I want to restart this blog if others want to do so. More details to come once I get settled.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
From the issue dated May 20, 2005
Rhyme & Unreason
How a Web site purporting to uncover fraud shook up the world of poetry contests
By THOMAS BARTLETT
Portland, Ore.
The scourge of the poetry world is sipping black tea and nibbling almond cookies in the Tower of Cosmic Reflections on a drizzly Monday afternoon. The name of the teahouse may be grandiose but the scourge himself is anything but: Alan Cordle is a 36-year-old research librarian at Portland Community College who has wispy blond hair and pudgy cheeks. He drives a 1994 Honda Accord, likes to hike, and brews his own beer. "These cookies are great," he says with his mouth full. The man is harmlessness in blue slacks.
Or is he? For the past year this chipper librarian has been moonlighting as the anonymous operator of a Web site devoted to exposing corruption in poetry contests, many of which are run by university presses. He has accused poets and publishers of fraud, demanded criminal investigations, and sent letters to the bosses of suspected wrongdoers listing their purported misdeeds. He has even given people mean nicknames.
If you are a supporter of Foetry, as his site is called, you probably think of Mr. Cordle as a crusader for fairness, a beacon in a dark alley of conspiracy and malfeasance. Maybe even a hero.
If, however, you are one of the poets or publishers he has fingered as a cheat (on evidence that at times is just a notch above wild speculation), then you probably don't like him very much. In fact, you may have even composed a few well-turned phrases to express your contempt. You're a poet, after all; it's what you do.
Poetry contests -- particularly the prestigious ones -- do more than boost the egos of the winners: They often make a poet's career. The winners get published; the losers are left to enter another contest. Published poets are first in line to get university teaching jobs, which is one reason they spend a lot of time and money (contests often charge "reading fees") trying to win big-name competitions. The contests also matter for established poets, who are seeking to publish their books and strengthen their reputations.
While the contests might be just the most egregious example of cronyism in academic poetry -- a world in which dust-jacket blurbs, invitations to read, and visiting professorships depend a lot on personal relationships -- pretty much everyone agrees that the system is far from ideal. And to its credit, Foetry has persuaded some presses to review their contests and has made judges think twice about picking people they know. But it has also caused a lot of bitterness and hurt feelings -- and attracted the ire of one of the country's most honored poets, the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. "It's been a little bit of a lynching," she says.
Eyes on the Prizes
Alan Cordle created Foetry in April 2004 after years of watching his wife, Kathleen Halme, enter poetry contests and becoming increasingly convinced that they weren't fair. At first, it was just Mr. Cordle and his computer. But the site gained momentum and soon it was attracting hundreds of visitors each day, many of whom also believed that something was rotten about these contests. They gossiped and gathered evidence.
Here's an example: In 2002 Brenda Hillman selected a manuscript by Aaron McCollough for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. As part of that honor, Mr. McCollough's manuscript was published by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University.
Foetry alleges that Ms. Hillman and Mr. McCollough knew each other and that she "helped him revise" his manuscript before the contest. Because of that connection, the argument goes, the contest was tainted.
But while Mr. McCollough and Ms. Hillman acknowledge that they had met once before the contest, the meeting lasted "for about five minutes," according to Ms. Hillman, who has taught poetry at a number of colleges and is a professor and poet in residence at Saint Mary's College of California.
Mr. McCollough, now a graduate student in English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, calls Foetry's allegations "a bunch of crap." He says he was one of a dozen or so students who participated in a weekend seminar conducted by Ms. Hillman at the University of Iowa about two years before the contest. She did not, he insists, help him revise his manuscript at that time, although she did give him some suggestions after he won. Ms. Hillman backs up his account.
Mr. Cordle won't reveal his source for this information, but he stands by it.
If Foetry relied exclusively on anonymous tipsters and tenuous connections, it would be easy enough to dismiss. It does not. Mr. Cordle -- and this is where his librarian training comes in handy -- has made use of open-records laws to force presses at public universities to hand over documents related to their contests. Tracking down leads and connecting the dots became an obsession for Mr. Cordle, who at one point spent 20 hours a week or more working on Foetry. "It was fun and addictive," he says. His biggest score came when, through a third party, he asked the University of Georgia Press for a list of the recent judges of the prize it gives to already-published poets.
For Foetry supporters, what was on that list became the smoking gun. In January 1999, Jorie Graham selected a manuscript by the poet and critic Peter Sacks for the prize. On its face, that was a shocking revelation. Ms. Graham and Mr. Sacks are colleagues at Harvard University. They are also married.
Ms. Graham says it is not that simple. The two were not married in 1999, and Ms. Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard. They knew each other, she says, but not well. They married in 2000, the same year she moved to Harvard.
But Ms. Graham apparently had some reservations herself: She says she informed the editor overseeing the contest, Bin Ramke, that there was a conflict. As a result, she says, Mr. Ramke was the judge who actually selected Mr. Sacks's book. Normally, Mr. Ramke selects a dozen or so finalists, and the winner is selected by a single outside judge.
Documents that Mr. Cordle obtained from the Georgia press, however, do not seem to support that scenario. For instance, in a letter Mr. Ramke wrote in 1999 to the director of the press, he says that Ms. Graham "enthusiastically concurs" with his decision to pick Mr. Sacks's work.
Ms. Graham calls that wording a "big mistake" and points to another part of the letter in which Mr. Ramke says he would pick the manuscript "even if I were alone in the wilderness." Mr. Cordle also obtained through the request a page of prose written by Ms. Graham praising Mr. Sacks's book. She says that was nothing more than "jacket copy" that Mr. Ramke asked her to write. Mr. Ramke, however, says that judges -- whom he calls "outside readers" -- are asked to write a page or so about the manuscript "to be used as arguments for publishing the book."
That is only one of Ms. Graham's supposed sins, according to Foetry. There are other contests in which she selected former students or people she had known. In some cases, the allegations seem to be a giant stretch. Just because she was at a university at the same time as someone else does not necessarily mean they were friends. But Mr. Cordle and others argue that those involved in poetry programs at the same university tend to know each other, and so it is not unreasonable to assume a connection.
