“The e-mails sent by Padel in April tipped off journalists to this record. She wrote: “Some [of my] supporters add that what he does for students can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, reporting one of his two recorded cases of sexual harassment and that Obama is rumoured to have turned him down for his inauguration poem because of the sexual record. But I don’t think that’s fair.”

The e-mail also says: “The harassment is all documented on the web.”"

~

She doesn’t think it fair, but wants to inform the hacks, because, she said:

“I was contacted by an Oxford student, who believed Mr Walcott’s relations with female students at universities was relevant to her university’s election of a professor.

Because her concern seemed to be a part of the whole picture, I communicated it to two journalists. I would not have done so had I known of the anonymous mailing, or of any journalist intending to highlight this issue on its own.”

~

As the piece points out:

WHAT SHE SAID PUBLICLY
“Neither they [my campaign managers] nor I mentioned Walcott’s harassment record and had nothing to do with any behind-doors operation”

Ruth Padel, May 12, 2009

WHAT SHE SAID PRIVATELY
“What he [Walcott] actually does can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, reporting one of his two recorded cases of sexual harassment”

E-mail to journalists, April 2009

And now she wants:

“It would be so much less wounding to everyone concerned, it needs to rest . . . if you can find it in your heart.”

~

In your heart, soft-focus pro-photo shot candy dancing smiles, butter wouldn’t melt eyes, pixies, elves and fae folk off the priviliged line, survivial of the fittest great great grandpa – top o’ the world ma, got there by dealing straight right through to lose what’s left before the goin’s gettin good and gone.

Puppies and pretend, fluffy ducks and brass-necked swans, a coterie of fauns and fawning fwends, shoo horn in by hook or crook, all above board, nothing awf abait it, dearie mearie wearie woo, jackels round the dried up well, one with a top cup, one with a moan, whingy stingy bleeding wound, do we hear the faery sound – heal it, feel it, fluffy wuffy woo, oh ho ha yah yo, look who it isn’t – babels Truth to wit:

who fall, shine, show, come
in the nature of the vowel
and the consonant,

fall into letters, shining
out of these into words,
showing learned meaning
and character to come out
of those words into texts,
proverb, commentary, compositions
and learning the two true folds
divisions, goings and voice-roads
selecting vocables at the tower
of how we speak, what we say
and the undying literary knowledge
of the Ogham – plastic and natural

wood-speech that nourishes while
it is on the mind, sings at giving
it, sues while asking the reward
for it, judges about its greatness
or smallness, and sits after being
paid the prize side-seam of chieftain
oaks; cutting material fact from that
harmony of words peculiar to oak-
vowel poetry practitoners expressing
correspondence in the Latin alphabet
when the wise satirist, to wit,

the one who has a wise course;
should mean to be nature and matter
both semi mute and doubting still
what this was in truth – a sage’s
finding of the course s/he followed
in the mind, existing firm to the last
as the last word of a sage’s knowledge
puts it, to wit:

the combatants should be put first
so that they do not misplace speech
of the undying knowledge of the Ogham:
the nobility of the order of the Greek
philosophies are vain,
Reading, grammar and gloss,
Diligent literature and metrics,
Small their avail in heaven above.
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Well, as to that …

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article6350589.ece

This whole fiasco does seem to have illuminated a difference between English and American journalism — and you can hardly say now that it’s not been reported in the UK this time.

And that’s only today, Saturday 24th May.

Will Oxford University investigate? If you read what they say carefuly in the Times article, and decode the characteristic English obliqueness, they don’t seem to be ruling this entirely out.

I don’t think they will, but then a couple of days ago, I thought the whole thing would be forgotten about the minute the votes, spoiled-ballot-protests and all, were cast.

But it seems set to run and run …

What goes round, comes round.
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Am I the only poetess in the U.S. who hasn’t seen his manhood? Well, besides Mary Oliver and Ruth Stone. He wouldn’t have the guts to do that to Kay Ryan.

Honestly, I think he is a fine poet. It seems as though his teaching skills lack something to be desired. Is there anything wrong with saying this? Would Byron have made a good teacher? Do poets have to teach?
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“Dennis Johnson has been covering the Derek Walcott “smear campaign” — blech — very well, and with the election of Ruth Padel to the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University he sums the controversy up for us.

