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Page name       = Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Valentine' and lexical deviance.

Valentine is a poem that is included in a collection of other poems by Carol Ann Duffy,named meantime. Carol Ann Duffy was a British poet who won many awards for her poetry collections, including meantime. She was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1993 for this collection of poems. In the collection 'Mean Time' there is a nostalgic view throughout, with poems that "explore broken and budding relationships . The poem Valentine is particularly lexically deviant, which is a common feature throughout Duffy's poetry works. Duffy is also well known for her use of the dramatic monologue and the inclusion and mixing of a range of "everyday" linguistic varieties in her poems, such as colloquialisms and such.

Overview of Valentine
Carol Ann Duffy's poem Valentine offers an unconventional approach to the traditional romantic idea of a idealistic valentines day. Throughout the poem there is a strong metaphor of an onion, shining the spotlight on a common everyday kitchen vegetable and Duffy infuses it with drama and symbolism. Most of Duffy's poems contain the history of love, social destruction and women and rebellion. In this poem she has incorporated the history of love which she describes throughout this particular poem. Duffy includes symbolic imagery throughout, a symbol is defined as something that is different to its literal sense. For example, in Duffy's 'Valentine' there is symbolic imagery of an onion. In this poem, the onion does not literally represent what it is, a kitchen item, but it could represent the true nature of love, painful and over romanticised.

Typical features of Duffy's poetry
In her poetry, Duffy uses a range of different literary techniques. One of those being the use of the dramatic monologue. Duffy uses the dramatic monologue as her main form of writing as it "allows mostly marginalised social types a voice" .Through writing in the dramatic monologue it allows Duffy to adopt multiple different personas and express her thoughts through her literary works. This gives the audience an insight into the personas psyche as well as Duffy's as Duffy explores a range of themes in her poems that are relatable to her and the time period in which they are written. stated that "primarily the dramatic monologue presents a way of bringing the poet's self into the public world, while simultaneously denying responsibility, and masking presence". Duffy also includes a range of themes in her poems from language and the representations of reality to the construction of the self, gender and social issues, contemporary culture and different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. Duffy is well known for her love poems that often take the form of monologues. "Her verses, as an Economist reviewer described them, are typically spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world".

What is lexical deviance?
Deviation is "the act of moving away from what is normal or acceptable" therefore, "any departure from the usual and acceptable norms of language is considered as a deviation". Deviation is usually found in literary discourses, such as poetry which will be explored in this article. In literature the deviation is "considered as a license or permission for poets and writers to say or write what people in normal situations of language use cannot". Poetry language is a means of communication and speaks about the beliefs, traditions and thoughts of the writer and they embody this into their poetry . A feature of lexical deviance is neologism. Neologism is the invention of a "new word or expression" or a "new meaning for an existing word" and this is one of the ways in which poets deviate from normal language use. This feature is easily recognised in poetic discourse as a neologism looks unfamiliar to the reader or audience, as it is, in hind sight a 'made up word'. pointed towards another feature of poetry and that is, sometimes poets are influenced by spoken language in their poems. "In poems we may see regional dialect being used and there are also differences between spoken and written discourse, such as minor sentences which are typically carried over into poetic structure. Spoken language is also reflected in poems through the use of a more informal language being used as written discourse is seen to be more formal then spoken discourse".

