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A few days ago I posted a light-hearted note on Ruth Padel’s appointment to the Oxford Professor of Poetry position in the storm of resurfacing allegations against Derek Walcott. Well, turns out that Padel staged the “anonymous” campaign that she herself condemned. Now she’s resigned. First let me say something that I haven’t read elsewhere: Didn’t everyone already know about Walcott’s no-no’s? Why is this news to begin with? Anyway, who will be the next Oxford Poet? The picture should be clear, and all the talking heads now agree. We won’t find a decent poet with a moral compass. (Humor.)

So I move to nominate three candidates: my cousin Bert from Alaska, me, and a genetically engineered clone of Wordsworth.

Bert hails from the purest state on earth, home to Gov. Sarah Palin. He’s a religious poet and has only ever wanted to sleep with one person, his wife, and only for the sake of kids. And his poetry is pretty good, too! He does mostly experimental free-verse. In fact, it’s hard to read because most of it’s just words he likes thrown randomly on the page in different fonts and colors. But they do rhyme. He’s upstanding and moral. And this guy writes a lot. The guy produces a new poem every twenty minutes. (He types them into a blackberry and emails them to a list of 1,000 people.) This guy could write poetry while reading it. Plenty of people have already come out saying that this whole ordeal hurts literature and poetry, and I think Bert can restore dignity to this tarnished position, dragged through the mud for hundreds of years.

Many of us know, deep down, the unfortunate truth. Competitive schools-Ivy League or not-don’t want to pay the price for high moral standards. You can learn about the shady dealings of a dozen big name artists, writers, and scholars at big name schools in a five minute Internet search. That’s why I say fire them all and replace them with people like me. $11k a year for this Oxford job already falls within my currently salary range as a graduate student. Since the job only requires a few speaking events a year, I can do those over the Internet. I have a wonderful British accent. I’ve taken some poetry workshops, and I can learn the last thousand years of poetry on the job. The bottom line is that as a common person I’ve been trained not to do things like hit on students or run smear campaigns.

Which leads me to my third nomination: Wordsworth. Folks, this guy made his career writing about the common people. Remember that poem in your Brit Lit survey class, about the guy standing in the river with the leaches? That was Wordsworth. And Tintern Abbey. So I say dig him up, extract his DNA, and remake him. Homegrown Wordsworth can be psychologically conditioned to behave himself, and we can also give him superhuman powers. Nobody would have to worry about sexual harassment charges, because who wouldn’t want to be seduced by superhuman Wordsworth?