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