…and I’ll stop with the poet gossip. Well, barring Armitage slapping Duffy with a leather glove in front of Foyle’s, of course.
Jezebel has a post on the Padel-Walcott showdown that I think summarises and articulates pretty well what’s been bothering me about the whole thing. A couple sentences that hit the mark:
But it’s also disappointing that any discussion of Walcott’s history of sexual harassment — and he has admitted to propositioning one student — is now tainted by Padel’s appearance of self-interest. Padel’s involvement has sunk the issue into the realm of identity politics, leading Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent to compare the conflict between the two poets to “the fierce contest between race and gender represented by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”
Amusingly, I’d almost made the Obama/Clinton parallel in my last post, but thought it was too much of a stretch. But that sense of disappointment–that questions of importance are now hopelessly mired in what nearly everyone at this point is referring to as “playground scandal”–that bit is dead on.
As far as the questions of whether Padel would have gotten the same treatment if she were a male poet…I’m honestly not sure. Possibly, probably…I will say one thing, though; I’ve read a lot of commentary from people, some I know and some I don’t, where I would say the glee they’re taking in either Padel’s resignation or the suggestions of sexism are veering pretty sharply into misogyny. Perhaps I’m over-sensitive, and the guys making endless jokes about how sexist they are, of course they are, silly Padel, ohohoho, are actually doing so with a finely honed sense of irony. But then again, I wouldn’t really know; those particular conversations are ones I, and from appearances most other women, don’t feel comfortable joining–and if these commenters were actually so ironic, you would think they would have noticed it.
Oh, well. Endless news fodder for a position that pays six thousand pounds a year. I’ll yield the final thought, on this and on most academy matters, to a Jezebel commenter: “In academia the politics are so bad because the stakes are so low.”
Oh Norwich. Land of endless flatness, land of the same three pubs we go to over and over and over again, land of three starbucks in a two-minute radius and incongruous gatherings of goths and frankly, the silliest accents this side of Cornwall.


