Remembering Foetry: an interview with Alan Cordle, part 2.

This is Part 2; Part 1 is here.

You mentioned my outing on Foetry.  You apologized for it later.  I don’t know if it was under my own name or one of my heteronyms in which I suggested you “blow me after a four-mile jog.” I am still proud of that, but not so proud of how I pointed out I knew a lot of Jewish lawyers with ponytails who would rain hell fire on Foetry for…I don’t really remember.

I do, however, remember being very you-go-girl in some of the more abstract principles of the site, and a few of the more Iowa-clan-ish things that were happening and still happening in the poetry biz.

I can imagine Wilson’s role in the book as that of the half-crazy, half-sane ambassador to perhaps the main narrative of you trying to figure out what you hath wrought, all of the various shitstorms popping up on the boards as the years go by.  Would you agree with me that the aesthetic bent of the commentors were on the rear-guard-ish side?  That’s what I remember about Wilson, mostly; people would be talking about Topic X and Wilson would mention, like, Theodore Roethke or somebody like that.

I said I didn’t want to talk much about outing you.  That does show up in the book and it’s better explained there than here.  But I do want to comment on something I really admired about interacting with you on Foetry.  You mentioned the McSweeney’s incident.  I didn’t start that thread as some sort of revenge – it came from someone who’d sent you a sestina and (obviously) didn’t get it accepted.  What I liked so much is that you actually made a pie chart showing the number of acceptances who were your friends, acquaintances, etc.  You defended yourself.  And frankly, I think editors at journals unaffiliated with academia should be able to publish whomever they want.  I agreed with you, but the pie chart was over the top!

The interviewer's response to Foetry's attacks of editorial sycophancy: a pie chart.

Just imagine if Jorie Graham had drawn up a flowchart: Did former student babysit my daughter > finalist!  If not > send apologetic, overly-praising apology.  Did babysitter also flatter me constantly > win!  If she’d have sent me that flowchart I would have thought she’s crazier than I suspect she is, but I would have admired her.  Instead, she just kept spinning these incredible stories to various media outlets.

I think you might be conflating “Wilson” with “Monday Love.”  [DN: I am. Sorry Wilson. Or Monday Love.] Wilson’s an insider.  Any half-serious poet would know of him, if not his writing.  Monday went to Iowa, and earned a Masters in English.  He’s got some respectable poetry publications, but I think of him more as a scholar and a critic.  He’d be the one to turn Topic X into Roethke or even more likely, Poe.  But I love the digressive nature of Internet forums and always enjoyed his posts.  Monday’s blogging now at Scarriet, which a few Foetry people started when our accounts were all deleted at the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, by Travis Nichols, who runs the forum there.  There’s a backstory about him in my book.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit, what with Scarriet, the take-off of Harriet, the former-blog-now-aggregation site at the Poetry Foundation. And then people finally found out who was behind all this—a poet-husband, of all people, and a librarian, someone once-removed from the poetryland business. Had you been well studied in the family trees and connections of how a poetry career is constructed?  What surprises were there when Foetry got started?

Well, yes.  I’ve known Kathleen for more than 20 years.  She’s got three full-length books now, but I was around long before those.  So I watched her enter all the contests, send all the checks, invest lots of time and emotion into the system.  I’d studied Jorie Graham’s work in two classes with Tom Gardner, who’s written extensively about her (and been rewarded for it, as is her way).  And early on I became aware of how she operates.  The first time I made an issue out of the contests was in the mid-nineties, when I made a phone call to the National Poetry Series because a guy I knew was bragging he was going to win, but hadn’t even entered yet.  His name is Michael White and he knew all the details before they’d even started accepting manuscripts: Mark Strand (his former prof) would be selecting his book, which house would publish it, etc.  It was disgusting.

But after I started Foetry, the unexpected thing that happened was the crowdsourcing.  There are some seriously (and rightfully) pissed off poets out there who’ve socked a ton of money they probably don’t have into entering these scams.  So they posted on the messageboards or contacted “Foetry” and asked me to post for them.  It was sickening to learn how many contests were fixed.

