Poor Sean Duffy

Listen to this:

I can guarantee you, or most of you, I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I'm living high on the hog, I've got one paycheck. So I struggle to meet my bills right now. Would it be easier for me if I get more paychecks? Maybe, but at this point I'm not living high on the hog. I think you should all take a step back.

It's heartbreaking. A man who chose to have too many kids is struggling to pay his bills and we should all sympathise. His statement is in response to a man asking if it was right for a Congressman to earn such a massive multiple of the average wage.

And I would, were his 'one paycheck' not $174,000 plus the free healthcare and various benefits most Americans don't get… all provided by the US government, because Mr. Duffy is a Congressman. Not only that, but he's a Republican from Wisconsin, which has just abolished union rights to allow him reduce public workers' wages and working conditions.

"I'm attacking the leadership of the union because they're greedy, and they're selfish and they're self-interested," New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie told a conservative conference Wednesday.

A new teacher in Wisconsin earns roughly $30,000 (£18,500), rising to $50,000 (£31,000) towards the end of his/her career - without all the benefits Mr. Duffy takes home. Duffy 'earns' three times Wisconsin's median wage. The state's average wage is about $52,000.

To rhyme is not a crime

A while back, I mentioned that I really rated Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints, a radical novel set on Ynys Enlli, a prime site of Welsh religious and historical interest. I'm not the only one - she's just won the Oxfam Hay Prize. There's a little old colonialism bound up in the award though - she's an established novelist rather than a newcomer, but there's just a hint in this article that it's writing in English that matters. Even more patronisingly, the BBC story is headlined 'Singer-songwriter wins book prize'. I'm sure Dr. Dafydd will love that faintly dismissive tone…

Anyway, mention of her specialism (R. S. Thomas) reminded me that a comment on another post asked me to list and justify my favourite poets. So here we are:

R. S. Thomas. I met him a couple of times, and very unpleasant he was too. I don't agree with some of his attitudes, but I think that he's up there with the greatest poets of the twentieth century - hounded by his position as an anglicised Welsh nationalist, an agnostic vicar, a cold man with deep feelings, a radical conservative in many ways, everything is poured into poetry which is simultaneously calm and heartfelt. I have a CD of him reading many of the poems, and it's spine-chilling.

MacSpAunDay - I'm a 1930s specialist, the time when poets and artists were forced to take sides by history - often damaging their work in the process, but sometimes liberating them from the parlour games of older English literature. MacSpAunday was a sneering nickname for the leftwing, often homosexual, Oxford educated poets of the 30s: MacNeice, Spender, Auden and C. Day-Lewis.

Malory - I'm a sucker for medieval literature (and further back), especially the Arthurian romances that twist and embellish Celtic myths to deal with pressing current concerns.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: burst in on an all-male preserve, demonstrated that she could do all the strict-metre formal stuff, and turned the tables on all the poetry that objectified women as passive, sexless commodities. She's funny too.

Which leads me to Sappho - fragments of whose poetry survived because a parchment was wrapped round a mummified crocodile, 3000 years ago. Passionate, heartfelt, sometimes angry and sometimes loving and technically gifted, she really is out on her own.

She was paraphrased by Catullus - who could go from writing funny filth to passionate love in a heartbeat. I also rate Whitman, Donne, Duffy, Muldoon, and Simon Armitage, who always surprises me by conveying depths of emotion in the most ordinary of phrases, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg for their exuberance and surprising seriousness. Larkin I find interesting but can't warm to, if you see what I mean. Then there are lots of others I'm getting into slowly, like the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth). I could go on for much longer but I have marking to do…

Poetry please

U. A. Fanthorpe died yesterday - she was a very cool poet.

On the plus side - Carol Ann Duffy is now poet laureate. I hope she isn't a monarchist (I doubt many lefty lesbian poets are), but if we have to have a state poet, she's a good one - try The World's Wife. Let's just hope that the curse of the job (producing duff doggerel for dull occasions) doesn't befall her.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was briefly considered in 1850, but no woman has ever been given the job. Apparently the other contenders were Simon Armitage and Roger McGough - both would have been brilliant. Duffy's giving the £6,000 annual pay to the Poetry Society for a prize, but is demanding to be given the large amount of booze traditionally awarded up front. Very wise.