Now the air is dirty and the sex is clean – and your coffee makes my hair turn green…
The Kinkster is a man who sees life, and sees it whole. It’s a shame we can’t have him come in and adjudicate this mess over the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Derek Walcott has withdrawn, Ruth Padel has had to resign. The question of who is an appropriate teacher of poetry seems to be rather more complex than the question of who can impart an understanding of the form…
(Before I go on, a brief declaration: I’ve met Ruth Padel a couple of times, and I like her. I haven’t met Derek Walcott. It seems entirely plausible to me that I’d like him, too.)
The whole discussion is odd. It was odd enough when Clive James – who has now acknowledged that he wants the gig, surely making himself a less than disinterested observer – proposed that “Derek Walcott is unlikely to be a menace to young women at the age of 75″. I mean, ooooookay, thanks for sharing, but someone should tell Silvio Berlusconi…
Cheap shots aside, though: who said it was desirable – or even possible – for a poet to have a perfectly respectable, untroubling approach to the world? Aren’t poets supposed to be drunk on life, as Rumi put it? To be consumed with passions too great to contain?
Yeats wrote:
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of my heart.
What part of the foul rag-and-bone shop is safe for students of poetry? And why should students of poetry be safe, anyway? Beauty has always been dangerous, artistic endeavour has always been associated with madness and excess. Paul Verlaine shot at Arthur Rimbaud; Rimbaud reputedly once introduced himself as “alcoholic, syphilitic, pederast and poet”. And as for what he has to say about poets in general…
A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses… He exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of…?
It’s not just Rimbaud. TS Eliot had a nervous breakdown; Sylvia Plath committed suicide; Pushkin died in a duel; Mandelstam was constantly unfaithful, baited Stalin until he was arrested, and died in a correction camp. Coleridge was perpetually stoned, Byron slept with everyone he could catch and caught plenty of other things besides, Shelley held up incest as an ideal union.
And in the face of all this, we are invited to believe first that Derek Walcott’s apparently lecherous but otherwise not frightfully exciting behaviour of years ago is a terrible threat to students and thus a bar to his appointment to the job – which the woman who brought the original suit against Boston University incidentally does not believe – and second that Ruth Padel’s involvement in exposing said behaviour is a terrible sin which therefore bars her appointment to the job. Never mind the frankly ludicrous doublethink, where did we acquire this appetite for the small, the squeaky clean, and the safe? I’m not saying that all poets should be touched with madness, and nor am I dismissing the seriousness of full-on sexual harassment where it occurs – just that it’s ludicrous to assert a love of poetry and complain about the wildness which goes with it.
Poetry is a jungle, but we seem to think we can get the same joy from a box of cut flowers.
