About the University

Candidate statements

Each candidate for election, or authorised representative, may submit for publication a written statement, of no more than 500 words, setting out the candidate's reasons for standing. The statements posted below will also be published in the University Gazette from 20 May.

Paula Claire - this candidate has withdrawn (as of 7 June 2010)

 

Michael George Gibson - Candidate Statement

The literary and verbal things now presented and published as 'poems' are so varied that a fresh and fundamental examination of what was and is 'poetry' is well worth making.

It may be argued that there is a growing failure or reluctance to distinguish 'word-things' that have some poetic qualities from those that have the true and full characteristics of poetry. We pay too little attention now to the true nature of verse.

An examination of English poetry back to its written beginnings as an art or craft sharing formal and technical characteristics with music is a way to deal with the matter.

The proposition may be put that poetry as a literary art is primarily a sonic and rhythmic one. Attention to matters of prosody, of metrical arrangement and other patterning of alliteration and rhyme and so forth, is essential to an elucidation of the true nature of English poetry from "Beowulf" (and even earlier) to the present day.

Indeed, the question as to 'What is the rhythm of "Beowulf"?' is still a vexed one requiring a clear and definite solution. Our earliest poetry had an inherent 'songness' or 'songlikeness'. We may work backwards and forwards through the layers of English verse to discover these formal characteristics of true poetry.

A 'musicalistic' approach to such an investigation could examine the rhythmic practices of such as Heaney, Hughes, Plath, Graves, Bishop, Hopkins, Blake, Herrick, Donne, Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Wyatt, Skelton, the 'Gawain' poet, Chaucer – indeed, all the makers there have ever been – and arrive at a coherent prosodic theory of English poetry which shows how even a Modern English 'limerick' shares essential rhythmic characteristics with the Old English verse of Cædmon and "Beowulf".

I am standing for the Office of Professor of Poetry so that I may present such a theory.

Michael George Gibson

Seán Haldane - Candidate Statement

When I was at Oxford, Robert Graves lectured as Professor of Poetry to packed audiences of students from all disciplines, drawn by his deep personal involvement in his subject, and he made himself available informally to students. I would like to do the same.

I was born in Sussex in 1943. My formal education has been at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, University College, Oxford (B.A. 1st Class Hons. in English, 1965) and Saybrook Institute, San Francisco (Ph.D in Psychology, 1977).

I work as a consultant clinical neuropsychologist. I have never wanted to make a living from poetry, but it has been the centre of my life. Always Two - Collected Poems 1966-2009 includes new poems along with many from previous volumes published in Canada and the UK.

From 1968 to 1973 I was a part-time farmer in Quebec and co-publisher with Marnie Pomeroy at the Ladysmith Press which brought out books of poems by ourselves and young North American and British poets. The first Ladysmith books were hand-typeset and printed by us on a platen press. I also published through Ladysmith a biography of the American poet Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904), The Fright of Time, and What Poetry Is, an angry polemic about much academic teaching of poetry.

Subsequently I trained in psychotherapy and clinical neuropsychology. I wrote two psychology books for the general public (Emotional First Aid, 1984, and Couple Dynamics, 1985) and worked as a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist, first in Canada, and since 1994 in England. I have appeared frequently as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases. Currently I work in the NHS in East London developing memory clinics.

In parallel to my work as a scientist-practitioner I have continued to write on poetry: ‘student guides' to Donne and Hardy; articles about John Clare's madness, Wilhelm Lehmann, Sorley MacLean's Gaelic and James Fenton's Ulster-Scots; and translations of poems from German, Catalan, and Irish. I speak French, German, Italian and Portuguese with varying degrees of fluency. For a list of publications, poems with audio, brief biography and photographs, see my website http://www.seanhaldane.com

I have a particular interest in poems set to music. With one of my daughters, the singer Christina Raphaëlle Haldane, and Sholto Kynoch who organises the Oxford Lieder festival, I am encouraging the commissioning of today's composers to set today's poems.

I am married to Ghislaine Lanteigne, and have three daughters and two grandsons. I frequently visit Ireland and Canada. I am an enthusiastic field archer.

I am used to lecturing (currently in psychology and psychiatry) and I see no conflict between scientific and poetic thought. If elected Professor of Poetry I want to talk about the neuropsychology of poetry, poetry and verse, poetry and 'more-than-coincidence', poetry in different languages, and what Hardy called its 'sustaining power'. The physicist Julian Barbour maintains that 'although there is never identity of experience... the entire world is resolved into pure shared experience.' I want in my lectures to share the experience of poetry.

