Poetry Notebook (25 page)

An alarm bell should have rung then, but most of us were probably not listening. Many of us were listening, however, when it rang again at Peter Porter’s failure to win the post in a race
against Christopher Ricks. Professor Ricks is a scholar, critic and lecturer of titanic prowess, and all are agreed that he did a mighty job. But he was not a poet. It could be said that he fell
into the same hallowed category as erstwhile incumbents A. C. Bradley, J. W. Mackail, W. P. Ker and Maurice Bowra, who were not poets either, but knew an awful lot about it. (Lest you doubt his
credentials, remember that it was Bowra who told Isaiah Berlin about Anna Akhmatova. Berlin had never heard of her. Bowra really had read everything.)

Knowing a lot about it, however, is not the same as doing it, and surely the importance of the post – the thing that makes it decisively different from all the other professorships of
literature in Oxford – depends on its holder being a mature poet with some actual, concrete, hard-won stuff to impart about how poetry gets written. All kinds of people can read poetry, and
more than a few of them can study it: but only a poet can write it. If poets write it for a long time, they find a lot out, not just about their own work but about all the work by other people, in
all ages and languages, that they think is vital. They are well placed to say why they think it so, and when they get near the finishing line they are ideally placed. They speak not so much ex
cathedra as ex atelier, as it were.

From that viewpoint, I thought both Fenton and Muldoon a bit young, and I might say at this point that I would rule myself out for the same reason: despite what the clock might say, I’m
only just getting started. Peter Porter, however, when he ran for the office, was ready to sum up. At the risk of losing his friendship, I might hazard that he would not have been quite as
practised a lecturer as Professor Ricks. But Peter Porter, quite apart from his stature as a poet, is a greatly learned man, a born educator, and a whole world of poetry and the arts is already in
his mind, never needing to be mugged up, all ready to be brought out. (He would have been a master of the Poetry Professor’s other, unofficial task, as exemplified by Auden and later by
Heaney, which is to conduct the kind of informal tutorial that masquerades as a
tertulia
.) But the poet lost to a critic, because the critic had a superior campaign.

So there was already, to my mind at least, a prominent question mark over the electoral system before the recent election got started. But this time the press got into the act and the prominent
question mark turned to vivid scarlet neon, wreathed in the smoke of hell-fire. When one of Ruth Padel’s unwisely enthusiastic friends in the press informed the rest of the press of what it
should have known already, namely that Walcott had a sexual harassment case in his past, the election for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry became an American presidential election in parodic
miniature, with character as the only issue. It should have taken only a moment’s thought to realize that character is just about the last parameter by which to measure the English poets,
among whom the Earl of Rochester and Lord Byron are locked in contention for the title of most wicked and both are outdone for male chauvinism by Milton in fifty different passages of
Paradise
Lost
. But nobody was thinking except Walcott.

It could be that he had a lot to think about. I have no idea. Or rather I have some idea, but it is based only on the publicly available documentation, which is not very extensive. I have met
people who say they know more, but they always seem to have learned it from someone else who knows everything, and him I have yet to meet. Those who were glad to see Walcott hounded out of the race
were not impressed by the arguments of those of us who said that he was unlikely, at the age of seventy-nine, to launch himself from the podium and fall ravenously on the young lovely in the third
row, and I quite see their point. If he had indeed once done what he was rumoured to have done, then he was a villain. But there would still have been little relevance to his qualifications to be
Oxford Professor of Poetry, a post for which you want the kind of man, or indeed woman, that people would flock to hear if he, or she, were lecturing from behind bars. Derek Walcott prudently
retired before he could be scrutinized further, and Ruth Padel, gaining the office by default, resigned from it because her part in ensuring that her opponent should be scrutinized in the first
place was itself scrutinized. The press decided the issue, and the third candidate, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, might have been giving us his judgement on the whole pitiful business by resigning in
his turn. How would he have found the post worth holding, if the press had started scrutinizing him? There might have been some unpleasantness about a disputed parking space back there in the
University of Allahabad. Perhaps he had been photographed allowing his fond look to linger too long on the bare midriff of a Bollywood starlet while he was signing her well-thumbed copy of his
collection
The Transfiguring Places
. And even if he had nothing to hide, why should he let himself be treated like an elected official?

The conclusion is inescapable. Since every future election will be subject to invigilation by the press, the only solution is to scrap the election system. This would probably need to be done
even if the press could somehow reach an agreement to stay out of the lives of the candidates, because already the question of who should hold the post next is subject to the demands of social
engineering, which are no doubt worthy but are entirely irrelevant. Derek Walcott wasn’t running as the first black poet to aspire to the post. He was running as a great poet who happened to
be black. If some time elapses before there is another great poet who happens to be black, then those are the breaks. There are no good reasons, only bad ones, for favouring P. Diddy as the next
Oxford Professor of Poetry, just as there are no good reasons, only bad ones, for threatening a museum with a cut in its funds because not enough black people are coming to see the paintings. To
think otherwise is just another way of patronizing people of colour, and a particularly insidious one.

The same applies to the view (we might call it the Winterson view) by which it is supposed to be a tragedy that a woman poet could not get the post. A truly accomplished woman poet, U. A.
Fanthorpe, ran for the office in 1994, and lost. But if another female poet of equivalent stature were to appear, she could be appointed. Carol Ann Duffy, who revered Fanthorpe, should be of just
about the right magnitude if her completed term as laureate is judged successful, or even if it isn’t. But she would still be a bit young for the post. Kathleen Jamie, already impressive,
should be magisterial by then; but she, too, will scarcely be ready to draw the conclusions of a lifetime. If either Duffy or Jamie gets hustled into an election ten years from now, it will be a
bad sign. An appointments committee could make a principle of playing a long game.