‘Let’s recap, shall we? In England, they regard a chair in poetry as a very powerful position. They actually hold an election for that chair — candidates vie for it, people vote. Yes, an academic position is subject to a popular vote. And a man with a long and documented history of sexual harassment is seen as subject of a smear campagn if anyone brings up that history. And oh yes, if anyone does bring it up, it’s no doubt the woman running against him.’”

Thank God someone is talking sense about this matter.
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Thank you very much.

sorry about the rant. your posts on meter are always a joy to read and very perspicacious. Take no notice of my bullying, i am only a dreamer in an armchair freeing the conscious order, pulling strings to flux in humanity’s fete and (yo!) name divinity Kathleen, a terrible pleaser who’ll advance and retreat as you tease out life’s music, spirit moments from love and let her alphabet rattle it’s answer an ear cocked to art will hear – island queen of memory.

Perspicacious. a relatively new-to-me word i have been deploying to try and appear insightful, after reading the armagh po-mo trickster Maíle Dúin use it in the intro to his Oxford lectures.

Has anyone read them, when the Princeton ollamh (ulav) held the spot?

He juggles a million associative thoughts in his high wire act, linking a whiff of Yeatsean muscadet in the poem All Souls Night to a sky-page canvas of coincidence connected to collateral co-ordinate ties that sorta ay, hey look at the coefficient incidence of it all in the crane bag made from the skin of Aoife, daughter og pyschopomp sea-god Manannán mac Lir

foaming horse-water deity riding his plain
in ancient mist of mythical man, four square
his white-wave hoof-shod sodden feet, wet
deity in a drop of meadow dew in May

our inner spring of time and grass-stone
hail-blade trampling under horses’ hoof:

Manannán mac Lír, son of the reflecting sea
in tranquil lunar moonlight, the reversing

word that roars clear, rowing to the Land
of Women crying for love-sight he’ll wash
you in a hundred sounds of music sung
by Manannán – beneath a foaming sky-water
horse of four hooves wave-shod in trodden
white sea-grains counting the sand flakes
lined in His hoof-light: Manannán mac Lír
stirs the sea like it is your blood.

…and put his most precious objects in the said crane bag made from Aofie who had been turned into a bird by Iuchra a jealous rival for the love of Ilbrec and when she died was wrought into a wizzard-bag.

Hermes Mercury and Thoth, of course, all invented writing after seeing the shapes cranes make when aloft, Ogma making ogham of it in Celtic tradition which the ‘ed of poetry New Yorker knows only too well, havin robbed me ideas for pomes and emptied the mind of original blather reading me blog as an anonymous one in the filidh band.

But his lectures whaddya reckon?

~

I have Graves Oxford lectures and have read some of Arnolds, and Padel’s i predict will round on the Greeks coz she used to teach it and tthe Minoans in 2000 BC, imitated the courting ritual of cranes, as their frescos at Knossos in Crete – of twirling lovers who swirl in a mating dance – confirm, or at least corroborate in a parrallel pretend of (yo!) ha ho dee do dat doh don’t dee lah, as Saint Sean shouted in Woolton and Wavertree when he and sir Paul wuz rockin for da moany mahn.
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Uh, J. M. Coetzee, Seamus Heaney, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison?
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Will anyone be volunteering down the shelters or does the moral pontificating only extend as far as thinking about these thinks and doing absolutely zero about them in reality.

This is a poem of hers called

The Appointment.

Flamingo silk. New ruff,
the ivory ghost
of a halter. Chestnut curls,

*

commas behind the ear.
“Taller, by half a head,
than my Lord Walsingham.”

*

His Devon-cream brogue,
malt eyes. New cloak
mussed in her mud.

*

The Queen leans forward,
a rosy envelope of civet.
A cleavage

*

whispering seed pearls.
Her own sleeve
rubs that speck of dirt

*

on his cheek. Three thousand
ornamental fruit baskets
swing in the smoke.

*

“It is our pleasure
to have our servant trained
some longer time

*

in Ireland.” Stamp out
marks of the Irish.
Their saffron smocks.

*

All curroughs, bards
and rhymers. Desmonds
and Fitzgeralds

*

stuck on low spikes,
an avenue of heads to
the war tent.

*

Kerry timber
sold to the Canaries.
Pregnant girls

*

hung in their own hair
on city walls. Plague
crumpling gargoyles

*

through Munster. “They spoke
like ghosts crying
out of their graves.”

