Foetry.com

Last updated

Foetry.com, sometimes referred to as just Foetry, was a website that attempted to identify fraudulent and unethical practices in poetry contests. It was active from April 1, 2004 until May 18, 2007.

Contents

Organization

Members and visitors contributed information which ostensibly linked judges and prize winners in various poetry contests. The site was divided into two main areas: lists of specific contests and relationships between judges and winners which suggested evidence of impropriety, and a forum for the discussion of ethical behavior in the poetry world.

Origins and evolution

Foetry.com was launched on April 1, 2004, by an anonymous editor, with the motto "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants. Naming names." After about twelve months, the founder of the site, Alan Cordle, was outed. No longer anonymous, he continued to operate the site until May 18, 2007. Various members, including Cordle, continue to post blogs with foetry-related material. [1]

Foetry.com received press coverage both positive and negative in such outlets as the Boston Globe , [2] The New York Times , [3] Poets & Writers Magazine, [4] and innumerable blogs, including that of Ron Silliman. Coverage came to a head around the time of Cordle's outing, amidst rumors that the site would shut down due to the loss of anonymity. The ambiguous yet perceptible impact of the website on the poetry world was summed up in a blog entry at the Kenyon Review about a month after Foetry's closure:

"If its death (if we dare call it that–might it, like King Arthur, lie in wait to rise again at a time of future need?) made almost no noise, its birth and early years sounded a great barbaric yawp. Are contests more fair? Perhaps, perhaps not. It may in fact be the case that poetry contests are more careful about egregious conflicts of interest. They may indeed be more transparent now, as well. But it was never clear if justice or revenge was in the forefront of everyone’s mind in the heyday of Foetry.com (this applies to me and the other voyeurs of foetry.com as well as those who posted for or against the site). As people used to say in the Renaissance and earlier, Astraea (goddess of justice) has left the earth. History may record whether Foetry.com brought her back. Or, it may not." [5]

Successful campaigns

Foetry.com's most successful campaign, both in terms of news coverage and action taken because of it, was against the Contemporary Poetry Series run by the University of Georgia Press, and against Jorie Graham in particular. Acquiring documents through the Freedom of Information Act, Cordle and others discovered that Graham, as judge for the 1999 contest, had chosen Peter Sacks. She would marry Sacks in 2000. Graham would also join Sacks in a teaching position at Harvard in 2000. [6]

Among documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act were two letters:

After Graham judged contests and selected former students several contests immediately changed their contest rules to prohibit judges from selecting former students and other entrants they had relationships with. The rule against playing favorites in literary contests in which entry fees were paid became known loosely among those in the contest industry as "The Jorie Graham Rule." [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] Some members of Foetry.com suggested that she could be charged with mail fraud, as contest fees were collected through the US mail, [7] but no charges were ever filed. It is estimated that the University of Georgia Press took in as much as $250,000 from contest fees over the life of the contest series, which Ramke edited for twenty years.

Graham no longer judges literary contests. Bin Ramke, editor at the time of the Contemporary Poetry Series, resigned from his position as more and more national publicity turned the spotlight on the insider dealings at the University of Georgia Press and criticism mounted over his role in the controversy. [6] Despite the failure of both the editor of the University of Georgia Press and Bin Ramke to release a full and complete list of judges and other information (correspondence) related to the activities of the contest series, Foetry.com has carefully compiled documentation of winners and judges in the series, [13] including notations of conflicts of interest.

Throughout the course of the contest Ramke insisted that judges of the contest be kept secret. The Open Records Act was used to obtain records that both the University of Georgia Press and Ramke refused to provide upon request. Graham had previously published several books of Ramke's through a press, Kuhl House Press, she operated at the University of Iowa with Mark Levine, a former student of Graham who was selected by Graham as winner in the National Poetry series in 1992.

Another campaign, against the University of North Texas Press, resulted in the exasperation and subsequent resignation of Vassar Miller Prize founder and series editor, Scott Cairns. While both initial screening and final judging was done "blind"—with all identifying marks having been removed from all manuscripts—some judges of the contest had apparent connections to Cairns or to the University of Utah where Cairns and a number of judges and winners had studied, not necessarily at the same time. Other Cairns connections to judges and one winner were through the University of Missouri. Cairns clarified that, given the merely token payment that was made to the judges for their service (asking them to read and judge 10-15 manuscripts for about 1/10 of what they would normally receive for giving a one-hour reading of their own works), he had depended upon the generosity of friends to serve each year. At least one judge, Eleanor Wilner, was friends with a contest winner, Constance Merritt, and had co-authored a literary work with Merritt that won the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner in the same year Wilner selected Merritt as winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. After Foetry.com alleged the relationships between Cairns, judges and winners, Cairns agreed to resign in e-mails to Alan Cordle, Steven Ford Brown (Brown edited a book of criticism on the poetry of Vassar Miller and was critical of Cairns's management of the Vassar Miller contest series) and the editor of the University of North Texas Press.

