In my earlier post, “Stealing” Notebooks, I went over what enlightening information I uncovered in MARBL’s collection of Carol Ann Duffy’s notebooks. Along with the Selling Manhattan notebooks, I also looked at The World’s Wife, focusing on the four line poem, “Mrs Darwin”. The World’s Wife notebook was not as content rich as Selling Manhattan, Continue Reading Read more →
“Stealing” Notebooks
I recently visited Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) to view some of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry notebooks. While the collection spans decades of her career, I focused on her Selling Manhattan and The World’s Wife notebooks. This post will cover what I uncovered from notes on the poem “Stealing” from Selling Manhattan. Continue Reading Read more →
The World’s Wife MARBL Drafts: “Woman-Hater” in “Pygmalion’s Bride”
Going through drafts of “Pygmalion’s Bride,” I was shocked to see that in one draft, she characterized Pygmalion a “woman-hater.” While Duffy uses strong language throughout the poem, I was surprised that Duffy was so blunt with such a harsh description. I then found a memo she wrote to her self. In this memo she wrote a brief description of… Read more →
Selling Manhattan MARBL Drafts: The Idea of Invention in “I Live Here Now”
When going through the drafts of “I Live Here Now,” I was struck by Duffy’s initial emphasis on “invention.” The finished poem is already based on the idea of “invention,” emphasized by the dollhouse/miniature descriptions like “doll’s mirror,” “cotton wool on pipe-cleaners,” and “Pincushion Hill,” and of course, the speaker admitting that he “invented” the world. Yet in the earlier… Read more →
Duffy’s Modernized Myth
This classification of poetry as a sort of communication, as blogged about in my previous post, is distinct both when comparing it to the contents of Selling Manhattan and to those of The World’s Wife. The work that was compiled from the direct and nearly unaltered drafts to create Selling Manhattan, seemed to be a… Read more » Read more →
Ms. Duffy, We Have A Call For You On Line One
Before visiting MARBL to do research on Carol Ann Duffy’s manuscripts, I had never done research with the MARBL collections. Upon opening the lid of Carol Ann Duffy’s eighth box of her manuscript collection, I was blown away by the fact that all of these notebooks, adorned with coffee stains and ripped corners, brought Duffy… Read more » Read more →
Duffy’s Defense of Women
In the first collection of poems, dubbed “Selling Manhattan”, Duffy’s poems largely focused on internal reflection and she played around with form and language. She would interject small phrases into the verses which would reflect the thoughts of the protagonist of the poem. In her second collection, “World’s Wife”, Duffy takes fairy tales, myths,… Read more →
Gender Roles in World’s Wife
Throughout the World’s Wife, the themes of feminism and childhood memories continue to show in her poems. Most of the poems in this collection tend to focus on historical, even mythical figures from the past. However, I noticed that Duffy does embrace more relevant, modern-day famous figures towards the end of her book. The inclusion […] Read more →
Independence in Mrs Rip Van Winkle
If the poems of The World’s Wife paint women as independent and headstrong people who get along swimmingly without men, then “Mrs Rip Van Winkle” is a delightful poem that clearly portrays this agenda. Although it deviates somewhat from the original short story (Dame Van Winkle is dead by the time Rip Van Winkle wakes up), Carol […] Read more →
The Devil’s Wife
I found The Devil’s Wife to have the most interesting and varying structure out of all the poems in The World’s Wife. The poem is split into five different sections and it follows a plot of someone falls for the Devil and eventually spirals down the wrong path. She seemingly commits a heinous crime, as she is sentenced to … Continue reading The Devil’s Wife Read more →