Today’s resignation of Ruth Padel from Oxford University’s chair in poetry is just another sign that poetry is no longer about good writing but a gigantic and totally insignificant feud between networks of warring cliques in unsteady coalitions.

Poets have always been reprobates and backstabbers, but they used to write good poetry.

Padel admitted she sent anonymous messages about Derek Walcott – her main rival for the post – to journalists informing them of allegations of sexual impropriety.

From the New York Times, about the resignation:

During what remained of the campaign, Ms Padel denied having anything to do with the mailings, and condemned the attacks on Mr Walcott, saying that she revered her rival and telling The New York Times in an interview published days before the vote that “it seems horrible, this anonymous campaign.”

After scoring an easy victory over the only other candidate, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, she told The Daily Telegraph her victory had been “poisoned by cowardly acts which I condemn and which I have nothing to do with.” She added, “Those acts have done immense damage to people and to poetry.”

It is amazing to me that a story this irrelevant to its own supposed subject – art – even makes the New York Times. But I suppose the weight of the dead, great poets who once wrote stuff worth reading makes us want to continue to care about poetry, in the hope, perhaps, that someone might do something interesting with it.

There are good, contemporary poets. That is not the problem. The problem, as I see it, is that middling poetry has no audience – nobody reads Padel, and very few have read Walcott – so what beyond sexual impropriety or political pettiness distinguishes them? The only poetry that people read is either the very good type (many of the authors in this category are dead) and the very bad type (think of anything you get as a signature in an email from a religious relative).

Between the great and the abysmal exists a kind of oceanic partial-significance – where poets judge themselves by administrative hierarchy and status of the clique to which they have attached suckers.

I read a quote some time ago that poetry was entering a new golden era, since it had no audience (beyond email searches): if money is removed from the art, the art is liberated. Of course, now poets – and increasingly writers of literary fiction – have replaced money with the most horrible, insidious form of currency that exists: insignificant prestige.

A lot of people won’t agree. They see poetry as an ongoing conversation about art. Well, let’s have a conversation.

The controversy over the Oxford post – clearly – has nothing to do with the value of the poetry written by Walcott and Padel. The reason it cannot have anything to do with the value of their poetry is that, without an audience beyond people who know the poets, no value is put to a test.

The problem is spotted by the New York Times when it’s about Oxford chairs, but there ought to be a conversation about the fact that it happens everywhere, every night, and if it is not recognized, or stopped, there will never be another good poet.

Let me tell you about a poetry reading I attended recently. Three poets read. The one I had come to see – a friend – did well, I felt. The other two were very bad. They were so bad that I had to stifle groans. Perhaps I even failed to stifle them. Then I looked around: it was clear that the friends of those other poets thought their poets were very good, and my friend was not.

Was I right? Were they?

There was no way – none – to settle a debate except to accuse each other of sexual impropriety or racism or something else entirely outside the poetry. Or we could have maybe fought to the death.

Another story: I went to a poetry reading in Louisiana one evening. I went to this because a friend of mine said one of the two poets reading that night was a genius – Li-Young Lee. Lee was reading poems from The City in Which I Love You.

It is true that Li-Young Lee is a genius. Or at least, that book is genius. It is so good that it makes you realize just how middling everything else is. He didn’t introduce his poems; he just read them. After he finished his first poem, the auditorium applauded loudly and for a long time. It was honest applause. I don’t believe anyone was expecting to be in the presence of greatness that night.

Then the other poet read. She was bad – not quite email-signature-bad – but she’d had a lot of success working her way up administrative ladders and was now chair of some creative writing department at a prestigious university in the South. She read her first poem, and there was nothing but silence. She was astounded.

She said – and this is not a joke, and not an exaggeration – “You clapped for him but you won’t clap for me?”

Well, we clapped. It was the saddest, most uncomfortable clap that ever existed.