from this morning's NYT:
Surrender in the Battle of Poetry Web Sites
By EDWARD WYATT
W. H. Auden may have lamented that "poetry makes nothing happen," but
that has not kept poets themselves - and their enthusiasts - from using
the Internet to make trouble when they get riled up.
This week the poetry world is atwitter over the closing down of an
Internet site that for the last year dedicated itself to exposing what
it calls fraud among the small circle of poetry contests that
frequently offer publishing contracts as prizes.
Alan Cordle, a research librarian who lives in Portland, Ore., has
managed the Web site, www.foetry.com, anonymously since its inception a
little more a year ago.
He called his site the "American poetry watchdog" and aimed to expose
the national poetry contests that he said "are often large-scale fraud
operations" in which judges select their friends and students as
winners.
But Mr. Cordle's identity, which he says he protected to avoid
recriminations against those who joined in his fight, was revealed
earlier this month. The unmasking was performed by an anti-Foetry Web
site that is also run anonymously and which used some of Mr. Cordle's
own aggressive tactics - he once used a state open-records law to
unlock details about participants in a contest sponsored by a state
university press - to remove his cloak of mystery.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Cordle said that while the unveiling of
his identity was the immediate cause of his decision to close the
Foetry site, he had been planning to do so "for about a month" because
of frequent requests from his wife.
She, it turns out, is a poet - Kathleen Halme, who in September 1994
won a poetry contest managed by the University of Georgia Press, the
Contemporary Poetry Series, one of the contests that Mr. Cordle has
railed against as corrupt.
Mr. Cordle's identity was revealed by a blog called whoisfoetry
(whoisfoetry.blogspot.com). It had recently solicited tips about the
identity of the Foetry operator and of participants in its discussion
forum, which over the last year drew hundreds of poetry fanatics as
participants - most of them participating using pseudonyms.
After several tries, the blog managed to wrest the identity of the
Foetry site's registrant from the company that manages Internet domain
names. For the poetry world, which makes headlines about as often as
philosophers' guilds and knitting circles, the dust-up has led to
bitter recriminations and charges of slander or worse.
One of the poets and contest judges who has been attacked on the Foetry
site, Jorie Graham, a professor at Harvard University, said in a
telephone interview yesterday that the claims on Foetry were untrue as
well as "vitriolic and very painful" and took unfair aim "at the people
who have worked to try to help young poets in this country."
She is not the only opponent to speak publicly about Foetry; another
is Janet Holmes, an associate professor of English at Boise State
University and the director of Ahsahta Press, which oversees a poetry
prize that has come under fire on Foetry. Writing on her Web site,
www.humanophone.com, she said she was disgusted by the "lies and
innuendoes" on Mr. Cordle's site. "He should be ashamed of himself for
what he's done, not just because he's been caught doing it," she wrote.
Mr. Cordle said he had maintained the site's domain registration and
that he might restart the site at some point in the future if he can
find someone to take over monitoring of the discussion forums.
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"Lyric poetry has to be exorbitant or not at all." -- Gottfried Benn
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For updates on readings, etc. check my current events page:
http://albany.edu/~joris/CurrentEvents.html
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Pierre Joris
244 Elm Street
Albany NY 12202
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email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
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