foetry.com is very interesting, Mairead, but I'm troubled fairly 
quickly as I find that both a number of the winners & a number of the 
judges are poets I admire very much; & I can well see that certain of 
the latter would be likely to choose works by certain of the former for 
the very good reason that their poetics are so close. I don't think one 
can choose a judge & then expect that person to choose a kind of poetry 
s/he has no truck with.

And there's that question of what a small poetry press might publish; 
one of the recent books from NeWest was by a student of mine (not a 
poetry student but) whose work I came to admire & so invited hi so 
submit a ms to the press (there were 2 other readers who did not know 
him, but still). The other, Meredith Quartermain's, was a work I was 
more than happy to have come to us because I already admired her work. 
Would I (or any editor) look for work I did NOT admire?

So there are complexities here. It's possible that some of these judges 
should recuse themselves from so many juries because it's becoming 
clear that only their students win contests they judge, but still, it's 
possible that they would see such work as the best because it obviously 
reflects their biases. I think that perhaps it is necessary to have a 
jury rather than a single judge in these things.

Now self-publication is an intriguing concept today, changed from what 
it used to be seen as: mere vanity. A young poet I know chose to 
self-publish her third book (after the first had won a major Canadian 
award for a first book, & the 2nd had been taken up by one of our major 
publishers. Her 4th will be coming from NeWest. It seems she just 
decided to do it herself to see what would happen & didn't mind that 
most of its sales would be 'local,'

Lots of questions arise here, but I think that the particular questions 
of class that attached to 'the cummings case' no longer hold in quite 
the same manner as they did then (class is huge in the US, I think, but 
whether or not it affects poetry is at least an open question, or what 
we mean by the term 'class' is a bit different?

Doug
On 30-Jul-05, at 1:59 PM, Mairead Byrne wrote:

> Dear Judy,
>
> Thanks for your kind message.  I was referring to www.foetry.com: I 
> think it has come up recently on this list.  There were copies of Bin 
> Ramke's letters of support for a finalist in the University of Georgia 
> Contemporary Poetry Series, for which Bin was the editor, with a very 
> distinguished record.  I'm glad I read them because they taught me 
> what letters of support actually are or can be; and as I say, I have 
> never seen anything like them supporting my own work.  The bar has 
> been raised.  It has always been both a personal strength and weakness 
> that I am delighted and joyfully surprised by small pleasures, mainly 
> simply by survival.    I like what your Quaker friend says about 
> education.
>
> I have been thinking of self-publication a lot recently and I suppose 
> Cummings is a salutary example.  Essentially, much of his work was 
> self-published.  Class may have shielded him from anxiety in relation 
> to that.  Without the protection of class (several generations 
> educated; money; property), one may tend to think one has something to 
> prove, and that self-publication marks failure, i.e., if one was any 
> good someone else would want to publish the work.  It's not 
> necessarily so though.
> Cummings was obviously good, but still published patron-funded books 
> in tiny editions with miniscule sales.
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320

I give up these words easily, they are easy
to give up, like changing currency before
a border: the cursive line between mountain
and sky, say, as perfect a mismatch as any
made in heaven.

				Méira Cook