The next time someone complains that poetry is never in the news, it might be worth reminding them to be careful what they wish for. Poetry has been in the news lately, and the news has not been uniformly glorious.
Britain, for example, now has a new poet laureate–Carol Ann Duffy–to succeed the retiring Andrew Motion. Duffy is a poet and playwright of distinction, but the main fact about her that beguiles the press is that she is not just the first female poet laureate, but a lesbian as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that–indeed, we are living in a literary moment when both Britain’s poet laureate and the poet laureate of the United States (Kay Ryan) happen to be lesbians–but Duffy’s poetry is not preoccupied with her sexual life, so why dwell on the subject?
Well, perhaps because, prior to her appointment, the principal topic in the British media on the vacancy was the nature of the job itself. There was much discussion of whether such an arcane sinecure is really necessary in the modern world–of course it isn’t, but you could have just as easily made that argument 200 years ago–and a distressing number of eligible poets and poetasters lined up to announce publicly that they were not interested in being poet laureate.
Among whom, once upon a time, was Carol Ann Duffy herself, who seems to have been on the short list to succeed Ted Hughes in 1999 but declared afterward that she would not have accepted the post, if offered, since “I will not write a poem for [Prince] Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.”
Now that Edward and Sophie are safely married, she has evidently changed her mind and can settle down to the occasional commemorative couplet or civic sonnet and the traditional emolument of “a butt of sack”–roughly the equivalent of 600 bottles of sherry. Nice work if you can get it.
Meanwhile, from a little further up the Thames, comes news that Ruth Padel, another poet of distinction who had just been elected professor of poetry at Oxford, has been compelled to resign her post after it was revealed in two London newspapers that she had secretly campaigned against her principal rival, the Caribbean poet-playwright Derek Walcott. Padel seems to have sent some email messages to interested journalists questioning Walcott’s fitness for the task–he’s nearly 80 and doesn’t live in England–and directing them to a book, The Lecherous Professor, which accuses Walcott of sexual harassment.
I’m not quite sure where I come down in this urgent matter. The chair in poetry at Oxford is one of those sui generis British institutions that explain, as the saying goes, why academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. It is not really a faculty position but an invitation to deliver three lectures, and involves not an appointment by the university but an election in which only the holders of Oxford degrees are eligible to cast ballots. You can imagine the interest this sort of thing generates among Britain’s chattering classes–many of whom, of course, possess Oxford degrees.
On the one hand, Ruth Padel’s crime seems awfully trivial to me. If reporters asked her to evaluate her main rival, she was perfectly entitled to raise legitimate concerns; and the idea that she was secretly spreading sexual harassment allegations about Derek Walcott is laughable. If there is one fact that everybody in the lit biz “knows” about Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize, it is that his career has been periodically blighted by allegations of sexual harassment, which ended his association with Harvard and Boston University. His fanny-pinching reputation also forced him to withdraw from consideration as professor of poetry, allowing him to issue a statement complaining about the “low tactics [that] have been used. . . . I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me or to myself.”
On the other hand, as more than a few observers have pointed out, judging writers by such standards hurls us down a slippery slope. When considering candidates for a lectureship in poetry, it is probably well to remember that writers are, generally speaking, unconventional people, with all manner of personality quirks and character flaws–and in some cases, expressing opinions–that would swiftly disqualify them in other circumstances.
Curiously, the Padel case reminds me of poor John Sasso, Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign manager 20 years ago, who was also compelled to resign in disgrace because he had pointed out (privately, to reporters) that Dukakis’s rival, Joseph Biden, was a serial plagiarist.
As with Ruth Padel, I’m not quite sure what disgraced John Sasso and left Biden the injured party. For that matter, I’d rather Derek
Walcott were vice president.
Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
