Warming Her Pearls

NOTICE: DUE TO NAPO, THIS WILL BE THE LAST CC COMPETITION UNTIL JUNE.  

Co-Hosts - Ahavati & JohnnyBlaze ( the wonderful artist who renders these classic portraits )  

Welcome back to the Classic Corner Competitions, Part XXVII, in an ongoing series introducing serious writers of DUP to the most famous classical and modern poets of our time.

Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic, is the poet of “post-post war England: Thatcher’s England.” Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues.  Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph’s convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. With her 1993 collection, Mean Time, and 1994’s Selected Poems, she would begin to also write about queer love.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Duffy is also the United Kingdom’s poet laureate, the first woman to be appointed the position in 400 years. She earned the National Lottery award of 75,000 pounds, a sum that far exceeded the stipend that poet laureates receive.  Duffy’s recent collections include her Collected Poems (2015), The Bees (2011), winner of the Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Duffy is a professor of contemporary poetry and the creative director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She lives in Manchester.

For more information regarding Duffy, please visit the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-ann-duffy

Guidelines  

Write a new poem honoring Duffy inspired by any one of her poems.

Do NOT copy paste your poem to the competition, it must be linked to your page with the below information.

Do your best to make us feel as though we are reading poems by Duffy. The more we feel you "capturing her essence" in "your own words" , the higher you will score. This will involve choice of wording, delivery, subject material, formatting, target audience, ambiguity - a wide range of factors.    

The Rules

1. Two entries per DUP persona.    

2. No erotica; this is open to all ages and can't be viewed with an ECW ( Extreme Content Warning ).    

3. No exact word limit; however, attempt to keep it no more than 250 - 300.    

4. Any form is acceptable ( but studying the poet is advised ).    

5. Webmiss will be creating #CarolAnnDuffy in the theme list.  The page will automatically generate as soon as eight entrants hashtag the theme.  In the interim, #hashtag #CarolAnnDuffy at the bottom of your poem.

6. In your poem's notes, provide links to the poem by Duffy that inspired yours. Without this, we have no way of determining if you were truly inspired by Duffy, or simply swapped fresh words into her existing poetry and form, which could be considered plagiarism.

Comp will be judged by Ahavati & JohnnyBlaze. As in the past and in the event there is a tie, we will call in third ( and possibly fourth ) judge.

LASTLY**** ALL NON-ELIGIBLE ENTRIES WILL BE REMOVED, AS WELL AS THOSE WRITTEN BY A NON-DISCLOSED PROFILE. This is not a competition to deliberately ignore guidelines so as to advertise your work or sneak more entries in under a guise.

You have one month; best of luck to all entrants!

https://deepundergroundpoetry.com/poems/375434-nude-female-drawing/

A non entry

All for this instant, literally—a glimpse    
of egress from poverty and disease  
riddling an ignored thread of being—  
 this haversack of bleeding womb    
  birthing a gestating soul    
   
     It is said your life regresses    
moments before death;  
but, I believe it’s our Spirit, retracting—  
  a rubber band, returning    
  to the bright point of its origin  
before expanding outward again    
 
     From our final moment of happiness    
to the first love we experienced  
  our esprit instantaneously revisits—  
  commending to history memories    
to be recalled instinctively upon necessity—  
 
     Actions we burgeon from, or mimic  
become future choices of the collective  
seeking past connections—olde faces  
  and places etched within the stories  
  of our double-helixed DNA  
 
I was beautiful and intelligent once, but  
It is finished—this prolonged life    
   
     Since I took my first breath  
I anticipated this second, leaving behind  
the degradation of an aging society—  
so come—come quickly—because  
     I have grown so cold lying in wait  
~    

#CarolAnnDuffy

MRS NOAH

“It was an old story that was no longer true ... Truth can go out of stories, you know. What was true becomes meaningless, even a lie, because the truth has gone into another story. The water of the spring rises in another place”. (Ursula K. Le Guin)


“He was never so happy as when he had a project:
but this — an ark? And a bloody big one too.
I mean, work-shops, wood-stores, animal shelters — fair enough
but a bloomin’ great ark?
Though I’ve got to hand it to him
at nearly 600 years old he’d lost none of his DIY skills.
Anyway, I’d learnt the hard way
if a man gets a bee in his bonnet about something
it’s best to let them get on with it, and say nought.

