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| Hearsay: |
Wow. You thought things were ugly and complicated before? Well, now Ruth Padel, Oxford Professor of Poetry for less than a week, has resigned since it came to light that the emails seemingly intended to cripple the campaign of her main competitor Derek Walcott were written by none other than herself. I’ve seen a lot of commentary on this, and a good deal of it seems to hover around the divide at the feminism v. patriarchy watercooler. And with good reason. There are questions that need to be asked. Some of them can be answered somewhat definitively, but some can only create more questions, or spark arguments based on worldview.
The main problem is this: we were prepared to overlook the failings (in fact, possibly criminal behaviour) of Walcott because of his massive genius, yet Padel, also a genius, is being crucified for forwarding on a few notes by email—is this a case of misogyny? Historically and sociologically speaking, I’d normally say Yes. And given the sputtering and glee of her critics, it seems rather likely. Yet…
As someone who’s somewhat controversially forwarded on a few emails in the last year (ahem), I have no problem with Walcott’s past coming to light and being considered in the context of an election for a position with great influence (such as it is) over the public. And largely he survived it, character-wise, but his “career” is another matter. So the question isn’t whether the info was intended to smear, it’s who did the smearing? Was it a concerned citizen? A voting member of Oxford? A journalist with a particularly sensitive nose? No, it was another candidate. Does that change things? Further, what does it mean that the info passed on was to some a smear, and to others helpful information? Like it or not, believe it or not, there are certainly going to be gendered differences here in how we respond to a person with an alleged past of sexual impropriety. I would expect that this was considered pretty important information to more than a few voting members.
So, now I ask: did Padel resurrect and send the seedy past of Walcott with the intent to influence the election? Seems pretty likely, regardless of what the other reasons were. She should have let someone else forward it, frankly. Would this revelation have forced her to step down if she were a man? That’s debatable. I certainly would have called for anyone’s resignation if these kinds of tactics were employed, regardless of gender or issue. It’s dirty pool. And the original revelation certainly forced Walcott’s hand so that he lost the position before the contest was even decided. But dirty pool aside, forwarding emails of publicly available information is NOT a crime. And it’s certainly not comparable to a past of sexual harrassment.
But something to keep in mind here is that both poets resigned because of APPEARANCES of impropriety. No one actually forced them to. We can debate endlessly whether what they did was wrong or worthy of discussion in the context of the election, but THEY knew the appearances were likely to damage the OxProPo position itself. They realized that their own critical errors in judgement from the past (recent or relatively distant) had precluded them from holding a position that can’t sustain the scabs and scars that would come with their election.
The main problem with Walcott was his inability to admit there was an issue. In a position of immense public importance, an ambassadorial position of sorts, there is more to consider than genius. If we wanted genius plugging away at poetry we’d pay him to stay in his room and not talk. Padel may have thought she did nothing out of line and Walcott may have thought the past was behind him, but both have realized that in today’s world of instant forwarding and information retrieval, there’s no controlling the flow bad news. Once it’s out there, it goes where the prurience of the audience wills it. And just as one side in this debate was likely satisfied to see Walcott “punished” for past crimes, another will likely be content to see Padel punished for hers. At least Padel has realized what she did was wrong. Give her that.
Me? I think it’s all sick and sad. Since when did poets start acting like backstabbing academics? Oh. Right. It’s always been that way. We just didn’t have the internet to broadcast it to a world that already doesn’t care but is now also snickering. I do think Padel is being unfairly treated here, and largely because there are certain men (and women: misogyny has plenty of double agents) in the academy and the press glad to see her fail. But I suppose I’m mostly disgusted that a gaggle of great poets and academics were turned into gangs of sneering courtiers with hatpins and poisoned pens at the ready over what should be a position of mutual celebration and joy.
The fact is, there are plenty of people who could do this job, and two of them, no matter how great, have been weeded out. Whether by fair or foul means is for you to decide. (But would anyone want it now?) Natural selection at work is always an ugly business, but on a sociological scale, and with gendered biases added in, it gets downright nasty.
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May 26th, 2009 at 11:52 am
A pox on both their houses. Given the cases at Harvard and the out-of-court settlement at BU, it’s bizarre that Oxford even considered giving the position to Walcott. But Padel did misrepresent herself as having had nothing to do with the campaign against him. She should have, instead, withdrawn from the process earlier on the basis that she wouldn’t want to be at an institution that was considering giving a post to a serial sexual predator.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Very interesting summary. The more I think about it, the more frustrated and confused I get. Each side tries to plead its case while demonizing the other and criticizing every potential reason for critique. What a shame.