Criticisms

Criticisms of Foetry.com generally come in two forms. The first is that the tone is "shrill," as University of Florida professor William Logan put it in the San Francisco Chronicle, [14] despite agreeing with the overall message and intent. Related to shrillness of tone, critics of Foetry.com claim that there is a tendency to assume guilt until innocence is proven and that—with rare exceptions such as the CPS case mentioned above—Foetry.com authors did not insist on credible/tangible evidence. A second, deeper criticism argues that it is impossible to separate personal relationships amongst writers in an aesthetic community from judgments of literary merit that these writers inevitably make in publishing and promoting other writers' work. [15]

Foetry sparked an enthusiastic and well-coordinated campaign to dox its administrators. Efforts in this regard were coordinated in large part by contemporary poets, and Whoisfoetry?, an anonymous blog. [16] Those seeking to dox the administrators of Foetry.com sometimes engaged in behaviors they criticized it for, e.g. "lies and innuendoes", [3] against those suspected to be behind Foetry.com.

Notes

  1. ↑ "Post-Foetry".
  2. ↑ Stephen Burt (July 18, 2004). "A muckraking website aims to blow the lid off the cozy practices of contemporary poetry". Boston Globe. Retrieved 2006-10-21.
  3. 1 2 Edward Wyatt (April 21, 2005). "Surrender in the Battle of Poetry Web Sites". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-10-21.
  4. ↑ Kevin Larimer (July–August 2005). "THE CONTESTER: Who's Doing What to Keep Them Clean". Poets & Writers Magazine. Archived from the original on 2007-01-15. Retrieved 2006-10-21.
  5. ↑ Joseph Campana (2007-06-28). "Out with a whimper? Foetry.com". The Kenyon Review.
  6. 1 2 Tomas Alex Tizon, "In Search of Poetic Justice," Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2005. Available at the LA Times (subscription needed). Text is available at New Poetry Review Archived 2012-07-25 at the Wayback Machine or SFgate (accessed 16 March 2007)
  7. 1 2 Thomas Bartlett, "Rhyme and Unreason," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 20, 2005, available here (accessed March 16, 2005)
  8. ↑ Alex Beam, "Website polices rhymes and misdemeanors," Boston Globe, March 31, 2005, available here
  9. ↑ Foetry page on Jorie Graham
  10. ↑ John Sutherland, "American foetry," The Guardian, Monday July 4, 2005 the Guardian
  11. ↑ Example of use of the phrase at blog Mobylives
  12. ↑ Example of the use of the phrase at blog Significance and Inspiration (accessed 3/27/2008)
  13. ↑ Foetry.com archive Archived 2007-06-13 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ↑ Tomas Alex Tizon (July 10, 2005). "Angry librarian's darts sting the world of poetry". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2006-10-21.
  15. ↑ "More Foetry". December 5, 2005. Retrieved 2006-10-21.
  16. ↑ Bartlett, Thomas. Rhyme & Unreason. Chronicle of Higher Education. May 20, 2005.

Related Research Articles

<i>Yale Series of Younger Poets</i> Annual poetry prize at Yale University

The Yale Series of Younger Poets is an annual event of Yale University Press aiming to publish the debut collection of a promising American poet. Established in 1918, the Younger Poets Prize is the longest-running annual literary award in the United States.

Jorie Graham American poet (born 1950)

Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She won the 2013 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreach activities such as National Poetry Month, its website Poets.org, the syndicated series Poem-a-Day, American Poets magazine, readings and events, and poetry resources for K-12 educators. In addition, it sponsors a portfolio of nine major poetry awards, of which the first was a fellowship created in 1946 to support a poet and honor "distinguished achievement," and more than 200 prizes for student poets.

Forward Prizes for Poetry British poetry award(s)

The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually at a public ceremony in London. They were founded in 1992 by William Sieghart with the aim of celebrating excellence in poetry and increasing its audience. The prizes do this by identifying and honouring talent: collections published in the UK and Ireland over the course of the previous year are eligible, as are single poems nominated by journal editors or prize organisers. Each year, works shortlisted for the prizes – plus those highly commended by the judges – are collected in the Forward Book of Poetry.

The University of Georgia Press or UGA Press is a scholarly publishing house being the publishing division of the University of Georgia. It is the oldest and largest publishing house in Georgia and a member of the Association of American University Presses.

