A hard chair

And there was I thinking it was going to be nem con.

There are ten remaining candidates for the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Paula Claire withdrew on 7 June, in protest over "serious flaws" in the election process, and favouritism shown to Hill.

We are used to arguments about what does or does not constitute poetry, but Roger Lewis doesn't draw a distinction between the patterned words and the metaphor. Like Geoffrey Hill (for whom Professor Dame Averil Cameron, Warden of Keble, has posted an encomium), Lewis hasn't written a manifesto. His case is extravagantly pleaded by Rebecca Nicolson (St Hugh's 1985). Tantalisingly,

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.

But he won't be.

Michael Horovitz stands much more of a chance. It doesn't signify, but his facebook group has more supporters than Hill's. I just don't get his allegation that his religion is against him because it seems irrelevant to me - but maybe it's true that Christians are voting for Hill because he's a Christian... Have literature, and Oxford, come to this? I applaud Horovitz's manifesto:

Let the Oxford professorship's authority be revived as a platform for authentic poetry ticket-bookings, scheduling ever newer departures and in-depth arrivals way beyond mere careerist arrivism. Anyone voting for me is assured that I will continue striving to emulate Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford: "Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, / And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."

Ruth Padel supports both Hill (with a damning qualification about his stamina) and Horovitz. (Snarky article in Camden New Journal at the link.)

Other candidates include poetry fundamentalist traditionalist Michael George Gibson

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.

[Edit: amended following a complaint from Mr Gibson's agent - see comments]

Seán Haldane if elected wants

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'.

Chris Mann, a former Newdigate prizewinner, offers samples of his work, including

Dragonfly

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

Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

Stephen Moss is the Monster Raving Looney whose candidacy has been well documented in the Guardian.

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.... 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!

Sanskrit scholar Vaughan Pilikian's ambitions are as wide ranging as Lewis's, if harder to visualise.

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.

It is only through poetry that we might revenge ourselves on time. I could almost be persuaded of that.

Full Candidate statements here

I haven't voted yet.