Duffy and Larkin AO5

Question 1

Katherine Viner - love and the past

Answer 1

‘Duffy’s poetry was filled with lost loves and yearning for the past.’

Question 2

Katherine Viner - accessibility

Answer 2

‘her poems are accessible and entertaining.’

Question 3

Duffy - the woman herself regarding simplicity of language

Answer 3

‘I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.’

‘I am trying to reveal the truth, so it can’t have a fictional beginning.’

Question 4

Jody Allen Randolph - what haunts her verse 👻

Answer 4

‘Failure, loneliness, isolation and emptiness haunt her verse.’

Question 5

Duffy - once again the woman herself - temporality through a window

Answer 5

‘that wonderful life that goes on behind the lighted windows through which we all peek as we hurry past.’

Question 6

Duffy - love

Answer 6

‘i was exploring the end of love, of love gone wrong.’

Question 7

Larkin - the geezer himself - happiness and sadness

Answer 7

‘It’s sadness that provokes a poem. Being happy doesn’t provoke a poem.’

Question 8

John Goodby’s - tackinesss

Answer 8

‘The tackiness of mass commodities fascinates him.’

Question 9

Salem K. Hussan - unfulfillment, melancholy innit

Answer 9

‘The melancholy vein which runs through Larkin’s poetry comes from his feelings that one has not got out of life what life has to offer.’

Question 10

Martin - Larkin’s life could become poems

Answer 10

‘his life with its often casual discoveries could become poems.’

Question 11

McClatchy - what on earth did Larkin write about?

Answer 11

‘stunted lives and spoiled desires’

Question 12

John McRae - taking the familiar and…

Answer 12

‘takes the familiar and defamiliarises it’

Question 13

Motion

Answer 13

Larkin “is so often regarded as an unrelievedly pessimistic poet”.

Question 14

Larkin - the commonplace

Answer 14

‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace…I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’

Question 15

Duffy - on the meaning of her collection ‘mean time’

Answer 15

‘In the collection, I mean to write about time. The effects of time can be mean. Mean can mean average. The dwindling of childhood. Ageing. The distance of history. The tricks of memory and the renewal of language. The end of love. Divorce. New love. Luck. And so on.’

Question 16

Larkin - King’s reflection on Dockery and Son

Answer 16

“a poetry of disappointment, of the destruction of romantic illusions, of man’s defeat by time and his own inadequacies,”

Question 17

Reibetanz

Answer 17

“mundane reality that he shares with his readers.”

Question 18

Davies

Answer 18

“Larkin’s basic pattern of an ordinary incident or subject, opening out into more generalised final comment.’

• he was quotidian imagery then ends his poem with images of infinity.
• the subject and mundanity of his poems are specific before he explores an abyss.

Question 19

Dunno (truth and honesty)

Answer 19

“Life is not an act of honesty, but rather an act of dishonesty.”

Question 20

how should i describe their language together?

Answer 20

vernacular and demotic language

Question 21

Navemore

Answer 21

‘Larkin seldom presents himself as anything but the onlooker.’

Question 22

Watts

Answer 22

Duffy uses ‘tightly coiled images and precision wording’.

Question 23

Mendelson

Answer 23

argues that ‘Duffy’s talent is her ventriloquism.’

Question 24

Jones

Answer 24

‘Larkin embraces the purely personal.’

Question 25

Dr Rona Cran

Answer 25

'fugitive senses' - the power of smells, sights and sounds to transport the speaker of her poems back to the past. - this phrase creates the sense of transitory moments, fleeting smells and sights etc. which momentarily provoke a memory before disappearing again

Question 26

Marcel Proust

Answer 26

'notion of embodied time, of past years not being separate from us.'

Question 27

Marita Sturken

Answer 27

'memory forms the fabric of human life'

Question 28

Mayer

Answer 28

'memory is relentless... it is something we have to endure.' - we have to deal with the pain of memory and remembering

Question 29

Mayer (photographs)

Answer 29

her work incorporates photography as a key method for exploring memory. e.g. Before You Were Mine there are suggestions that there is a photograph that encourages the speaker to think about her mother as a younger woman. The image is used to suggest a memory or suggest an imagined past

Question 30

Brainard

Answer 30

'the past is always present' his work 'becomes about everybody.' - as with L and D their experiences become universal as they share it in their poetry. - our past colours our present and is formative

Question 31

Brainard (lists)

Answer 31

He lists extensively, a technique seen in Duffy's poetry. The poem becomes meditative like mantras and captures the ordinary minutiae of daily life.