Remembering Foetry: an interview with Alan Cordle, part 1.

The May 20, 2005 cover of the Chronicle blurs out Alan Cordle's face.

In our literary culture’s current era of aggressive online niceness, where air-kisses, back massage-y retweets and reblogs rule, it might be useful to step back to a simpler time in the early aughts, when the modus operandi for the online writer, more often than not, involved screaming across the skies to assert oneself, which, more often than not, also meant taking someone else down. Nasty and arch flame wars and cross-blog backyard fights ruled everyone’s Netscapes and Mozillas.

If you were a poet and online in those days, everything changed on April 1, 2004, when an anonymously run website called Foetry.com launched, its tagline “Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants. Naming names.”

Foetry took the whole literary gossip and careerism enterprise to the next level, at first taking poetry book contests as its main target.  Members pointed out the associations, near- and far-fetched, of the winners, losers, and judges.  (Winning a poetry book contest, it should be pointed out, is no small thing. For many years the only way a poet could see his or her name on the spine of the book, winning a poetry prize also means the beginning of a career, both in future publication and in academe.)

On any given day, Foetry’s front-page or discussion board would discuss how Poetry Contest Winner A studied at College X with Poetry Contest Judge V. Many take-downs, to a silent majority, rang as reason for justifiable, albeit harsh, self-policing, competitive schadenfreude or both.  Some of the conflict-of-interest contest allegations were ridiculously corrupt; Jorie Graham’s selection of her Harvard colleague and future husband Peter Sacks for University of George Press prize, was perceived by many as one of the largest scandals exposed thanks to Foetry. (Although they had blurbed each other’s books before all this, Graham claims they only knew each other at the time. Bin Ramke, the editor who ran the prize, no longer works for the Press, in no small part because of the fallout.)

In 2005, almost a year after its opening up for business, Foetry’s founder’s anonymity was exposed. His name: Alan Cordle, a research librarian at Portland Community College and husband of Kathleen Halme, a published poet who entered—and won—the same University of George Press prize. Even so, Cordle didn’t seem to fit the part of poetry dragonslayer. “The man is harmlessness in blue slacks,” Thomas Bartlett described Cordle in a 3000-word Chronicle of Higher Education profile that ran a month after his outing. He “has wispy blond hair and pudgy cheeks,” Bartlett continued, and “drives a 1994 Honda Accord, likes to hike, and brews his own beer.”

I had my run-ins with Foetry back in the day.  A former friend of mine was described as being friends with a contest judge; after a few glasses of wine, I posted grumpy and abusive comments and was promptly outed by Cordle himself.  Later, I was described as a “sychophant” in how I chose poems for during my run as the McSweeney’s sestinas section editor, a description I still hold is untrue and nasty. I told Cordle he could, and I think this is a direct quote, “blow me after a four-mile jog.”

Over time, however, perhaps from my own disillusionments or from growing thicker skin, I started to see Foetry and its ilk as perhaps a necessary evil or corrective for the inbred world of poetryland. And so began for me one of the oddest of correspondences: Alan Cordle and I started writing to each other. We met for a beer when I read at Powell’s in Portland.  I asked him if I could interview him, and he very nicely agreed.  What follows is Part 1 of our email conversation.

I know you emailed me some questions for a book project. What is it? Where are you at in the process?

I emailed you about the book back before I had a real sense of where it was going. After nearly five years of jotting down bits, I finally wrote what I thought was a cohesive manuscript last summer. I called it a memoir, but it has other elements that were a challenge to incorporate: the business of poetry, Internet ethics, and open records.

I turned 40 last year (and strangely, 41 this year) and had never written anything of that magnitude—I was just happy to be able to focus and to create a book-length project, which is different than writing something publishable. The manuscript went out into the world prematurely. Thankfully, I’ve had two people in the industry take it seriously enough to give me some excellent feedback. I did another revision in January and heard back from one of those people since. The other one said I would hear back by the end of February and I’m still waiting—haven’t given up.

So now I know I have more work to do on the Foetry book, but I feel like there’s a future for it.

What would you say you are working on with the manuscript?  One thing I try to remember when writing and teaching memoir is to make sure the narrator is questioned as much as the other players and the situations in the book. Do you question yourself in this book?  By which I mean: Do you question your own motives as much as other people in the book?

The two people I sent it to were supporters of the site from way back and each said the same thing about chronology.  The manuscript was very ADD and they both said (gently) that I should just put everything in the order it happened.  I’m not confident that the two agree on the tone–so I almost feel like I need to rewrite in two versions.  This writing thing is difficult because I’ve always written for myself and now I have to write for an audience.

