EDUCATION FOR LEISURE
Carol Ann Duffy
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets
I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.
I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.
I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
For signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.
There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
‘Education for Leisure’ brilliantly evokes the inner life of a lost and unemployed loser and implicitly explores the psychological motivations behind a knife-crime. The consciously unnamed narrator struggles to deal with feelings of haplessness, absurdity and suffers an unconvincing relationship with reality:
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets
I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
It’s not unusual for those with feelings of deep worthlessness to develop delusions of grandeur; here the narrator complains of being ignored and so resolves to ‘play God’. Which, pitifully, seems initially to amount to squashing flies against windows: though the allusion is altogether more apt and alludes to a scene in King Lear, when the blinded Gloucester, thinks of his son and laments, ”As flies to wanton boys are we to gods / They kill us for their sport. . . ” Gloucester expresses his horror at human cruelty; Shakespeare, much like Duffy in Educating for Leisure is not glamorising cruelty and harm, you’d have to be an idiot to believe that, but condemning it with the full humanity of high literature. This reference also expands on one of the poem’s key themes: that the education system has failed to give the narrator an accurate sense of what Shakespeare meant; and, indeed, only done enough to equip the narrator with the knowledge and skills to sit at home, on the dole, contemplating gruesome acts of vengeance.
Duffy moves between the subjects twitchy emotional centre through discreetly deployed images, delivering heartbreaking revelations of loss and stilted development. “I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name” is chillingly good, a metaphor for potential that is simply exhaled away. Few change the world significantly by flushing goldfishes, and then the senseless act is compounded by a fearful reference to Genesis, “I see that it is good“. As the poem nears its climax, the references have become increasingly egoistic and vengeful.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
For signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.
There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
With a flurry of tragi-comic statements, we see how the narrators’ sense of self-importance has been ridiculed by their encounters with reality. There’s the distinction between an ‘’autograph” and “signing on” – tellingly, the narrator’s is not appreciated. He’s cut off from the radio because he’s not a superstar, and at the high point of these tragi-comic turns, he gets out the bread-knife. “The pavements glitter suddenly” anoints us with the narrator’s excitement, and is a clear shift from “a sort of grey boredom stirring the streets”. Finally, the poem reaches its climax, “I touch your arm.” For the first time the reader is directly addressed, a brilliant rhetorical trick to engage the reader, and understand this may be as much about human contact as wanting to cause harm: “I touch your arm”. The narrator does not go out in a frenzy to menace, but to coldly, affectionately caress you with a knife. Something altogether more frightening, for me. Are the implications of the poem that going out with a bread-knife is as much a desperate act as calculated violence? This is where Duffy takes the cultural risk, where poetry becomes dangerous, unflinching. Rather then slur an estranged member of society, Duffy bravely enters the psychology of the unnamed narrator and the effects are unsettling, disturbing, awkwardly compassionate and ultimately, more condemning not only of the individual, but of society.
‘Education for Leisure’ is a timely and challenging poem, which is incredibly skilful and as Duffy says, she, “[uses] simple words but in a complicated way.” The poem has been banned from AQA course books following three complains––two about knives and one about flushing the goldfish. In our new censorious and close-minded age, it seems that members of our education system are incapable not only of challenging or stimulating through, but of being unable to understand anything figuratively. Not only that, but to ban this poem is to assert a logic which is wholly inconsistent, why not then ban any number of Shakespeare’s plays for ‘glamorising violence’? Are we really banning poems and not say video games or Tarantino films? Why not censor Lord of the Flies?
Yet, perhaps the most pernicious thing, is the lukewarm reaction from liberals. Though not everybody, at least. Thankfully, Michele Ledda, a teacher and organiser of Leeds Salon is campaigning for the poem to be brought back to the syllabus and has almost 300 signatures. Sadly, we are now in a position where we have to defend poetry, it’s majesty, its brilliance, to the dullards who run our intuitions, lest three people complain and serious literature is outlawed. May I suggest, that the best way forward is to email the link to our Laureate’s poem to all interested parties, sign Michele’s petition, and love literature, vigilantly.
Fantastic article, thank you for highlighting the need to support literature, especially when it concerns how future generations will ‘read’ cultural changes such as the need to prohibit poetry in order to remain politically correct and ‘safe’. I will be sharing this in as many ways possible!
I support the protest against the censoring of this poem. However, from a critical point of view, while agreeing with most of your critique, I question the statement that “It’s not unusual for those with feelings of deep worthlessness to develop delusions of grandeur”. Instead I would suggest that Duffy makes clever metaphoric use of madness to convey the frustration and anger of the unemployed youth. There is a deplorable number of cases of unsupervised paranoid schizophrenics killing strangers (the downside of ‘care in the community’). Duffy uses this phenomenon to create her manic ‘Outsider’ character.
As for glorifying violence, I am reminded of the Columbine type of offence in the US, Germany and Finland. I suspect that in reality as opposed to poetry, the perpetrators of such acts are disturbed, or there would be many more such offences, and indeed many more stabbings by UK students of Shaespeare and players of violent video games. The taboo against killing and extreme violence is so strong in our society that it takes a lot to drive most people to the point of murder. Even soldiers, I gather, often have difficulty killing the enemy, e.g. last I saw an ex-Afghanistan combatant describe how he had felt real unease and a distinct loss of part of his soul as he charged the Russian forces (then the enemy) for the first time.
I’m not used to blogging but enjoyed this article and felt I had to commend the site, which I’ll return to. School children should be given a copy of what Wes says with the poem, as a step towards breaking the cycle of bad teaching and unconfident readers.