Seán Haldane

Geoffrey Hill - Candidate Statement

Geoffrey Hill is widely recognized as one of the finest poets writing in the English language; for many readers in Britain and the USA, in Europe and beyond, Hill has been for a long time now the most important figure in contemporary verse. In the six decades since the publication of his earliest poems, Hill has written some of the most powerful, significant, and memorable poetry of his time, and books such as For the Unfallen (1959), Mercian Hymns (1971), The Triumph of Love (1998) and The Orchards of Syon (2002) have established his centrality for successive generations as a voice of compelling individuality and distinctiveness.

Geoffrey Hill was born in 1932, and was educated at Bromsgrove High School and Keble College, Oxford. He was a Lecturer (and subsequently Professor) in the University of Leeds, and later was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before joining Boston University in 1988, where he became a University Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion. Since his retirement in 2006, Hill has lived in England.

Of all the poets of his generation, Hill has had most critical attention, with numerous books, articles, and theses devoted to his work. Yet his readership has been much larger than an academic one, and poets from all over the world, in common with many readers of modern poetry, have long regarded Hill as an essential writer, whose work is always a matter of fresh interest and reward. Hill's first Collected Poems (1985) contained the five volumes of verse he had published since 1959; since Canaan (1996), Hill has published six further substantial collections, and his next Collected Poems, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012, will bring together a body of work that is unparalleled in its breadth, lyricism, passion, and intelligence.

Geoffrey Hill's critical work has addressed matters of poetic style across a wide historical sweep, but attending also to issues in philosophy and the history of ideas, to the nature of literary language, and to religious writing and theology. Hill's Collected Critical Writings (2008) ranges from Elizabethan literature to modernism, from the poetry of Donne and Dryden to the styles of Tyndale and of the Oxford English Dictionary, addressing on the way American literature, the poetry of war, and the poetic and cultural legacies of Eliot and Yeats. Hill's erudition is matched by his adventurousness and daring; this makes comparison with other great poet-critics, such as Dryden and Eliot themselves, entirely legitimate.

Geoffrey Hill is a lecturer of unrivalled power, whose standing as a poet gives his discourse an added dimension. His pre-eminence in the world of poetry guarantees a global audience, but his particular attachments to Oxford give a special appropriateness to Hill's candidacy for the Chair held by Arnold and Auden. It is seldom that the abilities of a great critic and a great poet are combined in the one writer, and Geoffrey Hill as Professor of Poetry would bring to Oxford this rarest, and most lasting, kind of distinction.

Professor Dame Averil Cameron, Warden of Keble

Michael Horovitz - Candidate Statement
Some Reasons for Standing

I've devoted most of my life over the half-century since I graduated from Oxford to extending the then generally approved and educationally transmitted boundary lines controlling arts media and poetic communications in Britain and elsewhere. It will feel fitting to bring some of these innovations to roost around my esteemed Alma Mater.

In summer 1959 I published New Departures 1 including verse, prose and drama by Beckett, Burroughs, John Fuller, John McGrath, Kurt Schwitters and Stevie Smith – but soon felt that a print anthology wasn't enough, so took 'Live New Departures' bandwagons on tour – troupes of poets, musicians and actors performing experimental poetry, plays and music.  

Over the following years more and more poets were producing more and more such gigs. In June 1965 the Royal Albert Hall Poetry Internationale which I co-organised marked an underground-to-mainstream breakthrough by attracting 7,000-plus auditors – the best-attended poetry reading in the UK's documented memory (some of its highspots can be relived in Peter Whitehead's film Wholly Communion).

At the time of the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980 I recalled that the original Olympics in ancient Greece featured poetry as prominently as athletics. So I contacted a quorum of poets, singer-musicians and other allies worldwide to launch the initial Poetry Olympics at Westminster Abbey in September 1980 (with Anne Stevenson, Gregory Corso, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Cooper Clarke et al), soon to be followed up by an average of several smaller events and one major confluence around Britain for the succeeding three decades.

As well as showcasing high-energy and quality poetry and associated performances, our aims were and remain a Healing of the Nations. Since the initial event there have been more women, more gay, lesbian and non-white performers, and interplay with musicians of all kinds including Stan Tracey, Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, Kylie Minogue, Damon Albarn, Ray Davies and Joe Strummer.

I was deeply distressed when OUP saw fit to close down its long-standing and highly distinguished Oxford Poets series because it was supposedly not making enough money. The top line of William Blake's Laocoön of 1820 reads 'Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only'. As world history has constantly demonstrated, the pursuits of money and its power corrupt, setting humans at each other's throats, as opposed to the serious pursuit of genuine culture and art. Timeship Earth feels perilously poised between the self-destruction of humanity and our redemption through concerted intelligence, pacifism and creativity.

