When I read through Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, I did not find it particularly inspiring. I had just been reading Tennyson beforehand, and Duffy’s language seemed less rich, more cynical–something did not approach the older classics. While I still do really prefer Tennyson, discussing Duffy’s poetry in class helped me appreciate her own style a little more.

We watched a portion of a reading Duffy did from The World’s Wife, of the poem “Mrs. Midas.” She dwelled on certain words, and I heard things in the poem that I hadn’t absorbed while reading it. As someone in class mentioned, it was a change to see someone behind the “I” in her poetry. Now, having heard Duffy read her own poetry, her voice fits into the words she chose for her poems.

Personally, I sometimes have a difficult time with spoken poetry. Perhaps it is because I don’t prefer to share my emotions, and poetry is such a bald performance of that very thing. Sometimes it is easy to blur the emotions of the narrator of the poem and the person performing it, especially if they put inflection and facial expressions into the performance. Poetry often explores sublime emotions and circumstances. I would prefer a safer distance from my poetry.

However, listening to Duffy has added to my understanding that poetry is meant to be performed or spoken. I hadn’t understood the emotions she was conveying, although in the poem itself she said that Midas had a “strange, wild, vain” expression; spoken, this had much more gravity in the poem (Duffy 12).

Source: Duffy, Carol Ann. The World’s Wife. Faber and Faber, 2001.