(Can anybody play?)

And now, from my obscure song reference straight on to the grumping: so Carol Ann Duffy is the new poet laureate. I’ve been a little surprised by my own reaction to it: had I posted my thoughts pre-announcement, they would have been mostly complaining about how, when we get down to brass tacks, I think Armitage (the other main contender, in my own opinion and in what I’ve heard about the deliberations) is the better poet. Writing now, though, having had a full day to catch up on what the Guardian, BBC, et al have to say about it, I find myself mostly just tired as all hell of the rampant sexism.

Okay, so the press is hardly proposing Duffy would do better to get back in the kitchen with her shoes off; it’s not that sort of sexism. But the focus is overwhelmingly on her status as First Female Poet Laureate. And I do get it, I do–she’s the first one, that’s great, it’s long long overdue. But something about the coverage is just so…lumpy? For example, the Guardian’s approach was to accompany their article about Duffy with several poems by other female poets. Way to conflate any woman with women as a whole, guys–I notice the New York Times didn’t run an excerpt of Idi Amin’s speeches alongside their November 8, 2008 headlines, but way to trailblaze! I’m using a deliberately outlandish parallel there, of course, but I think the underlying logic is the same. Carol Ann Duffy is a female poet. So is Lavinia Greenlaw, and Anne Sexton, and Jorie Graham, but that’s about all they have in common, and to focus on Duffy as a woman above and beyond everything else about her–at times, the fact that she’s even a poet seems to recede into the background–is diminishing, and insulting, to the rest of us.

I think my thoughts on this have come out of some longer-term mulling, as well as an interesting conversation I had this weekend. I was at a party in London on Friday night, where I had a chance to catch up with a girl I started a Ph.D. programme in Davis, California with, lo these many moons ago. After a year of it, I cut and ran to the U.K., and I don’t think we’d properly chatted with each other since. She’s still in the programme there, and making a great success of it from everything I heard; I’d wanted to pick her brain about the difference between British and American academia, but we ended up talking quite a bit about gender instead. She was saying that, since she’s been here, she’s been struck by how male-dominated the academy is, which made me think–and she has a point. Compared to what I remember of American schools, UEA is a much more male-centric institution. The British poetry scene seems similar–and, if I’m going to be brutally, bitchily honest here, the Norwich scene is no exception. I don’t know that I would classify most Norwich poets I know as overtly sexist, but unconsciously?–it’s been on my mind for a while. A lot of female poets I know just seem to get left out of a lot–the plummier gigs, the planning roles, the out-of-town readings. I remember a while ago being at an after-reading gathering at a pub, and suddenly realising that a mini-caste system had emerged: the prime table, the one grabbed by the ones who arrived first, was occupied only by the boys who got it and their girlfriends. The female latecomers, most of whom had also read, were shunted off to a side table and to find their own chairs. In the grand scheme of things, I’ve had papercuts that were more annoying, but that dull stomach-punch of recognition wasn’t a good moment, and it was all the worse for surprising me.

Anyway, I’ve managed to personalise yet another innocuous news item. Good for Duffy. But–and again with the Obama reference–just as one black president doesn’t mean we’re no longer a racist society, one female poet laureate doesn’t mean sexism is dead and gone. Just ask a female poet–they’re easy to find, of course; just check the second billing.