Another really sad thing for me was to learn that CD Wright had selected her students in the Georgia contest.  She and I were acquaintances and had a very close mutual friend, Debbie Luster.  Wright had written a letter to Halpern at the National Poetry Series complaining about White and Strand.  It wasn’t my phone call that got them kicked out – it was her letter, I’m certain.  Then she turned around and did the same thing when she thought no one was looking.  Foetry compelled the University of Georgia to reveal the names of contest judges throughout the years, something that had been Bin Ramke’s secret.

Let’s talk about something else entrirely, because I have to ask.  What the fuck happened on Talk of the Nation?  On April 21, 2005, I am listening to NPR and I hear them say “Foetry.”  Andrew Wyatt, a New York Times reporter, talking about the whole Foetry phenomenon, in that third-person disembodied narrator-less voice only Times arts reporters can do, a couple of weeks/months after you were outed. Then the first caller comes into the conversation– “Alan from Portland.”  I knew it was you.  Did you just call in of your own volition?  Did the screener know who you were?  I listened to it live, and it was a Network/Sidney Lumet taking over the airwaves kind of moment.  It was also the first time I heard your voice and perhaps the first time I thought of you as a human being rather than some droid.

I work at Portland Community College, which is the largest institution of higher learning in Oregon.  We have three main campuses.  One of the librarians at another campus left a voicemail for me that said, “Foetry is going to be on Talk of the Nation.”  I got the message while the show was live, so I quick looked up the phone number and miraculously got through to the screener.  I told her who I was and she asked, “Well, what’s your question?”  My real one was why didn’t NPR just interview me, like the CBC did, but I said, “I don’t have one, but I’d be happy to answer any since I founded the site.”  I was on lunch break and my cubemates were all listening to the stream online and cheering me on.  It was pretty surreal.  It took Neal Conan a second to realize who I was, but then he did a good job of shifting his questions to me and away from Wyatt.  It was extra-strange to me that Wyatt was the in-house expert, because of all the articles written after my outing, his was the weakest.  He called me for a quote and two hours later his story appeared on the web and in the New York Times the next day.  His biggest error was claiming that the website “whoisfoetry” outed me, when it was actually Janet Holmes.

The state of poetry publishing—of book publishing overall, really—since Foetry opened its virtual doors in 2004.  Print-on-demand has improved drastically. There are e-books, online books, iPads, all that shit. People publish their own poetry books without any real stigma, or their friends’ books. One person’s careerist nepotism is another person’s treasured coterie.

All of this, from my point of view, has lowered the stakes drastically for the poet who wants his or her book published.  And this is a good thing.  Would you agree that contests are no longer the only game in poetry biz?

Definitely.  I look at presses like your fellow blogger, Reb Livingston’s No Tell, as a good example of how things are changing for the better: she’s publishing who she wants to publish.  There are upright contests though: the Lena-Miles Wever Todd, Vassar Miller (which was pretty fucked up for many years), Steel Toe, etc.

But really, in terms of print, I think 99% of poets should self-publish and do so on demand.  If they’ve already published poems in journals or online, why not gather them together and create a book that they can love: from the ordering of the manuscript, to cover design, to font choices, and paper quality?  Why let presses (most of which do a pathetic job with promotion) have so much control?  Poets should think of their art as a product – not necessarily one that’s for sale, but something that is bigger than words on a page.

I believe online journals and poets’ websites are the best venues for publishing.  Poetry doesn’t make money for most people, so why not just make poems available?

My wife would disagree with me on anything remotely resembling online and/or self-publication.  But I would argue that poems shouldn’t sit around inside books no one reads.  Get them out into the world!

As for my own book, not poetry, I’m going to do some major revising this summer, send it back to the two people who’ve seen it already, and see what happens.  If neither of them is interested, don’t be surprised if I self-publish and create e-versions for iPads and Kindles.  I’ve been a computer owner for 31 years, since the TRS-80, so it would be a natural way for me to tell the Foetry story.

Stay tuned for Part 3…