Knowing what we know now, if we review the list of successive professorial terms in the modern era, there were times when Marianne Moore could have been appointed, or Elizabeth Bishop. But the
reason to appoint them would have been that they were great and learned poets, and not because they were women. If they had run in elections, of course, they would probably have lost, because the
electorate, all the graduates of Oxford, would have had to be persuaded that it was time for a woman.

The electorate is no doubt persuaded of that now, but what is the persuasion worth? It’s all a matter of mediatized opinion, when what should count is well-informed opinion, as agreed on
by a panel of people whose chief concern is poetry, and who rank poets by their achievement and vocational wisdom, and not by their membership of a group that is thought to be deprived. The group
might very well be deprived, but it will be deprived still more if it is mined for a token.

How this board of experts should be constituted is beyond me. But before he was ever Oxford Professor, Seamus Heaney was a visiting professor at Harvard, an office to which he was not elected,
but appointed, to the vast benefit of both Harvard and himself. So Harvard must know how to make a board system work. For the Oxford post, drafting all the surviving holders might not be a bad
start, and then you could add in some critics and literary editors who know what they are talking about. Who those might be would itself be a matter of expert choice, so I can already see that
there could be a welter of infighting and no clear course to a workable result. But we can be sure that the current system no longer works at all. Another election along the lines of the one we
have just had will be a kamikaze convention, and we might as well have Ant and Dec presiding over the phone-in.

In the majesty of his years and accomplishments, Les Murray, sole author of the several increasingly massive editions of his
New Collected Poems
– one of the great
books of the modern world – is in the position of a monarch who, having successfully constructed Versailles all on his own, is now pottering in the grounds building sheds. Six years ago
The Biplane Houses
was such a shed, and very prettily done. Now
Taller When Prone
is another. Perhaps I would not have had the idea of an enormous building and its satellite
bâtiments
if the first poem in the new book had not been about the Taj Mahal. The poem, called ‘From a Tourist Journal’, starts like this.

Immediately he’s got you in. He has always been able to do that. The way he can register, in words nobody else would quite choose, a perception nobody else could quite
have, is at the centre of his art, ensuring almost infallibly that a poem will work like a lucky charm for as long as he pours in the images. A Taj made of hail: you and I might say that we would
have seen that to be true eventually, and we might even argue learnedly that the word ‘Mahal’ phonically suggested the word ‘hail’ (points for an essay there), but the
daunting truth is that he doesn’t just think that way, he sees that way.

Murray sees the things of this world
mis à nu
, like Baudelaire’s heart. (More points for an essay.) The charm is infinite because the universe goes on forever, and he would
have something unique to say about every bit of it if he could go on sailing long enough through its eternity of transparencies. That’s why, I’ve just decided, the Versailles analogy
won’t quite do for the big book of poems. Versailles is as charmless as the Escorial. There is nothing delicious about it. The Hermitage in Petersburg is a better bet, because you always want
to break off a bit of plaster moulding and taste the quality of eighteenth-century Italian sugar dipped in Russian winter air.

Such world-girdling analogies, however, are invariably appropriate as to scope, even when they err in their field of resonance. No poet has ever travelled like this one, whether in reality or
just in his mind. This poet will show up wherever a specific quality comes to light, whether made by God or made by man – who is made by God too, who was man-made.

When Shah Jahan built the Taj to express his grief, his religion was concentrated into love, and one could say the same of the boy from Bunyah. Australia might seem like an
unlikely place for all the religions in the history of the world to be combined in a single literary expression, but what the hell, the man who split the atom came from New Zealand. Intelligence of
this intensity doesn’t have a single home. It belongs anywhere – anywhere that the pearl chimneys spill their depth.

In my dreams I see the ideal poetry teacher, nearly always a woman, giving personal instruction to the ideal pupil, nearly always a girl (the boys stay so thick so long, do they not? Although
some of them sharpen up later, in their tediously competitive way), and the teacher says: ‘With Les Murray, you have to get the
speed
. As soon as the first image strikes, the poem is
always on its way to somewhere else. He never elaborates without covering distance, so you have to keep your skates on.’

In ‘As Country Was Slow’ the new high-speed road is seen through what would be our eyes if they had enough supporting electronic equipment.

But by the third stanza the viewpoint has switched to beneath the road, and animals are doing the viewing.

Galway Kinnell once put a poem’s point of view inside a cow’s head, from which it could see rocks going by below on an endless conveyor belt. I wonder if Murray ever
saw that poem but I don’t wonder very hard. I have never caught him borrowing anything except a range of possibility, and any good poet will borrow one of those. They aren’t, after all,
nailed down. For all I know, Murray got the idea for talking about life in the bush when he first noticed how Shakespeare talked about life in a hedgerow. It’s something an exemplar can
provide: you can break through to subject matter that lay so close you didn’t notice. At home everywhere, Murray doesn’t always tell you that the poem is not set in Australia, although
sometimes the title tips you off that he has crossed the world. It seems a fair guess that ‘Midi’ is set in France, unless there’s a town called Midi somewhere near
Murwillumbah.