Life & Wisdom Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

Duffy treats inspiration less like a lightning bolt than a grit-in-the-mouth problem. The sand-and-oyster image demystifies the poem’s origins: art begins as discomfort, intrusion, something you can’t ignore. That metaphor also quietly reframes “truth” as made, not found. A pearl isn’t discovered in the oyster; it’s produced through labor, secretion, time. In Duffy’s hands, the poet’s job is to stay with the irritation long enough for it to transform.

Her second line tightens the argument into an aesthetic manifesto: “In each poem, I’m trying to reveal a truth, so it can’t have a fictional beginning.” The subtext is a refusal of the tidy scene-setting that often flatters fiction (the weather, the room, the decorative preface). Duffy wants the poem to start where the pressure is, where the moral or emotional dilemma is already live. It’s a claim about ethics as much as craft: if the poem is a truth-telling device, it shouldn’t launder its urgency through an invented doorway.

Context matters: Duffy’s work repeatedly inhabits voices sidelined by official narratives, remixing the canon (The World’s Wife) and bringing private experience into public language. “No fictional beginning” doesn’t mean she rejects persona or imagination; it means she distrusts art that uses invention to soften what hurts. The line reads as a defense of lyric immediacy in an era of spin: start with the splinter, not the story that explains it away.