In other cases, Ms. Graham did select poets she had taught. She explains that she has had many students over the years and says she isn't biased in favor of them. "If a great book happens to be written by a former student who went to the University of Iowa 10 years prior," she says, "and that's the best book by far, then I'm not going to discriminate against that student."
Go Daddy No
Plenty of poets -- including Ms. Graham -- don't like the contest system. But the fact is, poetry books don't sell, and so-called reading fees paid by contestants subsidize the cost of publication by small and university presses. That works well for the presses, but for poets it can mean spending a small fortune trying to get their words into print. Mr. Cordle and his supporters see the system as a scheme to defraud naïve poets while judges select their friends, students, and colleagues. Presses argue that it is just a regrettable economic necessity.
But even some of those who believe contests are fraught with conflicts of interest don't like the way Mr. Cordle has run his Web site. They especially didn't like that he ran it anonymously -- at least until last month, when his identity was revealed. (Mr. Cordle, for what it's worth, says he was worried about his wife's work being discriminated against if his identity were known).
Before that, guessing who ran Foetry had become a popular pastime for poets. There was a lot of speculation on poetry-related blogs, much of it far off the mark. A blog called whoisfoetry? appeared, coordinating efforts to expose the anonymous gadfly.
Mr. Cordle's name finally surfaced after someone complained to his Web-hosting service, Go Daddy. A spokesman for the service, which was paid an extra fee to keep Mr. Cordle's information confidential, refused to comment for this article. However, the terms that registrants agree to when they sign up say that the service may reveal the information for a number of reasons, including if the Web site embarrasses someone.
And Foetry has certainly embarrassed a lot of people -- sometimes close to home. When Mr. Cordle started the site, he assured Ms. Halme that there was no way anyone would discover who he was. He took lots of precautions. "I was pretty arrogant about not getting caught," he says. Ms. Halme was sure that, precautions or no, her husband's obsession with the fairness of poetry contests was going to blow up in his face.
She was right.
What made it even more distressing is that Ms. Halme was opposed to the Web site from the beginning. This is my world, she told him. How would you like it if I started a Web site about research librarians? Also, she knew that people would assume that she had a hand in Foetry if his identity became known. To this day she says she has never visited the Web site.
"I told him from the beginning that it all sickens me," she says. When asked what in particular sickens her, she says it was what people told her about Foetry's "ad hominem attacks." She contends that poetry organizations and poets themselves, "not my husband's site," should be policing the contests. That said, she agrees that the playing field is not level.
When Mr. Cordle discovered that he was no longer anonymous, he says, it felt like "a punch in the stomach." He was sitting on the couch, feet propped up, working on his laptop. While visiting a poetry-related blog, he noticed something strange: his name, address, and home telephone number. He checked another site and there they were again. "The cat is out of the bag," one blog declared triumphantly.
Ms. Halme happened to be in the room at the time. Mr. Cordle thought briefly about keeping it from her, then realized that would be impossible. When he told her, he started crying. Then she started crying.
When the tears subsided the anger began. Ms. Halme worried that her poetry career would be over now that everyone knew she was married to the man behind Foetry. She also knew that her publication history would be put under a microscope. The irony is that she is a successful poet: Two of her books have been published, one of them by the University of Georgia Press, which Mr. Cordle has criticized so relentlessly. She was a winner of a contest he deems unfair. As it happens, however, she didn't know the judge the year she won. "It's not rigged every year," Mr. Cordle says.
In the end, Mr. Cordle hurt the very person who had inspired him to start Foetry. But while the ordeal has been "difficult at times," Ms. Halme says, she may forgive him yet. "He's become the cute Michael Moore of poetry," she says with a laugh.
Lyrical Malice
Forgive Jorie Graham if she doesn't have much sympathy for Mr. Cordle or his wife. Not only has Foetry portrayed her as a serial cheater, it has also made fun of the way she poses in photographs and how she sighs during poetry readings. Which isn't very nice and certainly has nothing to do with poetry.
Ms. Graham admits that she has visited Foetry often and says the accusations and insults have made it difficult for her to write.They have frightened her at times. "These are scary people," she says.
The Web site has also made Ms. Graham wonder whether her students at Harvard will think she is a fraud. In several extended telephone conversations and lengthy e-mail messages, Ms. Graham eloquently expressed the pain Foetry has caused her.
Another extremely unhappy party is Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press and an associate professor of English at Boise State University, who says the allegations against her press are "vicious and untrue." She also doesn't think Mr. Cordle is truly interested in fixing the contest system. "It was more like 'We're going to get these people,'" she says.
Ms. Holmes fired back on her blog, Humanophone, saying Mr. Cordle "should be ashamed of himself." For his part, Mr. Cordle posted a picture of Ms. Holmes with flashing red eyes. "My sense of justice can come out in immature ways sometimes," he says. While he doesn't apologize for the flashing-eyes photo, he does acknowledge that there were times he might have gone too far. "I think people have a point when they say that my anonymity allowed me to take some ad hominem potshots," he says."
Also a target of Foetry's wrath is Bin Ramke, editor of the poetry series at the University of Georgia Press and a professor of English at the University of Denver, who believes that most of what is on Foetry is little more than conspiracy theories and baseless supposition. He agrees that judges should not choose friends or spouses, but he says that poets tend to know each other and so acting like such connections are a big deal is "strange." "I really don't think it's a matter of us corrupt individuals in positions of power who want to hand out prizes to friends," he says.
Blank Verses
Mr. Cordle took the Web site down soon after his identity was revealed. He had been planning to do so anyway, at his wife's insistence. But after the recent publicity -- and after some poets started celebrating its demise -- he decided to put it back up. This time his name is on it.
There are signs that university presses are taking some of his charges, or at least the publicity they have attracted, seriously. The University of Georgia Press has added a disclaimer to its Web site saying that judges of its poetry contest should "avoid conflicts of all kinds." Colorado State University has added a similar disclaimer for its Colorado Prize for Poetry. Other colleges are likely to follow.
