Website polices rhymes and misdemeanors
How can one not approve of subversive behavior, especially when it is in such short supply? So how can one not savor the take-no-prisoners website Foetry.com, devoted to exposing coziness and corruption in the understandably undermonitored world of poetry?
Foetry, the self-styled ''American poetry watchdog," will be one year old tomorrow. The site is the brainchild of a West Coast-based civil servant with a sporting interesting in verse, which is why he takes great technological pains, like using untraceable proxy servers for his website, to remain anonymous. But his outriders are far from anonymous, and they sally forth on occasion to wreak havoc in the name of truth, creative integrity, and, well, sheer troublemaking.
Just last week, poet Jorie Graham, Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, appeared on WBUR's ''The Connection." Graham was droning on about ''ecological catastrophe" and the ''enormous interruption in the transmission of core values" -- the usual poetic fare -- when host Dick Gordon took a call from ''Don, from Providence."
Providence-based writer Donald Judson then asked Graham, given that she is so concerned about ethics, to explain why she had twice awarded poetry prizes to former students. (Graham is one of the ''Unscrupulous Judges" singled out for ridicule on the Foetry website, where Judson is a regular. Foetry claims credit for at least two contests recently adopting what it calls a ''Jorie Graham rule," like this one at the Colorado Review: ''This year's final judge is Calvin Bedient. Former students and close friends of the final judge are not eligible to compete.")
On ''The Connection," Graham didn't seem inclined to answer, and Gordon quickly rescued her, cutting Judson out of the show: ''Don, you're in a space where none of us can follow you here."
Building the case against Graham was textbook Foetry. Last year the website's proprietor approached the University of Georgia, citing the state's open records law, asking it to open the judging records for the university press's Contemporary Poetry Series award. The university rebuffed the anonymous request, so a Foetry devotee refiled the claim under his own name.
The names of all the judges, and an explanation of their connection to the winners, dating back to 1979 can be found on the Foetry website. Graham was chided for, among other things, awarding the 2000 prize to her then-partner, now husband, Peter Sacks. The University of Georgia Press now discloses the names of its poetry judges, who ''are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds."
I invited four leading poets, including Graham, to discuss Foetry, and none of them got back to me. So I am left to make the anti-Foetry case for them. On the one hand, anonymous criticism is reprehensible. However, The New York Times's rhetorical musing last fall ''Will the people behind Foetry get their pants sued off?" hasn't happened. Foetry's reply: ''We haven't been sued because what we print is true."
Still, aren't some conflicts in these high-profile poetry contests inevitable? Let's say, generously, that there are 100 talented poets out there. Wouldn't it stand to reason that they would have studied together in the few prestigious poetry programs, and that they would hang out and schmooze in the laurel-strewn groves of
Kevin Walzer, co-proprietor of Ohio-based poetry publisher WordTech Communications, is a regular on the Foetry site, and uniquely qualified to comment on their tactics: Foetry blacklisted his poetry contests because he didn't require the contestants to submit poems anonymously. Walzer stopped running contests, he says, because ''I was getting unhappy with the whole contest structure."
Walzer thinks some of Foetry's early critiques were off base but adds that the site is on to something when it exposes the cronyism in big-ticket contests run by the University of Iowa or the Academy of American Poets. ''They haven't proved manipulation per se, by producing a smoking gun," Walzer says. ''But if you are running a big state lottery like Powerball, how does it look if the buddy of the Powerball operator keeps winning the big prize? Maybe it was just a random drawing, but it sure looks funny."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 