Popular Poet Banned - Comments

That's ridiculous... I read that poem last year when my class was prepearing for their GCSEs, and there's nothing that'd influence a kid to pick up a knife and stab someone at all. Yeah, I didn't like the poem, but that's because it wasn't my tastes.

How sad. ¬_¬"

I read one poem of her's. I hated it. Not a loss for Me...

Her poems talk about real life subjects. I remeber my english teacher talking about this poem and how they were baning it. We were the last year to have it in our anthology.

Its stupid the poem talks about killing something. So? Doesnt mean we are going to do it. A poem wont affect us that much. I mean there are poems in the anthology which contain more descriptive killings, one even has a maid serving a head on a plate! Some even have vivid sex scened. And these arnt getting banned. Seriously you ban one poem for containing knife crime you ahve to ban all poems containing viollence.

Its stupid

Urgh, I remeber when this happened. It's stupid, Duffy writes pretty much all her poems in a persona. She's taking on the persona of a guy with no money who has anger issues and kills his goldfish in this poem. I agree with the person below me, TKAM displays racial prejudice so why is that not banned? We read TKAM and think "that's awful", we read Education for Leisure and we think "that's awful", or "that's crazy". It doesn't glorify knife crime. It's silly.

They're taking this censoring a step too far. If they've banned her poem, they mayaswell ban the rest of the english literature syllabus.. to kill a mockingbird and lord of the flies should be unnacceptable if her poem is.

Political Correctivity and cencorship is just getting out of hand.
I studied Carol Ann Duffy for both my GCSE and AS level and no one in my class read it and decided they'd go and kill something.

It's ridiculous, they might aswell ban everything with the word 'kill' in it, if this is how they are going to react to a simple poem!

This is ridiculous. They are stealing the author's freedom of speech. I don't know if the laws about this are different in Britian, but there is no reason to ban this.

That poem was the best thing in the anthology.
I even have a piece of writing up on mibba that's based on, and it the style of the poem.
Sure, it IS sociopathic, but those kinds of people exist, and if at 16 we're still being bubble-wrapped and protected from the reality of the world we actually live in, how are we supposed to be able to keep ourselves later on in life?
Personally I'd rather learn that kind of thing in theory rather than practise, thank you.

For all that, it's a poem. Words on a page. The most damage it can do is a paper cut.
This whole censorship deal has gone way too far.

Jeez. It's not like someone's going to read a poem and go 'hey, I'll kill someone today because I read a poem about it!'
That is just WRONG. =/
And now that they've banned it, more people are going to be interested in it and read it. It's not helpful, is it

Yeah, I sort of agree with the person below.
I mean, all the 'knife crime' people I know generally try to sleep through as much of GCSE English as possible.

And yes, technically Shakespeare 'should' be banned, but his works still remain some of the best literature ever written, which, (let's be honest), 'Education For Leisure' is not. I really don't feel Shakespeare is comparable at all to this. Also, the I feel the poem's been glorified a little. I mean, it's a good poem, but it's not a great poem.

I think it's completely ridiculous. Literature is there to be read and appreciated, we're not supposed to be sheltered from it.

Seriously, the type of people who are the face of knife crime are not the type of people who are heavily influenced by poetry.
Yeah, in fact I'm sure it's really common to have a poetry reading before gangs go out on attack. /sarcasm

xD, I mean, OK, so they don't want to teach 'violent' things. But, as everyone's said, what about the Shakespeare stuff?
Yeah, they won't remove that. But, by their logic, they should.

I mean, for GSCE, I think two of the plays that they were taught were Romeo & Juliet [erm, two murders, two suicides, quite a lot of violence] and Macbeth [lots of murdering and insanity and basically kinda gross].

no freaking way! that's just ridiculous! Not once when I read any of her stuff when I was studying for my GCSE's did I feel prompted to go outside and stab someone. I'm glad she didn't take it sitting down though and wrote that article in response.

I don't think my class are doing Carol Ann Duffy, but I've read her poems in the anthology and I really like them and I wish we were doing her instead of old Seamus Heaney...
I can't believe they would do that. I got the impression that the poem was kind of anti-violence in a way, understanding why someone wants to kill something?
And yes, what about Shakespeare???

This. Is. Ridiculous.
That poem is one of the few that is studied at GCSE that I really enjoyed, and I did not feel that it glorified knife crime in any way. I did not have a motive to go out killing after reading it, that's for sure.
It's a shame that such a great author has been banned *sigh* maybe that government wil lsee sense soon?

So they can ban a poem about a crazy person who wants to kill someone for the hell of it, but they let all the other ones get printed again??
And what about Shakespeare?

Pfft, what a load of shit.

So now they have to reprint the whole anthology?
Oh well, I studied it this year, and it did me no harm. When my brother gets his GCSE anthology I'm giving him mine so I can purposfully go against the utter stupidy of AQA.
That whole section of poetry is all about crime and things like that. That's what it's supposed to be about.

So they let us read about people blowing each other's brains out with rifles in history but they don't let us read a few poems that mention wanting to kill things? The hell?

Poetry is art, it should not be censored.