There has been some fallout, too. Mr. Ramke says he will step down as editor of the poetry series at Georgia because of the controversy, although not because he believes he has done anything wrong. Ms. Graham says she will no longer judge poetry contests, though she says she made that decision before Foetry's allegations.
Ever since Mr. Cordle's name was revealed there has been talk of lawsuits. Ms. Holmes's lawyers have sent him a letter. Ms. Graham has been talking over her options with legal counsel. Mr. Cordle himself is considering action against the hosting service that revealed his name. Everyone it seems is looking for justice -- and not the poetic kind.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 37, Page A12
Rhyme & Unreason
How a Web site purporting to uncover fraud shook up the world of poetry contests
By THOMAS BARTLETT
Portland, Ore.
The scourge of the poetry world is sipping black tea and nibbling almond cookies in the Tower of Cosmic Reflections on a drizzly Monday afternoon. The name of the teahouse may be grandiose but the scourge himself is anything but: Alan Cordle is a 36-year-old research librarian at Portland Community College who has wispy blond hair and pudgy cheeks. He drives a 1994 Honda Accord, likes to hike, and brews his own beer. "These cookies are great," he says with his mouth full. The man is harmlessness in blue slacks.
Or is he? For the past year this chipper librarian has been moonlighting as the anonymous operator of a Web site devoted to exposing corruption in poetry contests, many of which are run by university presses. He has accused poets and publishers of fraud, demanded criminal investigations, and sent letters to the bosses of suspected wrongdoers listing their purported misdeeds. He has even given people mean nicknames.
If you are a supporter of Foetry, as his site is called, you probably think of Mr. Cordle as a crusader for fairness, a beacon in a dark alley of conspiracy and malfeasance. Maybe even a hero.
If, however, you are one of the poets or publishers he has fingered as a cheat (on evidence that at times is just a notch above wild speculation), then you probably don't like him very much. In fact, you may have even composed a few well-turned phrases to express your contempt. You're a poet, after all; it's what you do.
Poetry contests -- particularly the prestigious ones -- do more than boost the egos of the winners: They often make a poet's career. The winners get published; the losers are left to enter another contest. Published poets are first in line to get university teaching jobs, which is one reason they spend a lot of time and money (contests often charge "reading fees") trying to win big-name competitions. The contests also matter for established poets, who are seeking to publish their books and strengthen their reputations.
While the contests might be just the most egregious example of cronyism in academic poetry -- a world in which dust-jacket blurbs, invitations to read, and visiting professorships depend a lot on personal relationships -- pretty much everyone agrees that the system is far from ideal. And to its credit, Foetry has persuaded some presses to review their contests and has made judges think twice about picking people they know. But it has also caused a lot of bitterness and hurt feelings -- and attracted the ire of one of the country's most honored poets, the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. "It's been a little bit of a lynching," she says.
Eyes on the Prizes
Alan Cordle created Foetry in April 2004 after years of watching his wife, Kathleen Halme, enter poetry contests and becoming increasingly convinced that they weren't fair. At first, it was just Mr. Cordle and his computer. But the site gained momentum and soon it was attracting hundreds of visitors each day, many of whom also believed that something was rotten about these contests. They gossiped and gathered evidence.
Here's an example: In 2002 Brenda Hillman selected a manuscript by Aaron McCollough for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. As part of that honor, Mr. McCollough's manuscript was published by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University.
Foetry alleges that Ms. Hillman and Mr. McCollough knew each other and that she "helped him revise" his manuscript before the contest. Because of that connection, the argument goes, the contest was tainted.
But while Mr. McCollough and Ms. Hillman acknowledge that they had met once before the contest, the meeting lasted "for about five minutes," according to Ms. Hillman, who has taught poetry at a number of colleges and is a professor and poet in residence at Saint Mary's College of California.
Mr. McCollough, now a graduate student in English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, calls Foetry's allegations "a bunch of crap." He says he was one of a dozen or so students who participated in a weekend seminar conducted by Ms. Hillman at the University of Iowa about two years before the contest. She did not, he insists, help him revise his manuscript at that time, although she did give him some suggestions after he won. Ms. Hillman backs up his account.
Mr. Cordle won't reveal his source for this information, but he stands by it.
If Foetry relied exclusively on anonymous tipsters and tenuous connections, it would be easy enough to dismiss. It does not. Mr. Cordle -- and this is where his librarian training comes in handy -- has made use of open-records laws to force presses at public universities to hand over documents related to their contests. Tracking down leads and connecting the dots became an obsession for Mr. Cordle, who at one point spent 20 hours a week or more working on Foetry. "It was fun and addictive," he says. His biggest score came when, through a third party, he asked the University of Georgia Press for a list of the recent judges of the prize it gives to already-published poets.
For Foetry supporters, what was on that list became the smoking gun. In January 1999, Jorie Graham selected a manuscript by the poet and critic Peter Sacks for the prize. On its face, that was a shocking revelation. Ms. Graham and Mr. Sacks are colleagues at Harvard University. They are also married.
Ms. Graham says it is not that simple. The two were not married in 1999, and Ms. Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard. They knew each other, she says, but not well. They married in 2000, the same year she moved to Harvard.
But Ms. Graham apparently had some reservations herself: She says she informed the editor overseeing the contest, Bin Ramke, that there was a conflict. As a result, she says, Mr. Ramke was the judge who actually selected Mr. Sacks's book. Normally, Mr. Ramke selects a dozen or so finalists, and the winner is selected by a single outside judge.
Documents that Mr. Cordle obtained from the Georgia press, however, do not seem to support that scenario. For instance, in a letter Mr. Ramke wrote in 1999 to the director of the press, he says that Ms. Graham "enthusiastically concurs" with his decision to pick Mr. Sacks's work.