I hope to devote any more days and nights I'm allotted in this incarnation to taking ever newer departures, and to keeping the sacred torch of the muses burning bright. If some of this work and play can take place from the Oxford poetry professor ship with me at the helm, I'll be delighted to welcome anyone and everyone potentially interested aboard.

There are more reasons via http://www.poetryolympics.com and
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118620711489408

http://www.entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Michael Horovitz
Robert P. Lacey - Candidate Statement

A year ago (or there about)
one poet lost, then one walked out,
so now another vote there'll be
to fill the Chair of Poetry.

I thought it might be oh-so hip
to win me a professorship,
and so I thought I'd write this note
to woo, to wow, to win your vote!

"But why," I hear you choke and splutter,
"should we lift someone from the gutter,
when academic types have stood
that might just make the lectures good?"

You have a point, of course, and so
through all the duties I shall go,
and try to explain just a jot
of what I'd do, if it I got.

First: Three lectures in each year.
Now this, I do not really fear -
I read some books for my degree
at Oxford (Modern History).

And so, though now a medic I,
with notes that stack some three miles high,
I'm sure that I can find a way
to write three hours' worth to say!

Next: It would be my vocation
to give the Creweian Oration,
but this only biannually –
and in English, thankfully!

Third: To help judge prizes four.
And is that all? I'd cope with more!
For reading others' work is pleasure
when one seeks to fill one's leisure.

And last: encourage poetry
within this University...
It is as if this duty's sought
as no more than an afterthought.

At least, the notice reads that way,
with other duties holding sway.
But let me make this very clear:
I think this is the main point, here!

For poetry can by anyone
be writ, for pleasure and for fun,
or, perchance, emotionally,
to set a deeper meaning free.

And fostering the Muses' art
does not need someone hugely smart.
What better way in this to lead,
than to join in with that great deed?

I make these solemn pledges two,
in case there's hope of swaying you
to vote for me at end of May
(for Robert Lacey, poet lay):

I pledge to write against the clock
and each weekday in term I'll lock
a poem down however fine
and then I'll publish it online.

By doing so, I calculate
that by the end I'll demonstrate
some six hundred poems new
that anyone, for free, may view.

I further pledge, from out the fee
paid for the Chair of Poetry,
to form another, smallish prize
for poetry that please my eyes.

But at my back I always hear
the appointed poll-day hurrying near.
To end with, I would just emote:
It is quite crucial that you vote.

This Chair now sits, sad and forlorn,
with its rich, dark blue coverings torn.
Embrace this chance. Enter the fold.
Vote for Lacey. And an age of gold.

Robert P. Lacey

Steve Larkin - Candidate Statement

As the 'Oxford Professor of Poetry', I intend to assist a paradigm shift that has been happening in recent years in the UK and internationally, namely the resurrection of spoken word culture in all its' glorious forms.

I intend to reload the literary canon and fire it through the walls of any stifling ivory tower that blocks the emergence of an exciting and inclusive live literature scene.

I will:

use my skill and experience of staging accessible innovative events to create 'The Oxford University Slam Contest', encouraging staff and students at each college to take part in democratic live poetry competitions that will lead to a high profile annual final, and a 'Town vs Gown' special;

draw on my international profile and extensive networks to bring highly skilled creative practitioners to present their work to new audiences in Oxford;

fuse my experience as a lecturer in performance poetry and storytelling at Oxford Brookes University, my 15 years experience as a professional performer, together with the knowledge gained in my philosophy degree and beyond to create lectures that are illuminating and entertaining experiences that will be freely available to view online;

pursue new media applications such as The Oxford University Podcast Poetry Slam (which I judged last year) to enhance opportunities to get more people interested in creating and consuming poetry;

offer workshops to students and local residents who are interested in creating works of poetry.

I intend to work with same enthusiasm and vigour that I brought into making Hammer & Tongue one of the largest poetry promotion organisations in the UK to help Oxford University become recognised as a centre for a new wave of celebrated poets.

Most importantly, I intend to make poetry a fun and enjoyable activity to a large number of new people in Oxford and beyond.

Steve Larkin

"the spoken-word guru" Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Steve Larkin is the founder and artistic director of Hammer & Tongue:

"The best live poetry is to be found at the Hammer & Tongue Slams"  The Sunday Times,

"Hammer & Tongue has reinvented the medium for the hip hop generation"  The Guardian

Roger Lewis - Candidate Statement

The Chair of Poetry requires not a poet necessarily - but a great critic. A critic for whom all skilful and informed discussion concerning what Gerard Manley Hopkins called "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation," is of itself creative, giving pleasure and enlightenment to readers and listeners, enhancing their understanding of art's "nameless and inexplicable elegancies" – Dr Samuel Johnson's fine and ineffable phrase.

