Poet suffers writer's block over impending royal wedding

My refusal to write a poem about the occasion is unremarkable. But if Carol Ann Duffy is refusing (and a news story in The Times of London speculates this is the case) then her decision is more newsworthy than mine.

The accomplished Scot (this columnist has a terrific poetical crush on her) is after all her kingdom’s poet laureate. And surely royal weddings are just the sorts of things poets laureate do write about, aren’t they? And in her laureate role she did craft a poem, Rings, to mark the last big royal wedding, the 2011 shackling together of the alarmingly fecund (taking far less time than commoners do to reproduce, they’ve just produced their third baby) Will and Kate.

However Carol Ann Duffy is an unorthodox woman (she is the first openly gay UK poet laureate and her poetry is often wonderfully, hair-raisingly frank, fearless and dangerous) and in her poem for the Kate and Will occasion she didn’t mention either bride or bridegroom by name.

Knowing her work, I had rather hoped that she would write an unflinching poem for this looming wedding. It might have been a poem, with the insufferable royal family in her sometimes scathing sights, that said sane and refreshing things at a time of so much loyal gushing.

More about her and her poetry in just a moment. But first I hark back to a very recent, never-to-be-forgotten column in which I looked at how the #MeToo movement has helped make some art galleries and some gallery-goers uncomfortable about paintings of nude females.

I pointed to a ripper new feature article on this subject, Who’s Afraid of the Female Nude? Paintings of naked women, usually by clothed men, are suddenly sitting very uncomfortably on gallery walls. The New York Magazine piece, liberally illustrated with some of the many often challenging and blush-making paintings discussed) is by Michael Slenske and Molly Langmuir.

It is up online if you want a stimulating read and if, rare in modern readers, you have the stamina for long-form articles. But beware! One of the illustrated paintings, Robin F. Williams’ Salad Lover, 2016 may put you off salads for ever or might, alternatively, stoke in you a new, perverse and unhealthy interest in salads. Certainly it is a painting I wish I had never seen, for now I have to look away, blushing, whenever my Woolies’ trolley takes me past the supermarket’s (now, to me) pornographic-looking lettuces.

The New York Magazine writers talked about what may be going on (is there any unseemly ogling?) when clothed male painters use naked female models. Eerily, in the very week in which I read the magazine piece, my Carol Ann Duffy fandom had taken me to a poem of hers on this very subject of the politics of the naked model/clothed artist encounter.

One of the poet’s feminist specialties has been poems written from the points of view of women, often long-suffering, often wives, who have been shadowy satellites orbiting around famous men. And so sure enough her poem Standing Female Nude (why not, for a treat, Google it now?) expresses the opinions of a battling woman who, needing the money, poses naked for a painter she is told is a “genius” but who seems to her bossy and sexistly insensitive. What’s more she knows him to be (for she notices a tell-tale indication of this we cannot dwell on in a family column) a bit of a perv. When she poses in long, six-hour shifts, she is cold and hungry and dolefully aware she is no longer as pneumatic as she once was.

What an educative poem this is, packing an extra punch in these #MeToo times when serious questions are being asked about the notorious “male gaze”! No sensitive person who reads it will ever again be able to look at the female nude in painting or in sculpture without thinking of the human woman who posed for the artist.

Did her tummy rumble with hunger? Did goosebumps (that are never portrayed in the finished artwork, for who has ever seen bronze or marble goosebumps on a sculpted nude?) stipple her chilled skin? Did that unfeeling “genius” her clothed and warm employer (paying her only a few francs an hour) keep nagging her “Madame, do try to be still,”?