At the risk of appearing to be obsessed with this business of the election of the Oxford Professor of Poetry, here’s one more post on the subject. From where I stand, I have to say, the whole idea of an election for a poetry professor for which there are betting odds and about which so many articles have been written so far is so eccentrically quaint . . . so very, well, English, that it holds a surreal fascination.
Well, Priyamvada Gopal has just published another piece on the subject in the Guardian (the title of this post is her line, not mine) that actually finds some rationality in the exercise, so I thought it would be worth pointing any among you with some interest in the matter (rather than in Walcott’s alleged sexual misdeeds) in her direction. Below I am copying the first paragraphs of her lucid dissection of this ancient (up to now white male) ritual. If it grabs you, the link to her article follows. Enjoy. Or not.
She writes . . .
To judge by the newsprint lavished on the poet laureateship and the tight contest to become Oxford’s ceremonial professor of poetry, poets and poetry are the new reality television (if only). As the breathless speculation about the former subsides with the near certain appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the first female and openly gay poet laureate, literary heavyweights are lining up to support Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott as, respectively, Oxford’s first female or first black professor of poetry.
This race has even elicited a partisan attack on Walcott in the Independent, which makes no allusion to the Nobel laureate’s vast literary output but claims that his alleged “priapic” fondness for young women make him an unsuitable candidate. An excellent point, but how sparse Oxbridge senior common rooms might suddenly become if such predilections worked, as they should, to debar some from academic office. Duffy, evicted from laureateship consideration last time round on the grounds that her sexuality might offend middle England, is now touted as the people’s choice.
It all sounds perilously like I’m a Poet, Get Me Out of Here, but scoffing is too easy. Grace-and-favour establishment posts such as the laureateship won’t transform the world – but the fact of who holds them (or won’t) tells us what needs to change. Benjamin Zephaniah arguably furthered his services to literature and society with his rejection of the OBE’s “insulting” memorialising of colonialism. While he insists that OBEs “compromise … and laureates suddenly go soft”, others maintain that a “new kind of laureateship” can be the vehicle for change. The campaign for a female laureate argues that such a figure can raise aspirations for girls beyond Jadedom and Jordanhood and remind people that poetry is relevant.
The rest at http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/30/poetry-laureate-race-women