<i>jubilat</i>

jubilat is a widely distributed, highly acclaimed American poetry and prose journal headquartered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. First published in 2000, it was founded by Rob Casper, Christian Hawkey, Michael Teig and Kelly LeFave. From its first issue onward, jubilat has aimed to publish what's most alive in contemporary American poetry, and to place it alongside selections of reprints, found pieces, prose of various kinds, art, and interviews with poets and other artists.

<i>Boston Review</i> American magazine

Boston Review is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form is a "forum", featuring a lead essay and several responses. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books with MIT Press.

The O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize was awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrated great imagination and daring. The poet must have published at least one book within the last five years, must have made important contributions as a teacher, and must be committed to furthering the understanding of poetry.

<i>Epoch</i> (American magazine)

Epoch is a triannual American literary magazine founded in 1947 and published by Cornell University. It has published well-known authors and award-winning work including stories reprinted in The Best American Short Stories series and poems later included in The Best American Poetry series. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays, graphic art, and sometimes cartoons and screenplays, but no literary criticism or book reviews.

Crazyhorse is an American magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, and essays. Since 1960, Crazyhorse has published many of the finest voices in literature, including John Updike, Raymond Carver, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Ha Jin, Lee K. Abbott, Philip F. Deaver, Stacie Cassarino, W. P. Kinsella, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, Carolyn Forché, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell, James Tate, and Franz Wright.

<i>Harvard Review</i> Harvard University literary magazine

Harvard Review is a biannual literary journal published by Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Peter M. Sacks is an expatriate South African painter and poet living and working in the United States.

Jonathan Holden, the first Poet Laureate of Kansas, is a Professor of English at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Chosen in 2004, his two-year term began July 1, 2005. He was succeeded by Denise Low on July 1, 2007.

Smartish Pace is a non-profit, independent literary journal based in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The magazine was founded in 1999 by Stephen Reichert who was a University of Maryland School of Law student at the time. The name, Smartish Pace, originates from a tort case in which a horse carriage, which was travelling at "a smartish pace," ran over and killed a donkey. Smartish Pace has published poems by the following Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award winners: Martín Espada, Terrance Hayes, Rae Armantrout, Mark Doty, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Schultz, Claudia Emerson, Nathaniel Mackey, Ted Kooser, Paul Muldoon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Andrew Hudgins, Henry Taylor, Gerald Stern, Maxine Kumin, and Anthony Hecht. The magazine has also debuted previously unpublished letters of Elizabeth Bishop and award-winning new translations of Tomas Tranströmer. When referencing places Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson had published, Newsweek called the journal "obscure". Smartish Pace was ranked ninth in the 2022 Literary Magazine Rankings–Poetry.

Bin Ramke American poet and editor (born 1947)

Lloyd Binford Ramke is an American poet and editor.

Gregory Pardlo American poet, writer, and professor (born 1968)

Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”

Jazzy Danziger is an American poet and editor.

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is a literary small press and poetry outreach organization in Cleveland, Ohio, operated under the auspices of the English Department at Cleveland State University. It publishes original works of poetry by contemporary writers, though it also publishes novellas, essay collections, and occasional works of criticism or translated poetry collections. It was founded in 1962 by poet Lewis Turco at what was then Fenn College, attained its present name two years later when Fenn College was absorbed into the newly founded Cleveland State University, and began publishing books in 1971. From 2007 to 2012 its Director and Series Editor was poet and professor Michael Dumanis. From 2014, its Director and Series Editor is the poet and professor Caryl Pagel.

Susan Elmslie is a Canadian poet living in Montreal, Quebec. She holds a B.A. (Hon) in English and French Language and Literature as well as an M.A. in Canadian Literature (1993) from the University of Western Ontario and a PhD in English with specialization in Canadian literature and a minor in American literature from McGill University (2000).

Barrett Warner American writer (born 1962)

Barrett Warner is an American short story writer, poet, essayist, critic, and editor. The author of Until I’m Blue in the Face (1990), My Friend Ken Harvey (2014), and Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (2016), his work has appeared in numerous literary journals and zines. He is a recipient of the Salamander fiction prize, the Tucson Festival of Books essay prize, and the Liam Rector, Chris Toll Memorial Chapbook, Cloudbank, and Princemere poetry prizes. In 2016, in recognition of his Maryland farm essays, he received an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. He used the grant to finance his move to South Carolina. Since 1983, he has been a genre editor for several literary magazines including William and Mary Review,Blood Lotus, Whomanwarp, and Free State Review. He currently serves as general editor of Free State Review as well as acquisitions editor for its publisher, Galileo Books, Ltd. He is married to author and poet Julia Wendell.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.