Lexical deviance and language choices in 'Valentine'
This poem juxtaposes cliché views on love and associations that are made with Valentine's day and replaces it with a more cynical and realistic interpretation of love. This poem by Duffy is deliberately lexically deviant throughout. The poem has no clear structure to it as there is single line stanzas and single word lines, which is not very common in many poems and she purposely avoids the common sonnet structure of a love poem. Upon reading the title valentine one could assume that it is a poem about love that will be in the typical sonnet form as sonnets are the "ultimate expression of love". A sonnet is made up of fourteen lines written in "iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme". By deviating from this common form of a love poem Duffy is showing her defiance in following understood language norms and is expressing a more cynical tone of love. In this poem conventional representations of romantic love and traditional valentine's gifts are challenged throughout. Another form of deviance that is used in this poem by Duffy is repetition which is shown in the lines "not a cute card or a kissogram" and "not a red rose or a satin heart". The repetition of the word "not" shows Duffy's rejection of these cliché gifts. Alliteration is also a characteristic of deviance, which is used in "cute card" this depicts the cynical tone that we see throughout the whole of the poem. A key feature of this poem that intensifies Duffy's deviance is the use of the metaphor of the onion that is shown throughout the poem. Duffy, or the persona that she has adapted in this poem, gives her lover an onion "wrapped in brown paper" as a gift for valentines day. This not only shows how Duffy is deviant in the language that she chooses to use in her poem but also that she is deviating from societal norms and she has gave her lover an everyday kitchen item rather than a traditional gift like a box of chocolates for example. She rejects the 'ideal' outlook on valentines day and turns it into something more sinister and dark. Duffy cleverly unravels the truth of the nature of love that it will hurt and betray you, but also make you happy and love is like an "onion" once you start the relationship and get into the deeper layers of it, it will inevitably make you cry. Duffy also uses a lot of symbolism in this poetry from the symbol of a classical valentines gift, light and a wedding ring. The symbol of a classic valentine's gift. The speaker in this poem invokes traditional valentines gifts and explicitly rejects them in favour of the onion and explains that this rejection is an attempt "to be truthful" when expressing her love to her partner. The traditional gifts represent an idealised image of love but hides the destructive parts of it. The symbol of "light". Throughout the discourse of the poem the onion is used as a metaphor for love and in turn its "light" symbolises the brutal truth of love. The "light" can be seen as the "truth" of love and how vulnerable it makes you. The symbol of the "wedding ring". A wedding ring is usually associated with a happy time where you marry the person you want to keep in your life forever and always. However, in this poem Duffy uses the symbolism of the wedding ring as presenting marriage as a restrictive, diminished form of love. This elicits Duffy's societal deviance once again as in the time of society that Duffy wrote this poem in it was seen as the norm to get married and was somewhat expected of people, however in this poem Duffy is expressing her deviation from the norms as she believes that you do not need to get married in order to show your love for someone.

Intertextuality in the works of Duffy
Intertextuality is defined as a "fact about literary texts-the fact that they are all intimately interconnected." and that "every text is affected by all the texts that came before it, since those texts influenced the author's thinking and aesthetic choices"

In her poems Duffy explores a range of themes and ideas, a few of which have been stated previously. Duffy's writing, as we know, was affected by a range of things, one being the society in which Duffy lived in. Duffy is known as a "post-modernist and feminist poet". Politics. In her poetry, Duffy tends to incorporate political ideologies. Her discourse in politics carries themes that generally "deviate from her previous discourse concerning lesbians and her striving for female identity". The rhetoric of self. For Duffy writing in the time period of the 1980's was a tough subject as there were many social factors taking place, such as the social injustices that females were faced with. In the time period of the 1980's Thatcher was elected as prime minister and the conservative party won. This time period was said to be the time that "England was convulsed by a social and political revolution". In this time period there was a move towards a more equal society in terms of gender roles, politics and so on. This was a time period where women started to diverge more into who they were as a person and started branching off and becoming more independent of men. In her poetry Duffy attempts to construct the ideas of the 'self' which is communicated through her most prominent style of writing and that is through the form of the dramatic monologue and the form of writing back. Duffy's poem's juxtapose "issues of economic policy, social control, and national identity in close relationship". The personas that Duffy adopts in her poetry don't assume a single, unified identity but are "inevitably intersected by discourses of national and cultural identity as they shape concepts of self and other, or affinity and difference, of belonging and exclusion" .This highlights the indecisiveness of the time period, women becoming more independent and equal to men as some did not know how to feel about this whereas others embraced this idea of a new found self.