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William Chiriboga _ubi1018 — This was the topic of my senior thesis (specifically the poem 'Medusa'), and also my most recent attempt at finding something revolutionary, interesting, or worthwhile in modern poetry. The dadaists and beat poets were intent on wresting poetry from the jaws of tradition. By popularizing poetry, they turned poetry into another pointless, populist act. By enshrining the 'personal experience' as the sole qualifier of poetic worth, they ensured that every hack poet will feel justified in sharing their inane thoughts, and that every good poet will be lost in a sea of mediocrity. Personal experiences are often banal and painfully shortsighted. Making sacred something which everyone has is the same as making nothing sacred. While their egalitarianism might be audacious, this does not make it useful. Remove our ability to critique poetry, and you no longer have any community of poetry. The poem has finally been relegated to the most base populist urge: escapism. When 'emotional reaction' is all that matters, Twilight and Miley become our 'high art'. Newsstand celeb rags become our critics. When you try to eliminate tradition, you eliminate the ability to create meaning, since meaning can only be expressed by confirming or denying the experiences and notions of tradition. Keeping tradition as a basis does not mean agreeing with it. Indeed, by rejecting it, the dadaists also rejected the tradition of poetry as fundamentally subversive. Without a tradition, what is there to subvert? I chose Duffy because I thought I saw something promising in her. Instead of shock tactics and 'personal experiences', she seemed to create a more complex and interesting view. It seemed there might be something more there than you might get from hearing a gas station attendant complain about their relationship woes for the duration of a cigarette break. When I finally sat down and began to follow the traces and threads of Duffy's thought, it became less promising. An analysis of word use, construction, and scansion proved rather fruitless; she was keeping no extra meaning there. Her words are simple, straightforward, and though they point to something more than their pure meaning on the page, there are no worlds inhabiting the spaces between oxymorons, as in Donne and Plath. Duffy does not take on and subvert the myths she uses, indeed she often presents the characters as divorced from their historical or mythological contexts. 'Medusa' ignores almost all of the original tale, acting less as an observation of the life of the monster than a rather simple metaphor for the belabored feminist standby of 'the gaze'. She even misapplies the mythological elements she does use, indicating that she has no interest in trying to realistically portray these 'unwritten' women's stories. There is no apparent pattern or further meaning to her misapplication, so it is not a subversion of the original tale. A comparison of this poem to previous Medusa-themed feminist poems (including Plath's) also failed to show promise. Duffy was not using tradition as a shorthand to create intertextuality. The similarities were haphazard and vague. A historical view proved no more profitable, since Duffy's many wives do not represent the various and changing views of the womanhood of the past. She does not explore the time before there was a possibility of 'homosexual identity', or the understanding of the feminine in all these far-flung ages. Indeed, her women are all remarkably modern, which would be forgiven under the auspices of the sacred 'personal experience', but it seems a crime to look at yourself, at femininity, at history, and not question whether your own assumptions are just the symptoms of your own zeitgeist. Perhaps Duffy recognizes this, for in 'Medusa' at least, she presents a woman whose view of the world is as flawed as the metaphor would indicate. It is her obsession with her own victimization that turns men to stone, not their faults or flaws. Though she blames them, we see the chinks and cracks in her all-encompassing victimhood. I hope that Duffy sees the cracks, as well. If she does, then her poems at least represent an informed and skeptical view of the 'subjugated woman', recognizing how this destruction becomes internalized. If she does not recognize this, then the poem is a purely personal experience, representing not only Duffy's understanding of gender, but where that understanding becomes flawed and unreliable: the point when an unreliable narrator becomes an unreliable author. Without clever and biting asides to clue us in, we're left wondering whether Duffy is a self-victimizer, or whether she is laughing at the notion. There is a sense that she recognizes this, but it never seemed fully-formed enough to break the bonds entirely. Most of the poems are more-or-less unremarkable, leaving many readers with the sense that Duffy is being candid and straight-forward. Her simplistic language does not invite a deeper reading, though her work profits from it. By failing to be clear, she leaves herself open to interpretation, even interpretations opposite to what she often seems to indicate. Many read 'Medusa' as a woman vindicated in her hatred, though perhaps this only comes from their own need for such vindication against the world. The myth of feminism in Duffy never reaches the conscientious wit of Angela Carter, whose acumen is a rare and valuable gift to humanity. By leaving her poems open to interpretation, Duffy loses much of the punch she could have had by presenting her subversion more strongly. Her poems are likely to amuse the cynic as well as provide emotional support to the self-victimizer. Then again, it's hard to blame Duffy for this entirely, as the short-sighted will always try to take away something that supports what they have already decided to be true.