~

i wonder if she’ll ever come across a real Desmond bard?
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Sea Grapes, a representative short lyric of Walcott’s, suffers from discursiveness. It lacks unity of presentation and effect, the kind we see in the sonnets of Edna Millay, for instance.

Walcott’s poem instead presents rhetoric; it gives us dry intellectualization.

Walcott’s poem didactically knocks us over the head.

We’re introduced to a schooner and Walcott *tells* us that the schooner in his poem “could be Odysseus.”

There quickly follows an extravagant conceit–a comparison so clotted that only a ridiculous pedant could love it–between a “father and husband’s longing, under gnarled sour grapes” and “the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name in
every gull’s outcry.” Instead of letting scene or image or speech convey the intent, we are told that a “longing, under gnarled sour grapes” is “like” the “adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name in every gull’s outcry.” The gull makes the adulterer guilty, but who needs such simplicity when it can be dressed with “Nausicca and sour grapes,” etc etc?

The trope of comparing hexameters to the tide in his hexameter line is frightfully clever, but it is more intellectualization; we appreciate the trick intellectually, for it is one more isolated rhetorical gesture in a hopeless rhetorical strategy of extravagant foot-noting celebrating a sermon. There is little music and no unity of effect whatsoever. Its attempt at grandiosity is patch-work.

The final line of iambic pentameter, “The classics can console. But not enough” depends on more intellectualization.

The lesson is stated explicitly: “The classics can console. But not enough.” Commentary on “the classics” takes the form of iambic pentamter for ironic purposes. But in vain. “Sea Grapes” is an exercise in pedantry. “Sea Grapes” is not art. It is pedantry disguised as art.
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“I should prefer not to,” Bartleby said to all entreaties to become party to a scene.

Terreson
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Walcott voluntarily withdrew from the election. As far as I can see, Walcott’s defenders only address 1982 and 1996. They cannot possibly know all of Walcott’s actions pertaining to this issue. So even Walcott’s defenders are simply not equipped to defend him. Walcott is the only one who does. Rather than defend himself, he chose to withdraw. End of story. Let’s move on.

If you like Walcott’s poetry, read it. What’s an appointment to Oxford got to do with anything?
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Thus, “delapidated” should strictly mean bricks falling off a wall.

But perhaps you meant something other than this?

It would have helped if you had provided enough context in your original statement to work out just what the hell you were on about.

RH.
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“given the number of logical fallacies on such happy display in some of the posts above, I won’t add to that stock the genetic fallacy: that of assuming the final result is tainted or unwise or inaccurate simply because some of those who helped bring it about had ulterior motives.”

Having gone to some trouble to untangle the convoluted syntax of that statement, I can only conclude that what you are referring to is not the genetic fallacy but the view that sacraments delivered by a flawed priest are nevertheless valid.

Otherwise I quite frankly haven’t the least idea what you’re on about.

Oh, I forgot you were a lawyer once, and are perhaps referring to the idea that in a jury of twelve, the possibilty that one member therein is more guilty than the person accused does not mean the verdict should be annuled.

Enlighten me, I pray.

RH.
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The numbers are in, and about 300 voted for Padel, 150 for Mehrotra, and 51 people went to the trouble of turning in spoiled ballot papers.

Go figure.

As to: “I wouldn’t shed any crocodile tears for this particular winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature …”

Another way of putting this would be that Walcott is the only living Nobel Prize Winner for Literature who writes in English.

Who gained, who loses?

Oxford, Walcott, Padel …

RH.
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The level of self-delusion here is absolutely crushing to observe.

In any case, it’s a dead issue. My own opinion was that the vote should be postponed so that new nominations could be made, but it has not been, and Padel seems certain to be the winner now. For what it’s worth, I very much suspect she was involved in–explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly–the campaign against Walcott, but given the number of logical fallacies on such happy display in some of the posts above, I won’t add to that stock the genetic fallacy: that of assuming the final result is tainted or unwise or inaccurate simply because some of those who helped bring it about had ulterior motives. A person with Walcott’s professional dossier would have a hard time getting a job as an educator in the U.S. (though not an impossible one), because whenever one applies for a job as a professor one’s history as a professor is considered; Oxford has done nothing more than say that, while we respect your poetry, Derek, we’re not certain your “sexual” style of teaching (Cf. Nicole Niemi) is appropriate for the world’s foremost educational institution. We look forward, instead, to continuing to read your work and attend your lectures and learn from your interviews and so on.