So yes, in its current format, I’ve done some self-examination, but a response I got from one of the readers was to stop feeling sorry for myself.  And in real life, I don’t too much, so if the book makes it seem that way, then I have to work harder to characterize my motives.  Obviously my initial impulse was well-intentioned, but possibly poorly-executed in many ways.  I thought I could shame poets and presses into cleaning up their contests, but then my anonymity provided an unearned sense of power.  It was a bit like a drug, dodging the people who were making guesses.  So that became a new kind of motive.  And site stats!  I mean, what web site owner doesn’t obsess over stats?  But that wasn’t too healthy.

I’d say that the manuscript doesn’t make me look like a saint.  But I didn’t collect ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars in entry fees and award my wife a book contract either.    So there’s a lot of looking at others’ motivations, but as you say, I definitely question why I did some of those things.  Maybe I need to invent a character who molested me in the rectory . . .

Do you think the state of poetry publishing has changed–for better, worse–as a result of Foetry? Or have things stayed the same?

Poetry publishing post-Foetry is a mixed bag. Countless competitions adopted the Jorie Graham Rule and/or the CLMP code of ethics. Few would credit those changes to Foetry.com. The CLMP code was a huge disappointment. I asked to be included in the roundtable discussion and Jeffrey Lependorf declined. The people who participated in the creation were some of the worst offenders: among them Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press, Janet Holmes of Ahsahta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review twins, Ted Genoways and John Casteen. The ethics code is a wishy-washy non-position–so as not to offend anyone, I imagine. Any press can claim to adhere to it and then do whatever the hell they want.

Soon after CLMP released the code, Nightboat Books adopted it and then let Donald Revell pick one of his wife’s students for the prize. Though I’ve never been able to verify it, some people told me Revell had taught the winner during a visiting gig at Iowa, too. Either way, the whole situation looked fishy, and for many, the appearance of a conflict of interest is nearly as bad as an actual one. It continues to baffle me that publishers/judges would want a “reputation” and that poets are so desperate they continue to pay these entry fees to known crooks.

Poetry publishing might even be worse without the contest model. Some publishers took a more reprehensible route: Genoways managed to abscond with the University of Georgia Poetry Series when Bin Ramke stepped down because of Foetry. Two of the first books Genoways published were Casteen’s and his own. Let me emphasize that I have no problem with self-publishing, but I have a huge problem with the University of Virginia, his employer, paying Georgia to publish his book. Even worse, Casteen is the son of UVA’s president. How can anyone take those two poets seriously and why aren’t Virginia (and Georgia) taxpayers demanding accountability? Probably because it’s poetry.

Yeah. I’m sure that’s part of it.  So most of these things you outline here seem reasonable and make sense—the Georgia series just sounds fucked no matter how one dices it. These things that happened and are still happening fucking suck and I would say that Foetry played a large part in letting everyone know this was and remains bullshit.

I haven’t asked anyone personally why Foetry et al. didn’t have a place at the table when, say, the CLMP code was drafted, but I would suggest part of the reason the boards of Foetry people were not invited to sit down had to do with how far afield the topics discussed, way off the track of Judge X selecting Poet Y who both are married to each other.  I’m not talking about the six degree of Kevin Bacon-type stuff; I mean the personal attacks that grew out of the discussion of often otherwise legitimate issues. Thoughts?  Mind you, I took part in it on the giving and receiving end on those boards and others, to my own detriment.  I forget the names of the regular anonymous people over there—there was Wilson, right? others?—these people didn’t really offer so much scoops on bad contests as much as ad hominems. Thoughts?

If you pick any random YouTube video or news article and read the comments which follow, Foetry.com’s crowd, in comparison, was very gentle.  I think embarrassed poets were quick to cry “ad hom” because they got exposed for cheating.  Much of the information of Foetry.com was already being talked about, but Foetry.com was the first to put it online.  Lependorf was just doing what he needed to do to continue the status quo.  He wouldn’t want the CLMP to look like it aligned itself in any way with me or with Foetry.com.  More importantly, he wouldn’t want to upset the Big Names.  But his organization had to do something to look like they cared, hence the “code of ethics.”  If Lependorf didn’t want me at the table for perceived ad homs, he sure picked the queen of them with Janet Holmes.  I’m not the one who called her a fat loser – it was the other way around.  (Dan, I met you recently – am I fat?)  She hilariously uses this phrase in her contest ad: Ahsahta Press, a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, conforms to the CLMP Code of Ethics and participated in its drafting.

You mention the attacks, and your part in them.  (For those reading who don’t know, Dan appeared at Foetry.com, using a pseudonym and I outed him).  I don’t really want to talk about that here, but let’s just say there’s a part of my manuscript in which I do a major self-exam (down to the scrotal level) on that.

And I’m glad you remembered Wilson.  He turned out to be a major player, not only on the site, but also in the book.  His public posts were brief, often funny, often thoughtful.  We communicated through the internal message board fairly often and he did have a number of scoops.  Many forum members gave me scoops privately and then I’d repost so no one could associate the scoop with the scooper.  There’s a lot of anger and frustration in po-biz, but the fear of speaking up trumps that.

See Part 2 here and Part 3/Getting to know here