Such a figure is Roger Lewis, who is attuned to poetry wherever it might be found, whether in opera libretti and biblical translations, in follies and grottoes, or in poetic personalities.

As readers of his recent Seasonal Suicide Notes already know, Lewis asks how people live their lives and behave as they do; how they embody their passion and imagination in literature, painting or performance; how improbabilities, dreariness and unworthiness are transformed, and gain momentum, gain freshness.

Armed with the finest First in English Language and Literature that St Andrews University had seen since Benedict XIII invented the place by issuing a Papal Bull back in 1413, South Welshman Lewis matriculated at Magdalen in 1982. In his first term he won The Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize, The Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and the Chancellor's English Essay Prize.

He was translated to a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson, where he edited Kipling's Rewards and Fairies, Hogg's Justified Sinner, and published Stage People, his collection of profile essays about British actors and actresses. It was with this book that Lewis began his career of investigating kaleidoscopic selves and bridging the gap between high literary culture and the popular arts.

His 1,200 page book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is now established as the greatest book on a non-classical actor ever written. It was later made into a multi-award-winning film by HBO, starring Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron. Books have followed on Laurence Olivier, Charles Hawtrey, and the big and splendid Anthony Burgess, whom Lewis viewed less as the heir to James Joyce than as a Manchester Music Hall act, a glorious charlatan.

If elected to the Chair of Poetry, Lewis' subjects may well include - Ezra Pound: Poetry and / or Politics; The Ramification of Richard Ellmann's 1,500 Factual Errors in his Biography of Oscar Wilde; The Nineteenth Century View of Shakespeare and Jesus and Great Cryptograms; Sullivan Without Gilbert; Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes: Sex, Violence and Difficulties with Girls; Poets of the Appetites: M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David; The End of England: Eric Ravilious, Barbara Jones and Edward Bawden; and Dick & Liz at Oxford: The Burtons and Doctor Faustus.

These days Lewis divides his time between the Herefordshire Balkans and the imperial spa town of Bad Ischl, in Upper Austria. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Asiatic Society. Later this year, the University of Hertfordshire will be conferring the degree of D.Litt. (h. c.) on him in St Albans Abbey.

Rebecca Nicolson, St Hugh's 1985.

Chris Mann - Candidate Statement

INTRODUCTION
I wish to contribute to the global character of Oxford's literary life by offering lectures and a poetry rooted in English prosody which draw on my experience of north and south.

I write as a South African who speaks Zulu, Afrikaans and Italian. I read English at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and won the 1973 Newdigate Prize for Poetry.

The first fifteen years of my working life were spent in disadvantaged rural communities, primarily as the administrative director of The Valley Trust, a medical and agricultural NGO near Durban.

After the end of apartheid I moved to Grahamstown with my family. I now work as the first Professor of Poetry at Rhodes University and the founder of Wordfest, a national multilingual festival of SA literatures.

I am passionate about taking poetry into the public domain. With each new book I go on tour with a show comprising poems, music and images.

PUBLICATIONS
I have published ten books of poetry and academic and other articles. Four plays-in-verse have been performed.

Recent books have focussed on plants (The Horn of Plenty), people (South Africans), places (Heartlands) and animals (Lifelines).

INNOVATIONS
In the tradition of Blake and working with my wife the artist Julia Skeen I have innovated painting-poems for visual projection during performance and WordBeacons to display poems in public places.

LECTURES

  • An inconvenient spirituality: poetic vision and the natural environment
  • From Bushman chant to urban lyric: poetry and the change of scale in human society
  • The sanctum of the poem: art, science and the limits of consciousness

MILESTONES
English Academy of South Africa's Award for Poetry. SA Playwright of the Year.
Poetry-performances at a stadium rally after Mandela's release and with Janet Suzman.
Eighty performances of Lifelines in South Africa, the US and Britain. Hon. D. Litt.

EXAMPLES OF POEMS
full texts: http://chrismann.co.za/poems.html
This site includes In Praise of the Shades, Money and the New Millennium, The Dancer in the Old Age Home, Real Cricket and The Gallstones in the Cellar.

