Poet’s rhyming riposte leaves Mrs Schofield ‘gobsmacked’
Esther Addley The Guardian, Saturday September 6, 2008.
Poet Carol Ann Duffy. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
“Today I am going to kill something,” says the unnamed protagonist of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure. “Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God.”
Duffy, one of Britain’s most admired poets, might have been tempted this week to feel the same way, following the news that the exam board AQA had ordered schools to remove from its GCSE curriculum an anthology containing the poem because it supposedly glorified knife crime.
Happily, in a move that may suggest she did not intend her work to be taken literally, Duffy has chosen the more measured response of penning a poem in reply. The verse, entitled Mrs Schofield’s GCSE and published here for the first time, makes reference to acts of violence in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello killing Desdemona, Macbeth’s dagger delusions, Tybalt’s stabbing in Romeo and Juliet.
“What it seems to me to be saying is that Shakespeare - the greatest writer - some of his stuff is a bit dangerous [too],” Duffy’s literary agent Peter Strauss said yesterday. “It’s saying, look at what’s been written previously before you criticise this.”
He described the...
