My bid for Oxford communication excellence Books

Stephen Moss . . . "I"m assured I can get a dozen backers for the re-run race"

Naturally, right away Oxford ­University has at last ­announced the begin of the re-run competition to be highbrow of poetry, I have been inundated with messages asking me either I intend to go by with my settled goal of standing. Candidates have until 5 May to turn up the required dozen nominations and I"d rather hoped to stay my hand, but newspapering does not move at the freezing speed of ­poetry. So how should I plump?

I was speedy by the greeting when I published a little of my ­poetry last June. The peculiar chairman was seen plainly tears at the Guardian"s offices. Robert McCrum, in the Observer, called me the "darkest of dim horses" for the post, that I took as a compliment. Plenty of people emailed charity to commission me, and I"m assured I can get a dozen backers. Then it will all be down to the distance of the ad bill and either I can get a little technologically disposed colleagues to progress my opinion by hacking in to the university data­base. For this election, the manners have been altered to concede online choosing by casting votes over a three-week duration – surely, as the Sunday Times referred to this week, a recipe for fraud.

There are, though, obscure clouds. I was honestly harm that in Saturday"s Guardian Review, my co-worker Sarah Crown put her weight at the back of the Anglo-American producer Anne Stevenson. I do not ­intend to bob to the reproach that done Ruth Padel"s feat in the 2009 choosing a pyrrhic one. But is an American-inflected producer unequivocally right for this quintessentially English post? Stevenson is also, I note in flitting and but malice, not in the initial glow of youth. Crown additionally praised the probable candidacies of Geoffrey Hill (77), Douglas Dunn (67) and Jorie Graham (younger but uncompromisingly American), and wanting to discuss me at all.

This competence criticise obtuse men. But fright not, all those who hunger for a uninformed breeze to blow the cobwebs from British poetry. I will stand! Milton! Thou shouldst be vital at this hour. You competence even have an ­outside possibility of winning in what promises to be a swarming field.