Dragonfly
Rafting the Zambezi River,
I saw your filigree shimmer
on a boulder's bulky sphinx…

The Clan Bard of the Drakensberg
Behind that weathered face of yours,
a face that held a Grecian statue's look
of gaunt contempt for all things mean…

In Memory of Jeanette Schoon
killed in exile by a parcel-bomb
Your nervy laugh and small, neat hands, Jeanette,
the high, compassionate ideals which you
like a swallow tossed about in storm-clouds
still flew towards, these lines commemorate…

Night Flying
The chiaroscuro of a bedroom lit by the moon,
a quilt's dim landscape of rumpled green hills.
I thought then of the feelings imaged by Chagall,
that moon-shone, tender dream where lovers fly…

The Mutability of Science
Knowing one cell unknows the next,
try as we might to mind the whole…

Epiphanies
Whoever grew wise
without sorrow?

Whoever loved
until they'd trusted
enough to bleed?

And who understood
until they'd shivered
in terror at their ignorance?

Christopher Michael Mann

Stephen Moss - Candidate Statement

A brief biog. Born in Newport, Monmouthshire in 1957. Educated at Hartridge High School. BA in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, 1975-78 (sadly never picked up my degree, so don't have a vote in this slightly peculiar election). MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College, London – marvellous course combining history, literature, art and architecture. Have worked in magazines and newspapers for the past 30 years, and been on the Guardian since 1989, combining editing and writing. Jobs have included deputy arts editor, deputy features editor and literary editor, though in the latter post I did rather dread the daily sackfuls of books, mostly biographies by the yard and histories of bus depots.

I've written poetry since I was very young, but a literary friend at college described it as the worst he'd ever read (ex-friend, actually), and I've only published about half a dozen poems (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/05/oxford-poetry-job-ruth-padel#start-of-comments). When I read my entire oeuvre at a Poetry Society event recently, it occupied less than three minutes. Someone compared the work to Ian Hamilton's – pithy, pungent, lived. But she had had a few beers.

So why I am standing? It's a good question. The idea came to me over a curry at the Hay Literary Festival last year. News of Ruth Padel's resignation had just broken, and I was struck by the sheer absurdity of the process – the curious electorate, the media's fascination with poetic politics, the odd idea of an elected poet. It intrigued and delighted me and, perhaps foolishly, I decided I would stand. Once you enter the race, your campaign develops a life of its own. I wrote a rather good poem for National Poetry Day (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/07/national-poetry-day-moss-poem if you want to read it), my name was mentioned in a few places, and suddenly one is a "real" candidate. I asked my rivals to start spreading scurrilous rumours about me, so I could pull out in a huff, but they preferred to stay magisterially aloof from such tittle-tattle. So momentum, the Big Mo which is supposed to determine political campaigns, took its course and here I am, standing naked (metaphorically speaking) before you.

What will I do if I win? Well, I will give the stipend away to needy poets and writers, and to good literary causes. I will set up an annual two-week poetry festival in Oxford. I will fight against the marginalisation of poetry, literature's perennial poor relation. I will buy anyone who votes for me a drink. I will, if necessary, go into coalition with Geoffrey Hill. I will back proportional representation in future elections. I will lecture on the role of poetry in society, starting with the Greeks and ending about a week last Tuesday. And I faithfully promise not to publish too many of my execrable poems. Can we win it? YES WE SCAN!

Stephen Moss

Vaughan Pilikian - Candidate Statement

Meaning is in ruins, the divided world godless, broken, ailing, and no one has the will or temper to restore it. The island subsides into a new dark age, dead flags hauled high and tattered on their flagpoles as dull men bicker in television studios, and a death rattle comes from behind the clenched white teeth of our tame and phobic literati. A fleabitten cowl has been pulled across the face of our talent. Our only hope is to learn from our children, but we lack the necessary simplicity of heart, and move instead with a hoary and stilted gait through a gloomy limbo of arrested ghosts.

Yet this is a good moment. Without wishing to take anything from the professorship's venerable past, the time has surely come to douse the sputtering flames of our own traditions and step out into the dark. In fervour and in doubt. To head out across the centuries and continents, there to martial the beggars the damned and the exiled in search of a New Elysium wherein the world can be woven anew, in their own image: young and old, north and south, animal and human, sky and earth.

I intend a lecture series to range across some, if not all, of the following topics: the poetics of science in the atrocity exhibition; antiaesthetics, esoterrorism and metempsychosis; the rhythm of the dig in the Negro spiritual; Japanese death poetry; rhymed trajectories to heaven in the Iliad and the Mahabharata. My aim in this august office will be to pull poetry from the drawing rooms and the garrets and the palaces, and send it forth. For poetry is a weapon, bloodsoaked and glinting. It is a gnostic heresy, a counterattack on all that holds us captive, a challenge to the cruel symmetries and stifled laughter of the Demiurge. It is only through poetry that we might revenge ourselves on time.

Vaughan Pilikian