South Bank Show - Carol Ann Duffy

On an evening when Radio 3 had already broadcast a discussion about poetry and its audience featuring such luminaries as Michael Schmidt, it seemed as if we had reached a saturation point of media coverage when Carol Ann was the subject of the South Bank Show. If it continues like this, I'll have to find myself an alternative minority interest. Does anybody still watch football, I wonder. When is the next World Cup?

As much as anything, there was an opportunity to compare and contrast Carol Ann's life with that of our leading playwright for those who had also seen Being Alan Bennett the previous night. Both are admirable writers and among my favourites but I'd be with Bennett if I had to choose because he gets the option of pretending to be himself whereas Duffy seems to have to be genuinely herself, although she does it very well.

It must be awkward being filmed looking thoughtfully at picturesque rivers and then talking about oneself while pointing out that one is a private person. While 'poet' has always looked like the easiest job in the world, it has to be pointed out (as she did) that novelists get paid more and not all that poets find themselves having to do to earn a living wage are things that I'd want to do.

A residential writing course, run with Gillian Clarke, looked like excruciating business although some poets will have a more encouraging attitude towards students and a more genuine belief in poetry than I could drum up. Certainly, as we saw her talking a keen apprentice through a poem, he did seem to have a good line where the dusk was 'punctuated' by insects. But when she suggested that his description of the fall of dusk made it too sudden and not gradual enough she was overstepping the mark.

I once read a poem called Seafront to a group, over twenty years ago but it still rankles, and was told that the sea was a rough, unruly thing not to be described as I had done, as a calm thing. But it had been both as 'flat as a pancake' and 'calm as a millpond' on the occasion I was describing and I went away thinking that advice only re-directed one back to cliche when cliche was something that poetry ought to be avoiding. Avoid it or re-make it but surely don't just use it wholesale. This workshop ethic must be challenged at every opportunity. I hope not everybody left their educational retreat with all their poems re-made as Duffy poems.

But it's not entirely her fault. She has to make a living and if aspiring writers want to buy her advice it is entirely up to them. Duffy is a fine poet but a conglomerate one, bringing together a trustworthy, old-fashioned leftist ideology, an inheritance from Adrian Henri and the Liverpool Scene, the middle-brow, user-friendly accessibility of the Armitage style that has a vague relationship with 'performance poetry' without ever reducing itself to a slam performance and some respect for tradition. She is as good an advert for poetry as there is and so we should be grateful but they must all be careful about musing too much on the significance or meaning of 'poetry' or else we will drown under a welter of nice-sounding phrase making about what 'poetry' is. Just do it.

The best of these musings was when she offered the opinion that poets feel the world through language (and that is only my rough precis, not what she actually said). Yes, it is. It is more than anything else about the way the language is used. Not about gender politics, daffodils, scenery or words to be used at funerals. This programme was never going to be much better than it was. It might have been better without the vignettes of actors doing her poems for her and having more of her subdued but concentrated live readings in which one interesting but impossible game was to try to see who she was reading with. She is right that we should have a laureate and I'm glad she's been brave enough to take it on because she is the best person for it. It invites criticism from those in the media who need targets but I think she's up to the challenge.

All the best to her because she deserves it. But, given the choice, I'd rather have been Alan Bennett. It might even be preferable to become a National Treasure posthomously, but only eventually. And not just yet.