Major poetry prizes rigged -- hot-shot Jew poets implicated

[lawrence dennis]

Although doubtless many involved in these scandals are not jews, we see that quite a few are. And the behaviour of these professors/judges reeks of the social inbreeding and mutual backscratching of Jews, whether in academia or journalism or politics or finance or ... publishing.

In Search of Poetic Justice: Contest-winning verses are fighting words at Foetry.com. The site's founder, who says events are rigged, has rattled nerves -- even his wife's.

PORTLAND, Ore. — He's not scary in person. Alan Cordle ... happens to be the most despised — some would say most feared — man in American poetry. At the very least, he is for the moment the most talked-about figure in this remote corner of the literary world.

Major poets, some with Pulitzer Prizes and MacArthur Fellowships on their resumes, call him an "attack dog," an "assassin," a "hangman" and, worst, a "brat with a major rage disorder." His supporters regard him a whistle-blower, champion and crusader. All agree that, for good or bad, Cordle has shaken up the establishment....

For the last 13 months ... he has been running his laptop-created website, Foetry, which purports to expose the corrupt world of poetry contests.

The number of annual contests in the United States has ballooned from five in 1980 to more than 100 today. Most charge "reading fees" of $20 to $30 an entry, with some contests drawing thousands of applicants.

In today's literary climate, winning a major contest is one of the only sure tickets to continuing life as a poet. Winners get book deals and professorships; losers look for another line of work.

In this world, Cordle says, judges — often "celebrity poets" who teach at prestigious schools — routinely award prizes to their students, friends and lovers. It is in his view a world of cozy cronyism that few outsiders know or care about, although poets have been whispering about it for decades.

The victims are the thousands of mostly young poets who pay to get a fair reading, and who are essentially "defrauded," Cordle says.

"It's cheating. It's criminal. If this was anything other than poetry, the Department of Justice would be all over it."

According to Ohio-based poetry publisher Kevin Walzer, it would be like holding a big state lottery and then having "buddies of the Powerball operator win the big prize" again and again. Even if it were coincidental, people might begin to suspect.

What transformed Foetry from another obscure arty website with an attitude was Cordle's penchant for research. Like an investigative reporter, he solicited tips from insiders and used open-records laws to get information from contest organizers. Then ... he named names.

The website's motto became: "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants. Naming names."

Much of what Foetry calls collusion would not pass muster in court.... But some of Foetry's examples appear to show true conflicts of interest — such as the case of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poet Series.

As in many contests, the judges had not been named. Cordle secured documents through a public-records petition last year, revealed their identities dating back to 1979, then documented the connections between judges and winners.

Confirming what many suspected, judges frequently awarded poets with whom they had personal relationships.

Among the poet-judges implicated were Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham at Harvard University; MacArthur fellow C.D. Wright at Brown University; and former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand at the University of Chicago.

As word spread, more people logged on to Foetry... Among those who logged on or took part in discussions were some of the most respected bards in the land...

Foetry "confirms what anyone involved in poetry over the past 30 years has known for a long, long time," says Neal Bowers, poet and Distinguished Professor of English at Iowa State University. Poetry contests are "rigged."

"The world of poetry," Bowers says, "is all about hustle and connection."

Poet and critic William Logan, an English professor at the University of Florida, says, "The facts at Foetry are mostly right, the tone mostly shrill. Reading it, I feel caught between being grateful and being annoyed."

Many others are outraged by Foetry, calling it a forum for poetry bashing and character assassination, a website for failed poets to vent their frustration.

Janet Holmes, editor and publisher at Ahsahta Press in Boise, Idaho, which sponsors the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, described the website as full of vindictive gossip.

"It gets pretty close to lawsuit territory, and, yes, I have a lawyer," says Holmes, whose contest is one of those named on the website as "dodgy."

Foetry says Sawtooth organizers allowed judges in 2002 and 2003 to award the prize to their friends. In one instance, a judge is accused of helping to revise the winning manuscript. Holmes calls the accusation "a fantasy."

Much of the anger stems from the fact that for the first 12 months, Foetry was run anonymously....

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American poetry became contest-driven after decades of waning public interest. Major publishing houses, squeezed by a 1979 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that resulted in higher taxes for unsold inventory, stopped publishing poetry books in volume.

It fell to university and small presses to keep the genre alive. The easiest way for a small press to publish poetry was to hold a contest, collect entry fees and then use the money to publish a book by the winning poet. That constituted the prize. Selling 1,000 books is considered a success; 500 or fewer is more typical.

Contrary to what Cordle claims, the contest method is not a great money-making scheme, says Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia. Genoways says most small presses ... do well just to break even.

Though critical of Cordle's tactics, Genoways agrees with Foetry's main aim, which is to change the contest system....

Perhaps most damaged by those disclosures was Jorie Graham, [a jewess--L.D.] who some say comes closest to being the superstar of American poetry.

At 54, Graham has accomplished what critic David Orr calls the trifecta of American verse: She won a major prize, a Pulitzer in 1996 for her book "The Dream of the Unified Field"; secured a faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; and was appointed to a distinguished chair at the most hallowed of Ivies, Harvard.

Last year, Foetry revealed the following:

In January 1999, with Graham as the judge for the Georgia contest, a manuscript by poet Peter Sacks was chosen for the prize. Sacks is Graham's colleague at Harvard, not to mention her husband.

Graham points out she didn't arrive at Harvard and marry Sacks until 2000, but she does not deny they knew each other at the time of the contest. In fact, Graham felt awkward enough about it to ask the series editor, Bin Ramke, to make the call. Ramke chose Sacks, and Graham concurred.

Foetry contends that Graham, as a judge at Georgia and other contests, has awarded prizes to five former students from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

It also says that C.D Wright and Mark Strand [a jew--L.D.] have chosen former students for awards.

Wright did not respond to an interview request, but Strand admitted to selecting one former student, in 1998, for a poetry prize. He says Foetry's accusations strike him as "much ado about very little."

Strand also defends Graham, ["my fellow jew would never cheat"--L.D.] whom he says has been unfairly targeted.

Graham, widely recognized as a gifted teacher, admits that she has chosen former students but says that no rules had prohibited her from doing so and that in each case she selected the strongest work. She also says what Foetry has done to her is akin to a public lynching.

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Graham recently announced she would no longer judge contests.

Ramke, the longtime editor of the Georgia poetry series, plans to leave his post, citing Foetry as the cause, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education journal.

A couple of highly regarded poetry presses ... have added language to contest rules that tells judges to "avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds."

Two organizations influential in the poetry world — the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses and Associated Writing Programs — this spring began discussions on developing standardized guidelines for poetry contests.

Among the ideas being considered are rules that would bar judges from awarding prizes to former students, and bar poets from entering contests in which the judge is a former teacher. Judges would be identified from the start.

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The last year has taken another kind of toll on Cordle. Once he used to like poetry. He studied modern poets in college, and for years he read poetry for pleasure. Now he is cynical about the whole enterprise. As an antidote, he's been reading his wife's new manuscript, of which the first line of the first poem reads, "Perhaps I was naïve. I thought it was for beauty."...