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
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