Poetry world shocker!

DOES POETRY NEED muckrakers? The secretive operators of the website Foetry (www.foetry.com), a self-described "American poetry watchdog," certainly think so. They promise, from behind a cloak of anonymity, to uncover scandals among the publishers of contemporary poetry, dishing dirt on "fraudulent `contests,"' as their homepage has it, "tracking the sycophants," "naming the names," and generally cleaning house.

The site has poets talking. Since its launch on April 1, Foetry has racked up almost 600 comments and questions, from the laudatory to the outraged, at one point receiving 1,000 page views in a single day -- quite a crowd for gossip about new verse. The site has prompted vitriol elsewhere in cyberspace, on various blogs and message boards: Poet and publisher Janet Holmes of Ahsahta Press in Boise calls it "repellent," California poet and blogger Eileen Tabios describes Foetry as "the dark side of the poetry world," while poet, critic, and publisher Kevin Walzer of WordTech Communications in Cincinnati complains that "these guys see conspiracies everywhere, and it's causing needless harm."

To understand what generates such heat, you need to know how the publication of contemporary poetry works.

"In the past decade," says Joan Houlihan, director of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, "the publishing landscape has been dominated by contests." Many, perhaps most, ambitious young poets take graduate degrees in creative writing; many of their first books get published through competitions run by university presses or by independent small publishers. These competitions typically use big-name poets as judges and charge entry fees (most around $25) to help pay for publication. (The oldest and best-known, the Yale Younger Poets competition, reached its apogee in the 1950s when W. H. Auden picked Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery.) Some contests switch judges each year; some name the judge only after announcing the winner. Many contests promise entrants anonymity. And some judges also teach in graduate writing programs.

These overlaps may create conflicts of interest. "Over and over again," alleges Foetry, "judges often select their own students and friends." Foetry's homepage promises the inside scoop on "unscrupulous judges" and "questionable screening" -- and it seems, at first glance, to have uncovered some doozies. Foetry claims, for example, that the Colorado Prize, which I won in 1999, "repeatedly awards the prize and publication to students of that year's judge or poets connected to the Iowa Writers' Workshop." (Three of 10 winners -- I'm not one of them -- hold Iowa degrees, of whom one was picked by an Iowa teacher.) Another page fingers several very prominent poets, including the one who selected me, as especially prone to favoritism.

Foetry reads like a cross between the Drudge Report and Consumer Reports, anonymously investigating (and spreading) rumors to further the cause of transparency. Its longest-running debate spotlights the prestigious New York-based magazine and book publisher Fence, lately a magnet for writers of difficult verse, which shows Iowa roots both on its masthead and in its choice of young poets. On the site's discussion board, Fence founder Rebecca Wolff, who attended UMass-Amherst and Iowa, explained the submission process in numbing detail, writing that "the preponderance of Iowans" proves only "that those of us who judge these contests are in some kind of agreement with those who make the decisions about who goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop." One reader responded by suggesting, absurdly, that Wolff be charged under racketeering laws.

Predictably, much of the energy Foetry generates gets directed against the site itself. Matthew Zapruder, a founder of the Florence, Mass.-based Verse Press (an offshoot of long-running Verse magazine), admits that some abuses need attention, but says that "the people who run the site have consistently used fear-mongering and an `accuse first, ask questions later' method." By remaining anonymous, charges Zapruder, who holds a graduate degree from UMass-Amherst, "the people who run the Foetry site contribute to the very system of hierarchy and secrecy that they so object to."

Indeed, the site's proprietors work hard to hide their identities, registering their domain through a proxy, and answering inquiries (including those made for this article) only through the site's own message board. That anonymity keeps them (if they are poets) from having their own verse blackballed; it also makes them harder to sue.

Foetry has identified contests that do permit the appearance of conflicts of interest, and it may even help prevent a few. Some contests have long barred judges from picking their former students: At least one more publisher, Kentucky-based Sarabande, adopted that rule after Foetry's launch. The poet Sarah Gorham, Sarabande's president, explains that "Foetry brought the oversight in our guidelines to our attention, but it was the example of the Walt Whitman Prize and AWP [the Associated Writing Programs contests] that convinced us to change our eligibility requirements."

Still, Foetry's opponents make credible points. "Publication has never been fair," says Houlihan, and it cannot be, being "taste-driven." One of the Foetry forums even asks: "Ethics, Fraud or Just the Way It's Always Been?"

Some poets find the contest system not worth fixing. Michael Scharf, poetry editor for Publishers Weekly and himself a published poet, suggests that smaller presses without competitions can, do, and should state "that they want to publish their friends," since "that kind of support seems to make for better work." Yet without contests, some publishers would fold. As Walzer points out, "There seem to be more people willing to pay for a chance to have their own book published (i.e., contest reading fee) than there are people willing to buy a book of poetry by someone else."

Perhaps the clearest point Foetry proves is one neither defenders nor detractors notice. Randall Jarrell wrote 50 years ago that the loudest controversies in the arts were matters "from which the art could be almost wholly excluded, leaving nothing but politics and public morality." The chat and the charges on Foetry's message boards are all about poets, but rarely about their poems: Aesthetic matters are almost completely absent, as they would be in a court of law.

The most hopeful signs are not the glimmers of procedural reform, but the participants who want to talk about art, such as the anonymous writer who defends a Fence competition this way: "I did enter this contest, but my book is not as good as Prageeta Sharma's" -- the young poet (not from Iowa) who won.

Stephen Burt, author of "Randall Jarrell and His Age," teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.