Ms. Graham calls that wording a "big mistake" and points to another part of the letter in which Mr. Ramke says he would pick the manuscript "even if I were alone in the wilderness." Mr. Cordle also obtained through the request a page of prose written by Ms. Graham praising Mr. Sacks's book. She says that was nothing more than "jacket copy" that Mr. Ramke asked her to write. Mr. Ramke, however, says that judges -- whom he calls "outside readers" -- are asked to write a page or so about the manuscript "to be used as arguments for publishing the book."
That is only one of Ms. Graham's supposed sins, according to Foetry. There are other contests in which she selected former students or people she had known. In some cases, the allegations seem to be a giant stretch. Just because she was at a university at the same time as someone else does not necessarily mean they were friends. But Mr. Cordle and others argue that those involved in poetry programs at the same university tend to know each other, and so it is not unreasonable to assume a connection.
In other cases, Ms. Graham did select poets she had taught. She explains that she has had many students over the years and says she isn't biased in favor of them. "If a great book happens to be written by a former student who went to the University of Iowa 10 years prior," she says, "and that's the best book by far, then I'm not going to discriminate against that student."
Go Daddy No
Plenty of poets -- including Ms. Graham -- don't like the contest system. But the fact is, poetry books don't sell, and so-called reading fees paid by contestants subsidize the cost of publication by small and university presses. That works well for the presses, but for poets it can mean spending a small fortune trying to get their words into print. Mr. Cordle and his supporters see the system as a scheme to defraud naïve poets while judges select their friends, students, and colleagues. Presses argue that it is just a regrettable economic necessity.
But even some of those who believe contests are fraught with conflicts of interest don't like the way Mr. Cordle has run his Web site. They especially didn't like that he ran it anonymously -- at least until last month, when his identity was revealed. (Mr. Cordle, for what it's worth, says he was worried about his wife's work being discriminated against if his identity were known).
Before that, guessing who ran Foetry had become a popular pastime for poets. There was a lot of speculation on poetry-related blogs, much of it far off the mark. A blog called whoisfoetry? appeared, coordinating efforts to expose the anonymous gadfly.
Mr. Cordle's name finally surfaced after someone complained to his Web-hosting service, Go Daddy. A spokesman for the service, which was paid an extra fee to keep Mr. Cordle's information confidential, refused to comment for this article. However, the terms that registrants agree to when they sign up say that the service may reveal the information for a number of reasons, including if the Web site embarrasses someone.
And Foetry has certainly embarrassed a lot of people -- sometimes close to home. When Mr. Cordle started the site, he assured Ms. Halme that there was no way anyone would discover who he was. He took lots of precautions. "I was pretty arrogant about not getting caught," he says. Ms. Halme was sure that, precautions or no, her husband's obsession with the fairness of poetry contests was going to blow up in his face.
She was right.
What made it even more distressing is that Ms. Halme was opposed to the Web site from the beginning. This is my world, she told him. How would you like it if I started a Web site about research librarians? Also, she knew that people would assume that she had a hand in Foetry if his identity became known. To this day she says she has never visited the Web site.
"I told him from the beginning that it all sickens me," she says. When asked what in particular sickens her, she says it was what people told her about Foetry's "ad hominem attacks." She contends that poetry organizations and poets themselves, "not my husband's site," should be policing the contests. That said, she agrees that the playing field is not level.
When Mr. Cordle discovered that he was no longer anonymous, he says, it felt like "a punch in the stomach." He was sitting on the couch, feet propped up, working on his laptop. While visiting a poetry-related blog, he noticed something strange: his name, address, and home telephone number. He checked another site and there they were again. "The cat is out of the bag," one blog declared triumphantly.
Ms. Halme happened to be in the room at the time. Mr. Cordle thought briefly about keeping it from her, then realized that would be impossible. When he told her, he started crying. Then she started crying.
When the tears subsided the anger began. Ms. Halme worried that her poetry career would be over now that everyone knew she was married to the man behind Foetry. She also knew that her publication history would be put under a microscope. The irony is that she is a successful poet: Two of her books have been published, one of them by the University of Georgia Press, which Mr. Cordle has criticized so relentlessly. She was a winner of a contest he deems unfair. As it happens, however, she didn't know the judge the year she won. "It's not rigged every year," Mr. Cordle says.
In the end, Mr. Cordle hurt the very person who had inspired him to start Foetry. But while the ordeal has been "difficult at times," Ms. Halme says, she may forgive him yet. "He's become the cute Michael Moore of poetry," she says with a laugh.
Lyrical Malice
Forgive Jorie Graham if she doesn't have much sympathy for Mr. Cordle or his wife. Not only has Foetry portrayed her as a serial cheater, it has also made fun of the way she poses in photographs and how she sighs during poetry readings. Which isn't very nice and certainly has nothing to do with poetry.
Ms. Graham admits that she has visited Foetry often and says the accusations and insults have made it difficult for her to write.They have frightened her at times. "These are scary people," she says.
The Web site has also made Ms. Graham wonder whether her students at Harvard will think she is a fraud. In several extended telephone conversations and lengthy e-mail messages, Ms. Graham eloquently expressed the pain Foetry has caused her.
Another extremely unhappy party is Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press and an associate professor of English at Boise State University, who says the allegations against her press are "vicious and untrue." She also doesn't think Mr. Cordle is truly interested in fixing the contest system. "It was more like 'We're going to get these people,'" she says.
Ms. Holmes fired back on her blog, Humanophone, saying Mr. Cordle "should be ashamed of himself." For his part, Mr. Cordle posted a picture of Ms. Holmes with flashing red eyes. "My sense of justice can come out in immature ways sometimes," he says. While he doesn't apologize for the flashing-eyes photo, he does acknowledge that there were times he might have gone too far. "I think people have a point when they say that my anonymity allowed me to take some ad hominem potshots," he says."