May 27th, 2009 at 4:57 am
Amidst the feuding over what to do next with this professorship, with two of the factions in a tizzy, hurling recommendations from the fringe, the Mehrotra side meeting quietly in common rooms across the university to introduce this poet into this English fray, Marjorie Perloff has been giving some of the best lectures on poetry here at St. Anne’s College, stretching the scope of poetics into new fields of possibility, challenging the generally old-fashioned sensibility of English poetry (at least in Oxford), raising eyebrows and, after some time, inducing nods of agreement, meanwhile introducing rather entrenched North American lineages of poetry that seem to have have had little to no impact here in England. It is a shame that most of the people who should have been attending these lectures were wrapped up on the sidelines of this poetry-gate. Perloff would be the most engaging Professor of Poetry Oxford could have at this present moment.
May 27th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Actually, Marjorie Perloff can kiss my athiest ass.
May 27th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
why is that Paul? Were you still at Western when she gave a talk there?
May 27th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Actually, it has to do with how casually she’s able to label all freethinkers as nazis.
May 28th, 2009 at 3:31 am
I am curious: which freethinkers has she labeled as nazis? Only mention of nazis during the St. Anne’s lectures were the real ones who Benjamin tried to flee from (one was on citation and the Arcades Project).
May 28th, 2009 at 4:09 am
And I bet Perloff would have no qualms with the atheist portion of your ass.
May 28th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I guess you missed Perloff’s review of Martin Amis’s book The Second Plane. In the book, Amis writes, “When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings . . . they shout, ‘God is great!’ When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?” This was meant to be rhetorical question of course, but Perloff, in an incredible spasm of childish stupidity, responds: “there’s a simple answer: they shout: ‘Heil Hitler!’”
For such a bright women, there’s no excuse for trash like this. She’d have been better off writing her review using every seventh word in the dictionary. I wouldn’t give her my kitchen chair to sit on, let alone one at Oxford.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:05 am
Paul, my reading of Perloff has been all on poetics, specifically her writings on poetry that I’ve found on the EPC site and, from there, the few titles I’ve chosen to order up to Fort Good Hope via Yellowknife over these last several years. I have not read the Amis book, but reading now the TLS review, it seems Perloff’s main critique of this specific Amis book is that it scratches at a surface of arguments: trying too much to creatively imagine the inner existences of some personae of Islamism, and, where engaging into some sort of historical argument seems often necessary, Amis slips into personal anecdote; a perpetuation of cliché from a safe distance. Perloff’s last sentence, which you quote, is unfortunate to me only because she does not give it any sort of cultural-historical context. Is she insinuating this because the Nazis did not have a specifically religious (meaning rooted in some sort of scriptural or sacred text) endgoal (though this does ignore actual ties between Nazism and Christianity of the time)? Is she referring to Hitchens and Dawkins as Nazis? Or is she equating Amis’ sort of a scratching at surfaces to depict his kind of ‘Islamismophobia’ as a reactionary danger analogous to Stéphane Courtois’s discussion of the moral equivalence of Nazism and Communism, which she brings up in the review? She leaves us short here, which, agreed, is very unfortunate.
(I am not sure if it is helpful to point out a discrepancy on how the last line is stated in the TLS [as you’ve quoted] to what is written on the .pdf of this review on her website [But the answer is obvious: they might just be shouting “Heil Hitler!” (italics mine)] which is possibly the original text, I don’t know.)
All of this to say that it is a pity that you would not have her into your kitchen. In some ways I find your statements analogous to those expressed against Tom Paulin a few years ago at Columbia and Harvard. I am not trying to take a view on what his television self said about some Israeli settlers, but I think he is a truly important poet, and his work—whether his poems, writings on Hazlitt, and his latest book of close-readings, which is very good—has been put out to little notice in the States since that debacle, which, I believe, is unfortunate to students of poetry. And I would say the same about your treatment of Perloff, that your theoretical banishment is unfortunate to freethinkers and readers of poetry alike who would have much to gain from her consistent historicizing and exploration of the possibilities of poetry from high modernism to this current time.
November 8th, 2010 at 6:01 pm
RE: “her [Perloff's] consistent historicizing”
Perloff stopped consistently historicizing after The Futurist Moment. She is a great advocate for previously ignored styles, coteries, and experiments, but now that those are in full view and receive as much attention as “mainstream” work the work of situating them in historical context is up to us.
See John Palattella, College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1994), pp. 165-170.