E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Splendid news.  England's finest living poet, Geoffrey Hill , has been elected the new Professor of Poetry for Oxford.  This practically papal position de facto renders Hill the most-esteemed elder figure of a crowded field, that stretches down its influence, to such "modern classics" as Fenton and Motion .  In short, he is confirmed as what he has been, in all but name, for years in the UK - part of the triumvirate of living greats of English, along with Walcott and Heaney - and, by extension, Ashbery , if one wants to include American poets.  Hill is grander than all these, openly wrestling with religion, politics, and ideas, in a more rhetorically ornate and high manner - the Miltonic tradition.  He is therefore a suitable follower-on from Ricks .  A note on Michael Horovitz : it is a pity he received so few votes (though over 300 is not an embarrassment); he would, if Hill had not been running, a good choice himself - and he ran a spirited and enjo...

Not only will Britain have a new government sometime soon after 6 May - in June, it will have a new Oxford Professor of Poetry, to fill the shoes of the retired professor, Ruth Padel .  So far, this has been a rather arcane campaign - plans to provide for online voting seem at odds with the decidedly low-key (and byzantine) system - as nominees must be put forward by Oxford students with degrees (and some apparently never bother to officially "take" such degrees). At any rate, the flood of popular, sunny, Clegg -like figures has yet to sweep us the people away.  Only three poets have been so far confirmed , and of those, the less said the better about two of them - or rather, the more said, because I had, frankly, never heard of them until today. It seems odd and a little ludicrous, if not vain, to allow oneself to be put forward for such a position, when one is, obviously, not of the first, or even second, rank.  The third nominee is the great genius of the E...

Just saw this at Carrie Etter's blog. Good to see Hill in the running .

Rumours or news that Geoffrey Hill might become Oxford Professor of Poetry have Eyewear thrilled. Hill represents a more serious tradition than that espoused by the current laureate; and one loftier, more sublime and rhetorically nuanced. Hill is the finest living poet writing in the Miltonic line. He would bring much to the post.

I will be reading from my new collection, Seaway: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2008), this Thursday, 6 November, as part of the Michaelmas '08 series, as a guest of the Oxford University Poetry Society - a great honour. Former invited guest poets include Dylan Thomas , Ted Hughes , Elaine Feinstein , Andrew Motion , Seamus Heaney , and Paul Farley . Other guests forthcoming include Colette Bryce (next week), and Daljit Nagra , Week 8. The venue will be St Edmund Hall, Old Dining Hall and the reading should start at 8.30pm. Hope to see some of you there.

Collectors of ephemera, and little magazines, will seek out the enigmatic, if feisty, Oxford Poetry '08 magazine, edited by Benjamin Mullen and J.C.H. Potts . At 147 pages, it is quite something. Its end of transmission "and of transmission" statement (is that a typo?) in the manifesto section makes startling reading: "Oxford Poetry is a name. We have no premises, no freephone, and certainly no savings account. Printing costs this year were donated. We have no committee of bosses, neither any constituting documents nor cubby hole for their preservation, and by summer 'we' too will have gone. Oxford Poetry 2009 (Vol. XIII, no. 1), therefore, is open for conscientious editorship to anyone, so long as they can claim simultaneous connection both to place and thing. No appointments will be made, no mantles conferred, no batons passed with patted backs. Mail forwarded from Magdalen to St Anne's will be Magdalen's again, and details of such subscriptions ...

I read Sunday with Elaine Feinstein at Exeter College, Oxford, as part of the Life Lines 2: Poets for Oxfam launch readings to a good-sized audience of appreciative and thoughtful students. During the Q & A questions regarding translation, evil and truth in poetry, and other matters, arose. One audience member rather kindly compared the sounds in my poems to Heaney and Plath . We then attended Choral Evensong (there was also Holy Baptism of two young people), followed by dinner at High Table, as a guest of the Rector. It was a very fine day, altogether, made better by the extraordinary sunlight.