Wendy Cope | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1945-07-21)21 July 1945 (age 80) |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | West Lodge Preparatory School,Sidcup, Kent Farrington's School,Chislehurst, Kent |
| Alma mater | St Hilda's College, Oxford |
| Period | 1980–present |
| Notable works | Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis Serious Concerns |
| Notable awards | Cholmondeley Award 1987 American Academy of Arts and Letters 1995 Michael Braude Award for Light Verse 1995 |
| Spouse | Lachlan Mackinnon |
Wendy CopeOBE (born 21 July 1945) is a contemporary English poet. She read history atSt Hilda's College, Oxford. She now lives inEly,Cambridgeshire, with her husband, the poetLachlan Mackinnon.
Cope was born inErith inKent (now in theLondon Borough of Bexley), where her father Fred Cope was manager of the local department store, Hedley Mitchell. She was educated at West Lodge Preparatory School inSidcup and Farrington's School,Chislehurst, both in Kent.[1] After graduating fromSt Hilda's College andWestminster College, Oxford, Cope spent fourteen years as a primary-school teacher.[2] In 1981, she became Arts and Reviews editor for theInner London Education Authority magazine,Contact. Five years later, she became a freelance writer and was a television critic forThe Spectator magazine, until 1990.[3]
Five collections of her adult poetry have been published:Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis in 1986,Serious Concerns in 1992,If I Don't Know in 2001,Family Values in 2011, andAnecdotal Evidence in 2018. Cope has also edited several anthologies of comic verse and was a judge of the 2007Man Booker Prize.[4]
She was elected aFellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992.[5]
In 1998, she was voted the listeners' choice in aBBC Radio 4 poll to succeedTed Hughes asPoet Laureate.[6] WhenAndrew Motion's term as Poet Laureate came to an end in 2009, Cope was again widely considered a popular candidate,[6] although she believes the post should be discontinued.[6][7]Carol Ann Duffy succeeded Motion as Poet Laureate.
Cope was appointedOfficer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the2010 Birthday Honours.[8] In April 2011, theBritish Library purchased Cope's archive including manuscripts, school reports and 40,000 emails, the largest email archive they have bought to date. The papers also include 67 poetry notebooks and unpublished poems. Cope commented: "I wanted to find a good home for my archive. The timing was dictated because we had to move home, so we needed some money to buy a house, and the space. So this was the moment. I askedAndrew Motion what I should do, and he told me someone to approach at the British Library. I wasn't sure they would want it, but they did." When the collection is catalogued and organised, the archive will be available to researchers.[9]
In 2013, after 19 years of living together, Cope married Lachlan Mackinnon in aregister office, although she has stated that she would have preferred acivil partnership.[10]
In January 2019, Cope was the guest on BBC Radio 4's long-running programmeDesert Island Discs. Her book choice wasThe Compleet Molesworth byGeoffrey Willans, her luxury item was writing materials and her favourite music track wasBach's "Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D minor".[11]
Despite Cope's slight output, her books have sold well and she has attracted a popular following with her lighthearted, often comical poetry, as well as achieving literary credibility, winning two awards and making an award shortlist over a fourteen-year period.[12] She has a keen eye for the everyday, mundane aspects of English life, especially the desires, frustrations, hopes, confusions and emotions in intimate relationships.[12] DrRowan Williams is a well known fan of her work, writing that: "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets, and says a lot of extremely serious things".[13] In 2021, the poet and criticRory Waterman published the first critical book on her work, for the "Writers and Their Work" series (Liverpool University Press).[14]
Threehaikus fromMaking Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, where they are presented as being written by the (fictional)Tulse Hill poet Jason Strugnell, were set by the composerColin Matthews in 1990 asStrugnell's Haiku.[15]
In 2008, Cope's poem "After The Lunch" was used as the lyric of the song "Waterloo Bridge" by jazz composer and musicianJools Holland and singer Louise Marshall.[16]
Wendy Cope's style progression spans nearly fifty years. While she has released more than two dozen publications, her most well-known works are her five intermittent poetry collections:Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986),Serious Concerns (1992),If I Don’t Know (2001),Family Values (2011), andAnecdotal Evidence (2018). The changes in her both her writing style and life can be tracked in these five collections.[citation needed]
Cope acknowledges that the first two are quite different from the latter three. She claims this is due to the major role played by her happiness in her writing, and that her first two collections were written when she was fairly unhappy. Both collections' poems vary in content, but are similar in structure. Generally, each poem features a lighthearted tone with punchline jokes and a dry, compressed wit. The punchline is often "centered on men from the point of view of the single heterosexual woman".[17] Paired with an admiration for life and the mundane, the collections garnered Cope popularity. Cope's style and humour became so consistent that both fans and critics alike began to label pieces written in this style as "Wendy Cope poems" – anthems for "several generations of frustrated and conflicted women".[18] This style was admired for neat rhyme schemes, humorous observations, and unexpected politically charged strikes at concepts like marriage or the patriarchy.
The following three publications are notably darker. They have also been less popular. The wild success ofSerious Concerns in the 1990s changed Cope's life entirely. Newfound money and resources allowed her to quit teaching, dedicate herself to writing, and begin living with Mackinnon, whom she later married, in 2013. As her happiness increased, her poetry changed. Free verse poems with darker tones replaced light-hearted rhyme. Cope's allusions to her battles with depression, a theme present in all of her work, grew more frequent.[18] The freedom of success allowed Cope to focus on more thorny issues.
Serious Concerns stands as Cope's most popular book, even thirty years later. One top-ten list of "must read" Cope poems has all top five poems as coming from her first two collections.[19] However, Cope herself disagrees with the concept of a "Wendy Cope anthem".[18] Cope's favourite of her own works isAnecdotal Evidence. Her favourite of her own poems is "Flowers" fromSerious Concerns.
Her domestic love poem 'The Orange' became increasingly viral from 2018, leading toFaber & Faber releasing a line of accompanying merchandise for it, and publishing a new edition of her works in 2023, entitledThe Orange and other poems.
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