Foetry.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Foetry.com, sometimes referred to as just Foetry, is a website that attempts to identify fraudulent and unethical practices in poetry contests.

This article is uncategorized.

Please help improve this article by adding it to one or more categories, so it may be associated with related articles (how?). Please remove this tag after categorizing, but not before.
This page has been tagged since March 2007.

1 Origins and Evolution
2 Successful Campaigns
3 Criticisms
4 Notes
5 External links

[edit] Origins and Evolution

Foetry was launched on April 1, 2004, by an anonymous editor. The site's motto was and is "Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants. Naming names." Members and visitors contribute information which links judges and prize winners in various poetry contests, documenting to varying degrees that some contests have been rigged. The site is divided into two main areas: a series of lists of "Dodgy Contests," "Unscrupulous Judges," etc, and a forum for the discussion of "foets," as members refer to unethical poets. Another area documents specific contests (e.g., University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Contests; University of Iowa Press Fiction and Poetry Contests) and the relationships between judges and winners (former student, spouses, etc.).

After about twelve months, the founder of the site, Alan Cordle, was outed. No longer anonymous, he continues to operate the site.

Some of the moderators have also revealed their real identities, either on the threads or in their signature lines. The other members of Foetry.com continue to participate, by and large, anonymously.

Before and after the outing, Foetry.com received press coverage, both positive and negative, in such outlets as the Boston Globe,^[1] the New York Times, ^[2] Poets & Writers Magazine, ^[3] and innumerable blogs, including that of Ron Silliman. Coverage came to a head around the time of Cordle's outing, amidst rumors (ultimately false) that the site would shut down due to the loss of anonymity.

[edit] 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.

Among documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act were two letters: the Bin Ramke (editor of the series) letter to the editor of the University of Georgia Press explaining that he was selecting Peter Sacks as the winner for that year (although Sacks had never actually entered the contest but was solicited outside the contest) and Ramke's admission that he had read only half the paid manuscript submissions -the rest were discarded; Jorie Graham's letter to Ramke advocating for the literary value of Sack's manuscript and its publication in the series. As editor, Ramke choose Sacks as the winner for that year. As a judge advocating for Sacks as winner, someone with whom she had a personal relationship, Graham opened herself to attack on ethical grounds. Graham had previously come under fire at other poetry contests (AWP, The Barnard Poetry Prize, The Colorado Poetry Prize, The National Poetry Series, The Walt Whitman Prize) for selecting former students and individuals she had relationships with.

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."^{[verification needed]} Some members of Foetry.com suggested that she could be charged with mail fraud, as contest fees were collected through the US mail, 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. 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, including notations of conflicts of interest.

It should be noted that 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. It is also worth noting that 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 successful campaign, against the University of North Texas Press, resulted in the resignation of Vassar Miller Prize founder and series editor, Scott Cairns. 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. 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.

[edit] 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, ^[4] despite agreeing with the overall message and intent. The second is that members tend to assume guilt until innocence is proven and with rare exceptions, such as the CPS case above, do not insist on credible/tangible evidence, or that it is possible to separate personal relationships with writers within an aesthetic community from judgments of literary merit^[5] Cordle has provided clear documentation of conflicts of interest between winners and judges http://www.foetry.com/georgia.html at Foetry.com.