Then the animals — talk about confusing.
First it was two of each, then seven, plus two only of unclean animals.
I’m no good at maths, or cleaning, so I left the boys to sort it out.
But did they really have to bring on board rats as well - and, for Chrissakes, snakes!
Weren’t they the ones who started all this mess? But at least dinosaurs
had died out, irksome beasts.

Anyway, worst bit was fending off all those drowning people.
Shem, Ham & Japheth with their father, each poking long hard sticks
shouting “We’re the good guys, piss off you evil bastards”. Terrible affair.
But as a woman I had no say.
Had fun with my three daughters-in-law though.
We made a good foursome playing Bridge
to fill in the months.

I like to sift truth from the modern trend of embellished story-telling.
The dove that brought back the olive leaf, for example;
after nearly a year of the olive tree being submerged in water — I mean, come on. What’s more, Noah wasn’t the only doom-sayer boat-builder on the planet —
of course other people survived.
And rainbows, well, they’ve sure been around a long time,
way before the ark.

Anyway, after landing
it was quickly back to same-old same-old
and being a non-person, barely noticed,
I decided to bugger off and do my own thing.
Met a nice young woman too
only 100 years old
and we settled down comfortably together while I wrote my memoirs.
I heard the old goat Noah lived another 350 tedious years
and became a cantankerous drunkard
cursing his grandson Canaan.
I was glad to be out of it, you know. 200 years together puts quite a strain on a relationship.

I’ve got to say this though
I’ve lived through interesting times.
The Tower of Babel was the next big news
but that’s another story.

And by the way, I do have a name; it’s Na’amah.
It means ‘sweet and pleasant’.”




#CarolAnnDuffy


Inspired by Duffy’s poem “Mrs Aesop” from her 1999 book “The World’s Wife”. The poem can be found on-line here: https://genius.com/Carol-ann-duffy-mrs-aesop-annotated

We now have #CarolAnnDuffy thanks to Webmiss. Please edit your themes accordingly.  

Ahavati and I promise we will eventually award a trophy in this challenge as soon as we can get a free moment to beam ourselves down from the USS Stanza! LOL

Thank you all for your patience; we'll be announcing the winners today.

Greetings, and again, thank you each for your patience. Now that NaPo is beginning to let us breathe a bit, we can get onto business requiring some heavy focus.

Thank you each for your amazing tributes to Duffy.  These competitions are never easy to judge, and sometimes it comes down the the tiniest thing.  In this case, however, that couldn't be further from the truth—it came directly down to something personal and believable.

That being said . . .

Wally, simply put, you made it personal and believable.  Many of these writes, while excellently composed poetry even capturing an essence, can lack that personal attribution the poet wrote from, in this case, her mother. Despite what we could suggest as edits, sometimes a piece exceeds beyond that aspect to something more.  This is one of those pieces.  I could feel the genuine connection to the past through this as I did Duffy's, on such a personal level that we couldn't help but award you first place. Congratulations.

Josh, yours was a wonderfully composed, hilarious tribute and perspective based on Duffy's wives poems, and we loved it. We could see the study and work that went into it. It was very close with Wally; however, the personal aspect of Wally's, particularly the ending, won out. Congratulations on placing Second!

EdibleWords, we enjoyed yours for the unique perspective in regards to mistress.  Many times we can feel like just a mistress of our taskmaster employers, who don't seem to see past us to our feelings vs responsibilities.  Being a mistress doesn't necessarily mean from a lover, and that's the aspect we gleaned and really enjoyed from yours. Congratulations on placing Third!

PoetsRevenge, we loved A Pearl Moon, which actually tied with EW's, but her unique perspective on defining mistress won out.

Congratulations to winner Wally, 2nd place Josh, and 3rd place EW, (and PR, too)... for wonderful ink to an amazing poet!👏🏻

Jade🐾