Also a target of Foetry's wrath is Bin Ramke, editor of the poetry series at the University of Georgia Press and a professor of English at the University of Denver, who believes that most of what is on Foetry is little more than conspiracy theories and baseless supposition. He agrees that judges should not choose friends or spouses, but he says that poets tend to know each other and so acting like such connections are a big deal is "strange." "I really don't think it's a matter of us corrupt individuals in positions of power who want to hand out prizes to friends," he says.
Blank Verses
Mr. Cordle took the Web site down soon after his identity was revealed. He had been planning to do so anyway, at his wife's insistence. But after the recent publicity -- and after some poets started celebrating its demise -- he decided to put it back up. This time his name is on it.
There are signs that university presses are taking some of his charges, or at least the publicity they have attracted, seriously. The University of Georgia Press has added a disclaimer to its Web site saying that judges of its poetry contest should "avoid conflicts of all kinds." Colorado State University has added a similar disclaimer for its Colorado Prize for Poetry. Other colleges are likely to follow.
There has been some fallout, too. Mr. Ramke says he will step down as editor of the poetry series at Georgia because of the controversy, although not because he believes he has done anything wrong. Ms. Graham says she will no longer judge poetry contests, though she says she made that decision before Foetry's allegations.
Ever since Mr. Cordle's name was revealed there has been talk of lawsuits. Ms. Holmes's lawyers have sent him a letter. Ms. Graham has been talking over her options with legal counsel. Mr. Cordle himself is considering action against the hosting service that revealed his name. Everyone it seems is looking for justice -- and not the poetic kind.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 37, Page A12
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i39/39b01401.htm
From the issue dated June 3, 2005
Contesting the Poetry Contests
By JOHN T. CASTEEN IV and TED GENOWAYS
In little more than a year, the virtual community at Foetry.com has managed to cause a remarkable stir. The Web site has accused several prominent poets and presses of conflicts of interest, and its discussion forums have condemned nearly every aspect of the poetry-contest process. Foetry's charges are leveled carelessly and with no acceptable standards of proof; its methods are wrongheaded and dangerous. They divert attention from the merits of the poetry in question, and they give license to its contributors to speculate openly and without accountability on the private lives and alleged public transgressions of writers, judges, and editors.
Nevertheless, the surrounding controversy highlights the perception that too many book-prize contests have sprung up in recent years without sufficient agreement about ethics and standards of practice. Without clear and common guidelines, young poets have grown suspicious of the process, often perceiving corruption where none exists and believing that success emanates from a few powerful people to whom they have no access. We have worked long enough -- as poets, as readers, as editors, and as arts organizers -- to know that such widespread collusion, even if it were an actual goal, would be impractical; there's no enticement that could persuade that many people to jeopardize their careers and reputations simply for the sake of promoting their friends. Based on discussions and interviews with those involved, we have found that, with a few exceptions, the accusations of impropriety far exceed any real wrongdoing.
Poets and their publishers must finally recognize, though, that a widespread perception of unfairness is nearly as damaging as actual fraud. Therefore, we strongly recommend that the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and the Literary Ventures Fund/Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (LVF/CLMP) form a joint committee to create voluntary guidelines for publication contests. We also suggest that those bodies investigate new means of supporting the publication of first books of poetry that do not involve financial contributions from the entrants themselves. Before we can suggest detailed short- or long-term solutions, however, we need to carefully consider how we arrived, as a culture of creative people, at a moment in which a Web site as reprehensible as Foetry would find an audience at all.
First, a frank admission: Poetry doesn't sell well and never has. For many years, the rationale for publishing poetry was that it added prestige to a press's list, while offering long-term financial rewards. Commercial publishers competed for the writings of major poets, hoping the investment would pay off when writers went on to win major prizes or were otherwise officially welcomed into the canon. In 1980, however, the landscape changed when the Internal Revenue Service applied to publishers a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Thor Power Tool Co. v. Commissioner, which made it more expensive for publishers to carry unsold inventory. As a result, most commercial publishers dramatically reduced their poetry lists.
University and independent small presses profited editorially but didn't have the benefit of best sellers to buoy these risky literary titles. Small publishers found two ready means of carrying overhead: government arts grants and writer-supported publication in the form of contests with reading fees. Because the former was competitive and time-consuming, the latter solution quickly became the more popular. As a result, the last 25 years have seen contests proliferate from five (the Juniper Prize at the University of Massachusetts Press, the Lamont and Walt Whitman Awards from the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets) in 1980 to more than 100 today.
More than half of the prizes now offered are from presses that didn't exist 25 years ago, and still more come from academic imprints that didn't publish poetry before the contest model provided a financial source. However, that strategy wouldn't work at all if there weren't an unprecedented number of entrants, most of whom come from the ranks of masters-in-fine-arts programs in creative writing. The increasing number of degree programs (roughly 25 in 1980, about 125 today) suggests a boom in teaching opportunities. The number of programs hiring new faculty members, however, has actually declined over the last decade; most new programs are staffed by formalizing new curricula with existing faculty members and resources.
As a result, there is an enormous competition among poets eager to distinguish themselves, and publishing remains the most trustworthy way to demonstrate skill and seriousness, which makes it the most problematic. Since the reputation of these programs rests in part on the success of graduates with livelihoods and careers to mind, the temptation for screeners and judges to choose former students may be great. We believe, as is widely if anecdotally reported, that such temptation may have occasionally led to impropriety. Such behavior must not be tolerated. To prevent future occurrences, presses must commit to common guidelines for the time being and shared goals for the future.
Contest organizers must take three simple and painful steps to restore integrity immediately. First, they must adopt uniform eligibility guidelines established by the umbrella groups. Second, they must remove all elements of anonymity from the submission and judging process. Third, they must stop offering cash awards. We suspect that the first of those solutions will be met with suspicion, the second with shock, and the third with dismay, so we'll address them in that order.
Whatever the wording of the guidelines, the AWP, AAUP, and LVF/CLMP must agree to create a common code of ethics for contests' operating procedures. Participation would be voluntary, but highly advantageous; oversight would be minimal. The guidelines should specify that former students and close, personal associates of the final judge are not eligible to enter. That simple provision places the burden equally on the entrant and the judge but recognizes the slipperiness in defining personal and professional relationships. There can be no yardstick for impropriety; these issues can and must be decided individually. If either party feels that a compromising student-teacher or personal affinity exists, then the entrant should be disqualified without bias from the contest.
