Search for Oxford Poetry Professor Begins
The Guardian reports on possibly one of the more stressful job searches in academia. The incoming Oxford University Professor of Poetry will succeed Simon Armitage (who just became the nation's poet laureate) and take on a four-year contract, giving a public lecture each term. "Candidates [...] must be nominated by at least 50 Oxford graduates," writes Alison Flood. Predictably, the search is not without controversy. The leading three candidates are Alice Oswald, Andrew McMillan, and Todd Swift. "Oswald, the winner of the TS Eliot, Costa and Griffin prizes, was backed by the most supporters, with 167 throwing their weight behind her, including former poet laureate Andrew Motion, novelist Mark Haddon and biographer and academic Hermione Lee," she continues.
Yorkshire poet McMillan, whose debut Physical celebrated the male body and won him the Guardian first book award as well as a host of nominations for other major prizes, counts 84 supporters, while the British-Canadian poet Todd Swift has 60.
Each contender now has until 20 June to canvas Oxford graduates for their votes. Their opening sallies will be made on Thursday, as all three publish statements staking their claim on a role that was inaugurated in 1708, and has been held by Matthew Arnold, WH Auden and Robert Graves.
Oswald promises that if she were to be elected, she will look to stage “extreme poetry events” such as “all-night readings of long poems, poetry in the dark or in coloured light, even perhaps a Carnival of Translation, A Memory Palace, a Poem-Circus … or an exhibition of mobile poems”.
Her statement adds: “It’s exciting to be engaged in poetry at a time when its medium is changing almost as radically as it did in the eighth century BC. I see no reason why Instagram poems shouldn’t prove as rewarding as concrete poems or the visual poems of classical Chinese and I’d welcome the chance to invite young poets to engage in discussion about what poetry has been and is becoming.”
Read on at The Guardian.