In the end, Walcott knows what he’s done, he knows what he is, and he knows that if this is the greatest price he must pay for the way he’s treated women for the past 30 years, it’s a trifle, really. I wouldn’t shed any crocodile tears for this particular winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

S.
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Just to clarify, bloggers on Harriet don’t filter the comments on their threads, so I have no idea what happened to your lost comment. As for this discussion, my original comment was focused on the use of the word “randy,” which Tom has already addressed.
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As for your other point, today we all still teach some young women poets who are quite vulnerable, especially those who have already been sexually abused in their homes or elsewhere, and I think it is quite reasonable to say that to have a revered poetry mentor in a position of authority treat them this way doesn’t only damage their academic chances but also has the potential to shake their confidence as poets. The reason this is of concern to me is not only for ths sake of their individual psychologies, but also for the sake of mitigating widespread imbalances of male and female behavior in the poetry world (such as assertiveness in sending out their poems, networking with potential mentors etc), the kind of thing that leads to the imbalances discusssd in the post on Numbers Trouble a couple of years ago.

I appreciate the frankness and thoughtfulness of your remarks, and your engaging these concerns so seriously.

Annie
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“Even one of Padel’s own nominators, philosophy professor AC Grayling, believes the election should be postponed.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/16/oxford-poetry-professor-election-goes-ahead

This is seriously clusterfuck territory.

– the Swiftboating of Walcott has emerged into the open, and the attacks on him look to be seriously engaged with at last.

Law of Unintended Consequencies, anyone?

Much as I dislike and distrust Oxford academics as a group {and in my book, they rate only slighly behind St Andrews when it comes to academic credibiltity}, you have to credit them with a certain bulldog persistence.

This particular Oxford Boat Race may elevate the (non) lectures [not to be]delivered by Walcott to the stature of those by A.C.Bradley, Housman, Auden, Robert Graves, and Peter Levi.

“Wot larks, Pip!”

RH
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Unlike you, I’m well out of the gaeltacht penumbra, not having the gaelic, but I have in my time rhymed rats to death.

I gave up writing killer poems when I realised that I had the capacity for writing poems which would drive poeple to suicide.

You, in contrast, seem to have developed the capacity to *bore them to death.

David ap Gwyllem would be ashamed of you.

Robin
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You couldn’t make this up …

Well, not unless you’re writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education or the Independent.

RH.
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About the only people to emerge from this entire sorry mess with any credibility are student journalists, the kids running the Harvard Crimson in 1982 and the current editors of Cherwell.

Even in the 2007 issue of the Crimson, they went to the trouble of actually asking people what they remembered from 25 years earlier.

Not their fault that what usually gets quoted from that issue is their gleeful rehash of the 1982 material rather than the bemused response of a professor thinking back, “Wasn’t that some sort of dispute over grades?”

The result of those student journalists putting their necks on the line in 1982 was that they levered Harvard into instituting a *proper set of procedures for investigating sexual harassment.

Credit where it’s due, they were risking a hell of a lot more than people like Seth who simply advance Chinese Whispers on the Web of a Thousand Lies.

But things change — the Crimson articles in 1982 were signed.

RH
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They aren’t “my” facts.

The fullest account of the 1982 incident seems to be contained in “The Lecherous Professor”, which prints the accusation that the unnamed Harvard student made against Walcott, and a letter later written to her by the Assistant Dean, Marlyn Lewis.

It’s available on-line:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Cy9g0huofa0C&pg=PP1&dq=lecherous+professor&ei=UlgOSsr3M6XEzgTbns2HCw#PPA31,M1

Rather than rehashing this once more, I’d simply direct anyone interested to that. Inter alia, it demonstrates what Harvard considered “due process” in 1982 — reading the accusation over the telephone, asking for a response, passing the material to Dean Rovosky, and passing back his judgement. Due process? Seems to me a bit inadequate, and hardly surpringly, neither party, the unnamed complainant not Walcott, seem to have been particularly happy with how the complaint was dealt with.