Poets who participate in short-term workshops, or teach at writing conferences, or accept short-term teaching residencies should not be presumed guilty of a conflict; neither should editors who have published the work of a poet in a literary magazine, screeners who recognize previously published poems, or those who know the writer through an insubstantial personal or professional acquaintance. While questions have been raised on Foetry about those kinds of tenuous connections, it's important to distinguish between passing familiarity, which we don't believe poses a conflict, and more substantial relationships that might introduce bias.
This burden can be borne equally only when contests remove all guise of anonymity. Given a consistent set of ethical standards, judges and applicants each make an implicit and public good-faith statement that no conflict exists; both must account for their choices before the fact. The removal of the judge's anonymity also allows entrants to make informed decisions about which contests they will pay to enter. Most important, it increases transparency. Accountability and openness can only increase confidence that all procedures are honest and ethical.
Last but not least, presses should stop offering cash awards for winners. It has become common practice to fatten the purse to increase the volume and quality of submissions. If poets expect their work to be treated as an artistic accomplishment, rather than as a commodity of dubious market value, then they need to stop insisting on being paid lump sums for their books. Without cash awards, entrants will be forced to learn about the quality of a contest's past winners, about how well various presses support and publicize their authors, and how actively those publishers support practicing poets. Moreover, if spent wisely and creatively on marketing and publicity for a worthy book, prize money could do a great deal to build a readership for a young poet's work. That goal means more than any single check. Many young poets are not rich, of course, so presses should consider more generous royalty arrangements; doing so rewards the poet for promoting her own work, the press, and, by extension, poetry in general.
Literary publishing's long-term health and stability depend on its ability to persuade those who have historically been the stewards of America's cultural inheritance -- our universities, first and foremost, but also the National Endowment for the Arts and private philanthropists -- both that their efforts thus far have been productive and that much important work remains to be done. We've long supported our academic and small presses in the same way we've underwritten journals and libraries, our other repositories of knowledge -- by subjecting them to the vagaries of markets, politics, budgetary constraints, and chance. They deserve better.
One oft-repeated truism holds that poetry is read primarily by poets. As a matter of economics, that niche market makes small-press work inherently tenuous; Even with contest fees, Sarabande Books, for example, showed a loss of more than $17,000 before sales on its 2004 contest for one book of fiction and one of poems. Sarabande's editor in chief, Sarah Gorham, points out that small independent presses like hers sprang up not for the promise of riches but to help ensure the well-being of the writing and reading publics. Sarabande's example is fairly typical. Many presses (Milkweed Editions, Alice James Books, Graywolf Press) share its nonprofit status, and many appear to have in place effective and continuing fund-raising efforts. The need for a development officer at a small press may come as a surprise to those outside the publishing industry, and indeed to many writers; for that latter group in particular, throwing a book contest looks like taking out a license to print money. All those fees, the reasoning goes, and it can't cost much to print a book. Someone's getting rich! The assumption, of course, is that the losers foot the bill for the production of the winner's book, and that the press pockets a tidy surplus.
In reality, any surplus is used to pay the overhead costs of the contest; they're the least evident expenses to outsiders and the most relevant to a press's long-term financial viability. To make writers feel supported, rather than exploited, it should be the long-term goal of presses to find financial resources that will eliminate the need for contest entry fees. The NEA has an explicit and longstanding commitment to literary publishing, but sources of private philanthropy must augment public support in a political climate that has so many causes drawing from a pool of so few discretionary dollars. The presses and their ancillary umbrella groups (the AWP, AAUP, LVF/CLMP, and others) must add to their individual and piecemeal efforts a larger push for corporate and private money to be distributed industrywide. It's vital that resources of money, of best practices, and of institutional memory be shared so they may do the greatest good for the greatest number of houses and writers in the long term.
Poets, of course, must also be the ones to sustain the art in the senses that are not worldly, not fiduciary. A sense of privilege, of our creative work as a vocation, must underlie a cultural change that would obviate both the purpose and the rhetoric of a Web site like Foetry. Donald Hall's 1988 essay "Poetry and Ambition," on the problem of careerism among contemporary poets (still disturbingly germane), makes clear that a generation of writers has understood the public act of writing, either in journals or books, not as an opportunity to contribute but as a way to get published. Too often, it's something one does for one's own benefit, not for readers', not for the future. Publication has become an end in itself, a credential, a professional certification.
Poets themselves must find a way to turn the discussion from quantity of publication to quality of work. That goal will require a communal effort. Our editorial offices, MFA lounges, coffee shops, and living rooms must promote a culture that inculcates its members with guiding principles of ethical and thoughtful behavior. Poets and critics must be candid about one another's work when it falls short, but always in the spirit they would wish their own poems handled and always with the guiding principles of furthering the art by helping the author along. Candor never lends itself either to professional favoritism or vitriol; it's the only trait of critical discourse that may change the view that work is being ignored because of impropriety. Poets whose manuscripts don't win a given contest -- and we're among the thousands of them -- need to feel certain that their rejection is an opportunity to do better work, not a confirmation that the deck is always stacked in someone else's favor.
In return, young poets must commit to reading contemporary poetry and learning which presses are appropriate for their work. Ben Barnhart, assistant editor at Milkweed Editions, says that his press receives between 3,000 and 4,000 manuscripts each year; of those, roughly two-thirds are wholly inappropriate for Milkweed or any of its peers. Many writers, he says, simply misunderstand the mission of the small press, its place in the larger publishing industry. Sarabande's Gorham and Ausable Press's Chase Twichell concur; small imprints are swamped not only by literary manuscripts that have nothing in common with their lists, but also by cookbooks, children's books, and wave after wave of inspirational and genre work. Presses cannot be expected to open contests to free submission until they have a sufficiently self-selecting pool to consider.
