Time for some poetic justice at Oxford

Behaving himself: Damien Hirst at Berlin’s Soho House with mum Mary
12 April 2012

There's an over-long election limping to its conclusion this week. Nominations closed yesterday for the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

There is one serious candidate, Geoffrey Hill, and a ragbag of wild-card contenders: performance poets, sound poets, a neuro-psychologist — and a couple who aren't poets at all.

It's a world away from last year, when a genuine race between Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and Ruth Padel, a well-regarded confessional poet and great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, swerved off the rails to become a train wreck the like of which had never happened in the post's 300-year history. Walcott withdrew in the wake of stories smearing him; his rival was duly elected.

But the story wouldn't go away, and within days Padel stepped down, giving a slightly surreal press conference at the Hay Festival. Soon, Libby Purves was in full throttle on Channel 4 News, decrying the role in the row of "that silly girl at the Evening Standard" (that'd be me) and arts journalists who only care about white wine, crisps and gossip.

Yet it will soon be Hay time again and the university has yet to find a replacement — which is sad for anyone who cares about poetry. Even sadder, though, are this year's light-hearted, throw-my-hat-into-the-ring campaigns. My personal favourite, Paula Claire, a sound poet, encourages listeners to shout out extra lines to add to the poems they hear at readings.

All this for the job widely considered the best there is in poetry: a kind of laureateship with none of the daft obligations to write about Kate Middleton or corgis. Over the years, Matthew Arnold, WH Auden and Seamus Heaney have all held the professorship. For an honorary salary of a few thousand pounds, the professor gives three lectures, often producing their most profound critical writing on poetry.

Heaney's lecture, The Indefatigable Hoof-taps, is one of the best pieces of writing there is about Sylvia Plath. When I was at Oxford, cultivating my fondness for gossip and crisps, it was a highlight to do a poetry workshop with Paul Muldoon. For students now at the university, such chances, for at least a year, have been lost.

But while many esteemed figures have declined to stand against Hill, citing his age (77) and stature, the ugly hangover of last year's debacle is that no one in their right mind would elect to stand after the level of personal scrutiny that went on last year. The talent has been scared away.

Personally, Hill isn't my favourite, but he'd be a worthy professor nonetheless. Next time around, I hope someone like Clive James or Don Paterson could be persuaded to stand. Or Bob Dylan: I'd raise a glass of warm white wine to him, for sure.

A little bit of Soho - in Berlin

I have just been in Berlin at the new Soho House, or should that be Haus? Formerly the archive of the Communist Party, in its new incarnation the club has come to life with a green rooftop pool looking out over the former East Berlin centre of Alexanderplatz.

Eat your heart out, Wim Wenders, whose film Wings of Desire — my favourite of his — is about an angel who lives over divided Berlin.

While the club doesn't have its own circus or trapeze bar like the film, it does have a boxing ring. For the haus's first weekend, Damien Hirst threw a party to celebrate his show in Berlin, a kind of YBAs school reunion

Pretty brave, and, it has to be said, something like the equivalent of inviting the Rolling Stones to road-test your new house or Lewis Hamilton to drive your new car.

Happily, when I left on Sunday, Das Haus and the boxing ring were still standing.

Russell Crowe in big softie shock

Russell Crowe, sometime phone-thrower and star of the new film of Robin Hood, has been telling GQ magazine how baffling he finds it that our press insists on referring to him as a Hollywood Hard Man.

"It's just ridiculous," he says. "I know some hard men, mate, and I am not a hard man. I'm a guy who likes poetry, who writes songs. I put on make-up for a living." Goddammit, if only he'd applied to be Oxford poetry professor.

Rainbow dream is over

Where once politics was showbusiness for ugly people, now it is exactly like reality TV. On Sunday, with my cousins, six and four, respectively, I watched brilliant 17-year-old Liverpudlian Stephanie, favourite to win, crash out of Over the Rainbow, the show to find a Dorothy for a new West End production of The Wizard of Oz.

"She's gone home, away in the moon," said cousin Oliver, appalled at the cruelty. I hope the fact that Stephanie's costume colour was yellow isn't a spooky omen.

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