As to: “We also know that the only thing which kept the 1996 allegations from being put to the test was that Walcott–Derek Walcott himself–decided to settle the half a million dollar lawsuit out of court,” compare that statement with what N.M.Kelby (Nicole Niemi) herself wrote in the Times two days ago, on 14th May.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article6288023.ece

Exactly what did or did not happen in 1982 is fogged — what is still transpiring at the moment is all too clear.

(Well, not entirely — I’d be interested to know how the figure of “200″ recipients of the Anonymous Dossier was reached. The earliest reference I can find to this is in the Cherwell, where it’s given as “50 to 100″. Currently it stands at 200. Did two hundred separate people come forward to state that they had received copies? A small point, I admit, but characteristic of how in this issue, assertion is taken as fact, and then embellished.)

Enough.

RH.
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[editing in]

..sorry, is quoting you at least twice.

yeah, sorry for being a dit harsh, you are great, i am only pretending.

carry on..you are a great Poet Seth, i am just a fantasist
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S.
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All this talk, from a person who calls themself a poet, who speaks like a lawyer, saying nothing about Poetry, but everything about his own petty mindedness.

Of course, Hitler, well you know, blah blah blah.

Me of course, i am a saint.

No doubt Boramson may come back with, well actually i think you’ll find that if you look at the ins and outs of a blue arse fly, you’ll actually find para 2 subsection 1o states, i am a person with no visible artistry, and lacking that, waffle on about the rights and wrongs of these people i fake an interest in.

Your mate Evans Bush has been on the same jag, talking nonsense, not naming names, gossiping Rumour she got off you.

And what galls, is that people like her, when her pals where pulling all the tricks trealted to not being supportive and not giving a fuk about me when i was trying to learn, doing my own thing on their sites, she didn’t say a dickie, but as soon as she and people like you, who know your limit, a very minor note in the grand scale, what you do is let your jealousy get the better of you and decant it into laughably obvious fake concern, reading like a law book and not the poet you pretend to be.

Evans Bush, in her little huddle, talking as if this is appalling, ranting on zip, and yet, when Real unfairness occurs right under her nose, when its her pals dishing it out, she doesn’t say a word.
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No. You are not entitled to your own facts.

Read the Time and New York Times articles from 1982. Walcott admitted he had a conversation alone with the girl on the date and time alleged, that there was a “tone” to the conversation which he didn’t “intend” to be offensive, that that tone was created by a “quip” he made about an encounter she had with her boyfriend. When you read the accuser’s recitation of the facts you realize she and Walcott aren’t in disagreement–it’s simply that she’s been specific about what was said, and he used euphemisms. We know that Harvard University, arguably the pre-eminent university in the world and one of its richest (if not the richest), complied with the employment-law due process requirements in the U.S. and conducted a full investigation into the matter. This involved interviewing both the student and Walcott. The result of this inquiry was a) a formal finding of “merit” to the allegation, b) a formal “admonishment” of Walcott, c) a statement by Harvard that it would, in light of what had happened, be “reluctant” to re-hire Walcott, and d) an immediate announcement from Walcott that he would resign from his job at Boston University if asked.

We also know that the only thing which kept the 1996 allegations from being put to the test was that Walcott–Derek Walcott himself–decided to settle the half a million dollar lawsuit out of court. Settling a lawsuit out of court need not be proof of an acknowledgment of guilt, but no one is entitled to say that it is only the fault of the 1996 accuser that the facts of that situation never came out. It is Walcott as much as anyone who saw to that.

And what do we hear from Walcott defenders, for instance on the Guardian website? We hear: a) the 1982 charges were never proven [false], b) all the allegations are from “decades” ago [false], c) Walcott has never spoken of the 1982 incident [false], d) the anonymous “smear campaign” contained demonstrably untrue material [false], and more. You asked about my (deceased) grandmothers; didn’t someone teach you to recognize when neither the original sources, nor sources about the original sources, not any subsequent sources, support your version of the facts?

S.
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Ask your grannie about context …

I know this may be difficult for you to understand, but it’s not that some of us don’t know what you’re saying but that, simply, we don’t agree with your reading of the evidence.

RH.
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Please stop instructng us to look at google News (all dates) and have a look at the process applied by Harvard in 1982.

It’s really not that difficult.

Didn’t your grandmother teach you to look at the primary sources?

[Sheesh, what do they teach children about scholarship these days?]

RH.
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