Our long-term objective, in short, should be to foster a sense of common cause between writers and publishers. Our community should acknowledge the difficulty we all face in spending our energy on work for which we receive only intangible or nominal compensation; writers and editors are in the same boat and should take pains not to take one another for granted. The enlightened self-interest of each of us is consistent with real and tangible change in the way we handle the day-to-day business of poetry; saying so seems self-evident, and puts us in mind of Robert Frost. "The thing is to write better and better poems," he said. "Setting our heart when we're too young on getting our poems appreciated lands us in the politics of poetry, which is death."
John T. Casteen IV is a member of the poetry board, and Ted Genoways is the editor, of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 39, Page B14
From the issue dated June 3, 2005
Contesting the Poetry Contests
By JOHN T. CASTEEN IV and TED GENOWAYS
In little more than a year, the virtual community at Foetry.com has managed to cause a remarkable stir. The Web site has accused several prominent poets and presses of conflicts of interest, and its discussion forums have condemned nearly every aspect of the poetry-contest process. Foetry's charges are leveled carelessly and with no acceptable standards of proof; its methods are wrongheaded and dangerous. They divert attention from the merits of the poetry in question, and they give license to its contributors to speculate openly and without accountability on the private lives and alleged public transgressions of writers, judges, and editors.
Nevertheless, the surrounding controversy highlights the perception that too many book-prize contests have sprung up in recent years without sufficient agreement about ethics and standards of practice. Without clear and common guidelines, young poets have grown suspicious of the process, often perceiving corruption where none exists and believing that success emanates from a few powerful people to whom they have no access. We have worked long enough -- as poets, as readers, as editors, and as arts organizers -- to know that such widespread collusion, even if it were an actual goal, would be impractical; there's no enticement that could persuade that many people to jeopardize their careers and reputations simply for the sake of promoting their friends. Based on discussions and interviews with those involved, we have found that, with a few exceptions, the accusations of impropriety far exceed any real wrongdoing.
Poets and their publishers must finally recognize, though, that a widespread perception of unfairness is nearly as damaging as actual fraud. Therefore, we strongly recommend that the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and the Literary Ventures Fund/Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (LVF/CLMP) form a joint committee to create voluntary guidelines for publication contests. We also suggest that those bodies investigate new means of supporting the publication of first books of poetry that do not involve financial contributions from the entrants themselves. Before we can suggest detailed short- or long-term solutions, however, we need to carefully consider how we arrived, as a culture of creative people, at a moment in which a Web site as reprehensible as Foetry would find an audience at all.
First, a frank admission: Poetry doesn't sell well and never has. For many years, the rationale for publishing poetry was that it added prestige to a press's list, while offering long-term financial rewards. Commercial publishers competed for the writings of major poets, hoping the investment would pay off when writers went on to win major prizes or were otherwise officially welcomed into the canon. In 1980, however, the landscape changed when the Internal Revenue Service applied to publishers a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Thor Power Tool Co. v. Commissioner, which made it more expensive for publishers to carry unsold inventory. As a result, most commercial publishers dramatically reduced their poetry lists.
University and independent small presses profited editorially but didn't have the benefit of best sellers to buoy these risky literary titles. Small publishers found two ready means of carrying overhead: government arts grants and writer-supported publication in the form of contests with reading fees. Because the former was competitive and time-consuming, the latter solution quickly became the more popular. As a result, the last 25 years have seen contests proliferate from five (the Juniper Prize at the University of Massachusetts Press, the Lamont and Walt Whitman Awards from the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets) in 1980 to more than 100 today.
More than half of the prizes now offered are from presses that didn't exist 25 years ago, and still more come from academic imprints that didn't publish poetry before the contest model provided a financial source. However, that strategy wouldn't work at all if there weren't an unprecedented number of entrants, most of whom come from the ranks of masters-in-fine-arts programs in creative writing. The increasing number of degree programs (roughly 25 in 1980, about 125 today) suggests a boom in teaching opportunities. The number of programs hiring new faculty members, however, has actually declined over the last decade; most new programs are staffed by formalizing new curricula with existing faculty members and resources.
As a result, there is an enormous competition among poets eager to distinguish themselves, and publishing remains the most trustworthy way to demonstrate skill and seriousness, which makes it the most problematic. Since the reputation of these programs rests in part on the success of graduates with livelihoods and careers to mind, the temptation for screeners and judges to choose former students may be great. We believe, as is widely if anecdotally reported, that such temptation may have occasionally led to impropriety. Such behavior must not be tolerated. To prevent future occurrences, presses must commit to common guidelines for the time being and shared goals for the future.
Contest organizers must take three simple and painful steps to restore integrity immediately. First, they must adopt uniform eligibility guidelines established by the umbrella groups. Second, they must remove all elements of anonymity from the submission and judging process. Third, they must stop offering cash awards. We suspect that the first of those solutions will be met with suspicion, the second with shock, and the third with dismay, so we'll address them in that order.
Whatever the wording of the guidelines, the AWP, AAUP, and LVF/CLMP must agree to create a common code of ethics for contests' operating procedures. Participation would be voluntary, but highly advantageous; oversight would be minimal. The guidelines should specify that former students and close, personal associates of the final judge are not eligible to enter. That simple provision places the burden equally on the entrant and the judge but recognizes the slipperiness in defining personal and professional relationships. There can be no yardstick for impropriety; these issues can and must be decided individually. If either party feels that a compromising student-teacher or personal affinity exists, then the entrant should be disqualified without bias from the contest.
Poets who participate in short-term workshops, or teach at writing conferences, or accept short-term teaching residencies should not be presumed guilty of a conflict; neither should editors who have published the work of a poet in a literary magazine, screeners who recognize previously published poems, or those who know the writer through an insubstantial personal or professional acquaintance. While questions have been raised on Foetry about those kinds of tenuous connections, it's important to distinguish between passing familiarity, which we don't believe poses a conflict, and more substantial relationships that might introduce bias.
