Custom dictates that an after-dinner speech should be amusing, but I want to talk briefly this evening about a serious subject: I mean the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Most of you will know that the post is currently vacant, following first the withdrawal of the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, and then the brief appointment and resignation of the poet Ruth Padel, under scandalous circumstances: anonymous packages containing information about Mr. Walcott's sexual harassment of students were mailed to Oxford academics; and Ms. Padel, though at first professing blameless ignorance, seems to have had a hand in the dirty tricks.
The field is wide open.
I am using this speech to announce my candidacy as the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford. You may ask what my qualifications are. You may ask, but I may not tell you; and besides, I rather resent the implication that one must have qualifications. For the record, I have written a few poems over the years, and I fancy that some of them are quite good, better indeed than some of the so-called verse being so lavishly hosannaed tonight. Let me share with you something I wrote at the age of 10; it was published in my school magazine above my name:
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I'll be honest and admit that my father helped me a little with this poem. When I look back, its diction seems a bit old-fashioned, and that half-rhyme of “eye” with “symmetry” seems lame. But it wasn't long before I was sounding edgier, more modernist. Here is what I wrote, again with my father's help, when I was 14:
Come in under the shadow of this red rock
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
I still think that's a pretty good effort for a 14-year-old and his zoologist dad to have come up with. On arriving in Toronto yesterday, I sat down, this time without my father's help, to pen this short lyric:
Toronto, city of maples stretched across the sky,
And the vivid ghost of Northrop Frye,
You do not lie, you do not lie!
What jagged extremities you pose:
In summer as warm as Karachi,
In winter as cold as Kiev;
The home of Michael Ondaatje,
And lately, Michael Ignatieff.
It is true that I'm better know as a critic than as a poet, but I am what Wordsworth called his brother, John – a “silent poet.” And if everyone's a silent critic, everyone's a silent poet. The other day, The New York Times carried a reader's letter from someone called Anne Tolstoi Maslon. Apparently, Ms. Maslon is a novelist. Usually, when The Times runs a letter from someone who is a published writer but not an especially famous one, a descriptive assertion in italics follows the name, using the formulation: “The writer [i.e. of this letter] is a novelist/poet/playwright.” I was struck by the letter from Anne Tolstoi Maslon, because in her case it was followed by the line: “The writer is the novelist.” Not a novelist, but the novelist. I mean no disrespect to her work, but I have been unable to find any fiction by Anne Tolstoi Maslon. Now this set me thinking. If Anne Tolstoi Maslon, buoyed no doubt by the prestige of her middle name, could simply assert, “The writer is the novelist,” why could I not submit my candidacy to Oxford, thus: “James Wood. The critic is the poet.”
Of course, I have other qualifications, too. I am an accomplished teacher, a mellifluous lecturer, and have no known history of sexual harassment. (A foolish plagiarism charge brought against me and my father a few years ago was thrown out and declared “frivolous.”) I am younger than Christopher Ricks (the former Professor), and thinner than Susan Boyle (also rumoured to be interested). Every poet who has a go at the Oxford job needs a campaign team, and I am here to announce it: my father, still going strong at 82, will be my chief of staff (he has also generously agreed to deliver one of my lectures at Oxford); one of the Griffin Trustees, Robin Robertson, will be in charge of the day-today running of the campaign; and the Griffin Trust has very kindly offered to pay for the considerable costs – thank you, Scott.
