Carol Ann Duffy
I'm fucking sick of hearing about knife crime, the latest thing latched onto by idiot tabloid editorial boards. Anyone can go into almost any kitchen and pick up a potentially deadly knife and stab someone with it in drink or rage or despair or all three. That's life, and it wouldn't be much of a consolation to you or your family if you were stabbed but what you going to do? Imprison all the cooks and live off soup?Unscrupulous bastards whip up ersatz hysteria to sell their sordid rags. A handful of cranks think its real. And shitty arses in suits produce their red pens. Ffs.
There's no upsurge or epidemic of stabbings. There IS an epidemic of reporting of the subject.
And that lead to three hysterical saddoes complaining about Duffy's poem, and a numpty-led exam board take it out of the curriculum. Now Duffy's answered the situation wonderfully. God bless her!
It does make you wonder, though, eh? I mean, how do you get to manage an exam board? Is the phrase "fucking idiot" in the job description?
On the plus side, it can be no bad thing to have poetry in the headlines; to have people thinking about the ideas, how humans deal with the horrors of violence and loneliness in literature. The tabloid editors, the fruitcakes, and the incompetents could never have imagined this, but the net effect has been to stimulate interest in poetic ideas.
I'll drink to that, as I eat the chicken I carved with a really quite frighteningly sharp bit of kit, called a knife.
Grrr sometimes you wonder whether some people actually learnt anything when they were at school/university. I assume that the no marks on the exam board have an university education. Although they can't have been paying much attention.
ReplyDeleteAnd did you see the response to the response? The poem is "a bit weird". For fuck's sake, it's the kind of critical retort you'd expect from a six-year-old.
ReplyDeleteIdiots one and all.
I saw that but I had to rein myself in, being about to spontaneously combust as it was.
ReplyDeleteThe woman's clearly an air-head anyway. Although maybe she's not that stupid. When she says "it's a bit weird" it shifts the blame because what she really means is "I don't understand it". But she's both clever and dishonest enough not to admit that.