This burden can be borne equally only when contests remove all guise of anonymity. Given a consistent set of ethical standards, judges and applicants each make an implicit and public good-faith statement that no conflict exists; both must account for their choices before the fact. The removal of the judge's anonymity also allows entrants to make informed decisions about which contests they will pay to enter. Most important, it increases transparency. Accountability and openness can only increase confidence that all procedures are honest and ethical.
Last but not least, presses should stop offering cash awards for winners. It has become common practice to fatten the purse to increase the volume and quality of submissions. If poets expect their work to be treated as an artistic accomplishment, rather than as a commodity of dubious market value, then they need to stop insisting on being paid lump sums for their books. Without cash awards, entrants will be forced to learn about the quality of a contest's past winners, about how well various presses support and publicize their authors, and how actively those publishers support practicing poets. Moreover, if spent wisely and creatively on marketing and publicity for a worthy book, prize money could do a great deal to build a readership for a young poet's work. That goal means more than any single check. Many young poets are not rich, of course, so presses should consider more generous royalty arrangements; doing so rewards the poet for promoting her own work, the press, and, by extension, poetry in general.
Literary publishing's long-term health and stability depend on its ability to persuade those who have historically been the stewards of America's cultural inheritance -- our universities, first and foremost, but also the National Endowment for the Arts and private philanthropists -- both that their efforts thus far have been productive and that much important work remains to be done. We've long supported our academic and small presses in the same way we've underwritten journals and libraries, our other repositories of knowledge -- by subjecting them to the vagaries of markets, politics, budgetary constraints, and chance. They deserve better.
One oft-repeated truism holds that poetry is read primarily by poets. As a matter of economics, that niche market makes small-press work inherently tenuous; Even with contest fees, Sarabande Books, for example, showed a loss of more than $17,000 before sales on its 2004 contest for one book of fiction and one of poems. Sarabande's editor in chief, Sarah Gorham, points out that small independent presses like hers sprang up not for the promise of riches but to help ensure the well-being of the writing and reading publics. Sarabande's example is fairly typical. Many presses (Milkweed Editions, Alice James Books, Graywolf Press) share its nonprofit status, and many appear to have in place effective and continuing fund-raising efforts. The need for a development officer at a small press may come as a surprise to those outside the publishing industry, and indeed to many writers; for that latter group in particular, throwing a book contest looks like taking out a license to print money. All those fees, the reasoning goes, and it can't cost much to print a book. Someone's getting rich! The assumption, of course, is that the losers foot the bill for the production of the winner's book, and that the press pockets a tidy surplus.
In reality, any surplus is used to pay the overhead costs of the contest; they're the least evident expenses to outsiders and the most relevant to a press's long-term financial viability. To make writers feel supported, rather than exploited, it should be the long-term goal of presses to find financial resources that will eliminate the need for contest entry fees. The NEA has an explicit and longstanding commitment to literary publishing, but sources of private philanthropy must augment public support in a political climate that has so many causes drawing from a pool of so few discretionary dollars. The presses and their ancillary umbrella groups (the AWP, AAUP, LVF/CLMP, and others) must add to their individual and piecemeal efforts a larger push for corporate and private money to be distributed industrywide. It's vital that resources of money, of best practices, and of institutional memory be shared so they may do the greatest good for the greatest number of houses and writers in the long term.
Poets, of course, must also be the ones to sustain the art in the senses that are not worldly, not fiduciary. A sense of privilege, of our creative work as a vocation, must underlie a cultural change that would obviate both the purpose and the rhetoric of a Web site like Foetry. Donald Hall's 1988 essay "Poetry and Ambition," on the problem of careerism among contemporary poets (still disturbingly germane), makes clear that a generation of writers has understood the public act of writing, either in journals or books, not as an opportunity to contribute but as a way to get published. Too often, it's something one does for one's own benefit, not for readers', not for the future. Publication has become an end in itself, a credential, a professional certification.
Poets themselves must find a way to turn the discussion from quantity of publication to quality of work. That goal will require a communal effort. Our editorial offices, MFA lounges, coffee shops, and living rooms must promote a culture that inculcates its members with guiding principles of ethical and thoughtful behavior. Poets and critics must be candid about one another's work when it falls short, but always in the spirit they would wish their own poems handled and always with the guiding principles of furthering the art by helping the author along. Candor never lends itself either to professional favoritism or vitriol; it's the only trait of critical discourse that may change the view that work is being ignored because of impropriety. Poets whose manuscripts don't win a given contest -- and we're among the thousands of them -- need to feel certain that their rejection is an opportunity to do better work, not a confirmation that the deck is always stacked in someone else's favor.
In return, young poets must commit to reading contemporary poetry and learning which presses are appropriate for their work. Ben Barnhart, assistant editor at Milkweed Editions, says that his press receives between 3,000 and 4,000 manuscripts each year; of those, roughly two-thirds are wholly inappropriate for Milkweed or any of its peers. Many writers, he says, simply misunderstand the mission of the small press, its place in the larger publishing industry. Sarabande's Gorham and Ausable Press's Chase Twichell concur; small imprints are swamped not only by literary manuscripts that have nothing in common with their lists, but also by cookbooks, children's books, and wave after wave of inspirational and genre work. Presses cannot be expected to open contests to free submission until they have a sufficiently self-selecting pool to consider.
Our long-term objective, in short, should be to foster a sense of common cause between writers and publishers. Our community should acknowledge the difficulty we all face in spending our energy on work for which we receive only intangible or nominal compensation; writers and editors are in the same boat and should take pains not to take one another for granted. The enlightened self-interest of each of us is consistent with real and tangible change in the way we handle the day-to-day business of poetry; saying so seems self-evident, and puts us in mind of Robert Frost. "The thing is to write better and better poems," he said. "Setting our heart when we're too young on getting our poems appreciated lands us in the politics of poetry, which is death."
John T. Casteen IV is a member of the poetry board, and Ted Genoways is the editor, of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 39, Page B14
