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Sophie Heawood: Think the world of poetry is a gentle one? Sharpen your quills…

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‘Poetry is more entertaining than anything Simon Cowell ever produced, and far more vicious’

So Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel laureate, might get the job of professor of poetry at Oxford University– except that he’s 80, might not visit Oxford much, and his backers are starting to publicly shift their allegiances, to Simon Armitage or one of the other candidates. The whole thing has been described as “a hornet’s nest of intrigue and back-biting”. Just as it was six years ago, when Ruth Padel had to withdraw from the job mere days after being given it, after another controversy involving fellow candidate Derek Walcott. In the end, it went to Geoffrey Hill, who then used his position to compare our nation’s first female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to Mills & Boon. Poetry: it’s more entertaining than anything Simon Cowell ever produced, and far more vicious.

I spent a year working in the poetry industry, if you can call it that, as an office assistant, and I promise you that advertising, the music industry and journalism have all turned out to be quite compassionate places to work in comparison. I have sat on tour buses with bands deciding whether they should flog their own VIP festival tickets for drug money, and the vibe has felt eminently reasonable compared to that of three poets and their factions competing for a prize and a publishing deal.

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