Life & Wisdom Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

Self-diagnosis as performance: Duffy’s line lands because it’s both a confession and a deliberately unpoetic little thud. “My prose is turgid” is the kind of phrase you’d expect from a school report or a brutal workshop note, not from a writer whose public identity is built on lyrical charge. That mismatch is the joke and the point. She uses a latinate, slightly comic word - “turgid” - to conjure prose that’s swollen, overfed, trying too hard. Then she deflates it with the plainspoken tag, “it just hasn’t got any energy,” a phrase that sounds like someone describing a dull party or a sluggish athlete. The tonal drop is a needle: she punctures the self-seriousness that often clings to discussions of “good writing.”

The subtext is craft anxiety without melodrama. Duffy, a poet by trade, frames prose as a body with metabolism: energy is the invisible thing readers feel before they can name why. By calling her own work inert, she’s refusing the myth that accomplished writers operate on permanent inspiration. She’s also signaling a poet’s suspicion of prose that’s all surface and no voltage, language that’s technically competent but dead on arrival.

Contextually, it reads like a corrective to literary prestige culture. Coming from a celebrated poet, the line gives permission to admit flatness, to talk about rhythm and vitality as the real currency, and to treat self-critique not as self-flagellation but as a tool sharp enough to be funny.