Poetry War, Oxbridge Battlefront

From our British correspondent:
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Ruth Padel, first female Oxford Professor of Poetry, resigns over smear claims

The first female Oxford Professor of Poetry resigned today following her involvement in an alleged smear campaign against a former rival.

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The candidate (left), a cute brunette with hazel eyes, denies any wrongdoing, says she acted in "good faith" towards rival Derek Walcott, who withdrew from the contest amid recriminatory reminders that he has twice been charged with sexual harassment. Now a new election will be held. Read the London Telegraph account here.

Padel is quoted saying "I wish he had not pulled out." Many other women have felt the same way, quipped Felicia Burns.

The poet will make a fuller statement at the Hay Festival tomorrow.

Back on February 26, the Guardian reported that Ladbroke's of London had laid 8-1 odds on Padel's becoming Britain’s poet laureate. Only Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, and three other bardies had shorter odds for the post that eventually went to the winner.

Padel was Lady Antonia Fraser's choice for the laureateship. "The candidate I back for [sic] is someone who was not mentioned in any of the newspaper reports yesterday [29 March] -- Ruth Padel. Her poems on Darwin are simply wonderful." Lady Antonia's late husband won the Nobel Prize in literature under the pseudonym Harold Pinter. See the story in the London Evening Standard here.

Patricia Hose charged that it is because of her preoccupation with Darwin and his association with evolutionary theory that Padel's poems have not been taught in the United States or Canada.

Initial reports of Duffy's laureateship mis-identified her as Carl Duffee, sparking outrage in Oxbridge circuses. But cooler heads prevailed. And a Manchester audience laughed appreciatively when Duffy -- Britain's first female, openly lesbian laureate -- improvised a couplet apropros the scandal of MP's runaway expense accounts:

"What did we do with the trust of your vote? Hired a flunky to flush out the moat," quipped Andrew Motion's successor, the Independent reported.

Speaking of moats, an article in the Telegraph notes and gloats over the members' use of public funds to clean their moats and do other greedy expensive ruling-class sorts of things, but concludes that the scandal is strictly small time.

Viktor Shenderovich, a media commentator on Russian radio, whose puppet show based on Spitting Image was banned some years ago, said the Russians are laughing at us. "The scope of corruption in Russia cannot compare with the shameful pettiness of British MPs. The small-mindedness arouses only disgust."

In the Guardian David McKie's take on the growing controversy was that we have always been going "From bad to verse." McKie's article on the mediocrity of past poets laureate was the 514th entitled "From Bad to Verse" since 1890.

Michael Deacon in The Telegraph saw the Padel flap in the context of the moral stance taken by revered figures of the past who would be outlaws today. Shelley was an atheist, Byron a womanizer, Coleridge a junkie, Keats a lily-livered Londoner, Blake a madman, and Wordsworth a bore.  And that's just the Romantics. “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post," Deacon wrote. "They just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”

MP's in Britain are members of parliament. In the United States, the initials stand for military police.  Yours truly, favoring challenges or duels as a way of adjudicating disputes, proposes that all the entrants write a poem that capitalizes on the potential for transatlantic misunderstanding in this conjunction of letters. If you go here or there you'll see what I mean. You Americans are clever but we got there first.

-- Raymond Chandler Russell

Comments

[Laura Orem]

This whole thing has just been depressing and reflects very badly on Oxford and on poetry.

Katy Evans-Bush wrote an excellent piece in the Guardian about it (this is prior to Padel's stepping down). Here's the link - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/23/derek-walcott

[James Clive]

I think Clive James would make a wonderful replacement...the finest poet of his generation, the first TV critic to bravely take on the difficult task of lampooning Japanese reality shows - and he's been in "Poetry" a number of times - so he must be good...

Plus he's getting on a bit, so the tottie-chasing probably wouldn't be an issue...

[John Chives]

I sense an Unseen Presence here, and Unseen Hand ...

[Dashiell Hamlet]

Eh, wot?

[Arturo Mercante]

I agree that the whole spectacle is sniff sniff veddy veddy in the tongue-in-jowl English manner. Hypocrisy, thy dwelling place is Brittania. Enough said. But your correspondent, so otherwise assiduous, failed to note. And the question of what he failed to note is the substance of an entire novel as gilt-edged as the fault in the golden bowl.

[Ms Baroque]

Oh dear. This is undoing all my work when I was guest blogging here! England is NOT like an episode of Inspector Morse. All normal people think this whole escapade has been bizarre.

[Molly Arden]

There will always be an England!

[Term papers]

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

[Washington Irving]

I'll be loving you,
All ways!