The academic life of poetry was looking healthy after Barry Spurr was appointed to a personal chair in poetry and poetics in 2011, the first in Australia, and Robert Adamson took the CAL chair of poetry at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2012. But Spurr was suspended a month ago pending investigation of his private emails using racist language. And Adamson's successful term ended with the last of six public lectures on poetry; he joined David Malouf and Judith Beveridge in a celebration of Martin Harrison, the poet and UTS teacher who died in September. Adamson's poetry collection, Net Needle, will be out in January. John Dale, professor of writing at UTS, said he will apply to the Copyright Agency Limited for further funding for the chair but it would not be filled until 2016.

At Singapore Writers' Festival last week, Irish poet Paul Muldoon spoke wryly about being Oxford professor of poetry from 1999 to 2004. He was elected to the position unopposed, he said, because people were distracted by the appointment of Andrew Motion as poet laureate. Part of his job was to give 15 lectures over five years, and he agreed with Oxford English professor John Stallworthy that most good poets don't have 15 lectures in them. Muldoon concluded: "I smile when I see people jockeying for the position because they have no idea."

FESTIVAL YIN AND YANG

Having been to Ubud Writers & Readers Festival and Singapore Writers' Festival in recent weeks, I recommend both as quite different experiences. Ubud's began in 2003 with the passion of Australian restaurateur Janet DeNeefe for her adopted home after the Bali bombings; she puts together an exciting program on a tiny budget with laidback and slightly chaotic energy that mixes international names with emerging local talent and attracts thousands of Australian visitors. Singapore's began as a biennial festival in 1986 and went annual in 2011 under a dynamic director, Paul Tan. He works with the National Arts Council and a generous government budget of $A1.7 million (increased from about $1 million in 2012). This year's program had a record 250 events in 10 days, with a fascinating range of Singaporean and regional writers as well as big names such as Naomi Wolf, Paul Theroux, Geoff Dyer and Karen Joy Fowler. Australian authors are in the mix but I wasn't aware of Australians in the audience. Held in air-conditioned marquees on the city campus of Singapore Management University and the surrounding art museums in colonial buildings, it is extremely well-run and easy for visitors and makes a great holiday combined with Singapore's famous food and shopping. The 2015 festival will have a new director, Yeow Kai Chai.

EAST MEETS WESTERN FEMINISM

It was interesting to see New Yorker Naomi Wolf present her feminist ideas to a keen audience in Singapore. She stopped suddenly onstage and said, "This quiet is Singapore listening, right? I come from such a rude city I'm not used to courtesy." It wasn't clear whether she included Singapore among developing countries, where she said feminism is focused on human rights and more "interesting and coherent" than in the West's "tedious" concern with arguments about mothers who work or stay home and "what does it mean that Taylor Swift said that?" Her research has found that Islamic women are less concerned about the hijab than Westerners who "are trying to whip up Islamophobia by demonising Islam using feminist tropes".