Then again they came from sources such as the Literary Wives Club who read only books that have wife in the title and stress that marriages might be difficult at times, but hush, it’s all good. This collection of poems did not sit well with them, which is of course all the more reason to go and read it yourself – you will be amazed and amused, if I am your yardstick instead of the literary wives….

Made me also think, though, about the fact that the majority if not all of these poems are only comprehensible if you know the literary texts or historical and cultural events they are based on; in other words you had to have had a solid education rooted in the Western canon of Greek mythology, the bible, some basic science (Darwin) and psychology (Freud,)the occasional folk tale and a movie. Poetry for the initiated, then, and a case of the rich get richer, since these poems do enrich when compared to the narrative templates which they turn upside down – IF you get the jokes.

College curriculum-change debates about the value of teaching the writings of dead White men aside, the issue really goes back to the fact how we can have a common dialogue when education is so unevenly distributed in this country, with states deciding what materials are appropriate or to be shunned, with economic short-falls forcing so many schools to forgo anything unessential, and with American elementary and middle school readers consistently loosing ground in their ability to read literature. (The data in the link are from 2019, I shudder to think how assessments look after the pandemic.) It goes, of course, beyond discussion of poetry. Any public debate about any issue at all depends on shared assumptions, shared assessment of what the facts are, and a shared language.

Age is another factor that impedes shared understanding. I was stunned to learn – pre-Covid- during guided tours of graffiti in several countries, how this or that word or symbol means something that I had no clue about. A (visual) language I have little exposure to.

(Photographs today from a single building in NE Portland near MLK, seen last week.)

Took me years to figure out what ACAB stood for, a shorthand you see around the world. Never mind the 3 or 4 letter abbreviations that float around social media and that, beyond lol, I have trouble deciphering. Socio-cultural language changes have naturally occurred as long as new generations have been talking and trying to find their own style of communication. It is always those in power or those who fear changes to the status quo who react with horror. In fact in the recent German election campaign, the conservative party made the topic of creating new gender neutral language (a complicated construction when endings for each noun differ according to gender) a campaign issue, signaling high value of preservation over change. But this is about how something is expressed rather than lacking a shared knowledge base about what is referred to in the first place.

Here is one of my favorite poems of the collection, which includes stabs at gender fluidity, mansplaining, erotic satisfaction found in same-sex unions, and the fact that stodgy male personality characteristics will not be left behind, even when you are punished to be a woman for 7 years because you killed a female snake! Love the ‘from’ in the title, too, yet another letter to The Times reporting on more than the first cuckoo of spring. It all makes me wonder how men will read these poems compared to women. Wives or not.

from Mrs. Tiresias

by Carol Ann Duffy

All I know is this:
he went out for his walk a man
and came home female.

Out the back gate with his stick,
the dog;
wearing his gardening kecks,
an open-necked shirt,
and a jacket in Harris tweed I’d patched at the elbows myself.

Whistling.

He liked to hear
the first cuckoo of spring
then write to The Times.
I’d usually heard it
days before him
but I never let on.

I’d heard one that morning
while he was asleep;
just as I heard,
at about 6 p.m.,
a faint sneer of thunder up in the woods
and felt
a sudden heat
at the back of my knees.

He was late getting back.

I was brushing my hair at the mirror
and running a bath
when a face
swam into view
next to my own.

The eyes were the same.
But in the shocking V of the shirt were breasts.
When he uttered my name in his woman’s voice I passed out

*

Life has to go on.

I put it about that he was a twin
and this was his sister
come down to live
while he himself
was working abroad.

And at first I tried to be kind;
blow-drying his hair till he learnt to do it himself,
lending him clothes till he started to shop for his own,
sisterly, holding his soft new shape in my arms all night.

Then he started his period.

One week in bed.
Two doctors in.
Three painkillers four times a day.
And later
a letter
to the powers that be
demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.
I see him still,
his selfish pale facepeering at the moon
through the bathroom window.
The curse, he said, the curse.

Don’t kiss me in public,
he snapped the next day,
I don’t want folk getting the wrong idea.

It got worse.

After the split I would glimpse him
out and about,
entering glitzy restaurants
on the arms of powerful men –
though I knew for sure
there’d be nothing of that
going on
if he had his way –
or on TV
telling the women out there
how, as a woman himself,
he knew how we felt.

His flirt’s smile.

The one thing he never got right
was the voice.
A cling peach slithering out from its tin.

I gritted my teeth.

And this is my lover, I said,
the one time we met
at a glittering ball
under the lights,
among tinkling glass,
and watched the way he stared
at her violet eyes,
at the blaze of her skin,
at the slow caress of her hand on the back of my neck;
and saw him picture
her bite,
her bite at the fruit of my lips,
and hear
my red wet cry in the night
as she shook his hand
saying How do you do:
and I noticed then his hands, her hands,
the clash of their sparkling rings and their painted nails.

Music today is the overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor – maybe I should only listen to music with wife in the title? But then I come across songs like this one….