From the New York Time:
A historic month for women in British poetry turned sour on Monday when the first woman in 301 years elected to Oxford University’s prestigious chair in poetry resigned and admitted what she had previously denied — that she had played a part in a covert effort to taint her main rival for the post with old allegations of sexual impropriety.
From the LRB Blog:
Now that Padel has stepped down after less than a week in the chair, admitting she played a ‘naive’ role in the smear campaign that led to Walcott’s withdrawal from the contest, Mehrotra’s supporters are running an email campaign insisting that he should be appointed by default: ‘he has received a significant number of votes, and emerged as a serious contender for the post, therefore, this should be the university’s next logical choice. At least this is how things happen in the democratic world.’ Or to put it another way, the farce has gone on long enough; why not appoint Mehrotra and be done with it?
I love how this kind of literary dust up tests the language of reporting. On one hand, you have the conniving female, on the other, an equally caddish male, combined with all the public and private intrigue surrounding a classic archetype of prestige, the treasured academic post. That you can describe the entire incident using generics shouldn’t stop what I’m sure are rather engaging dinner table conversations among British literati. But nobody seems to be asking the obvious question.
Why have an Oxford professor of poetry at all?
In an election that saw 426 votes out of a possible 100,000 the real issue of the relevance of poetry ought to be in play. That those who are “professional” poets often act unprofessionally seems like a sidebar, interesting as it might be.
