Foetry.com

» see foetry.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The name was a pun and a verdict at once. Foetry, as in faux-etry, a word for what happens when a prize is decided before the entries are read. The site opened on 1 April 2004 and its method was clerical rather than literary: get the list of contest winners, get the list of contest judges, and work out how the two lists already knew each other.

It worked because American poetry book prizes are small enough to fit on one page. A first-book contest charges every entrant a reading fee, hands the manuscripts to a famous poet, and publishes whoever the famous poet picks. The famous poet also teaches, and the entrants include students. Nobody had been going through the results with a spreadsheet, and when somebody finally did, the patterns were not subtle.

The operator stayed anonymous for about a year before being identified as Alan Cordle, a research librarian in Portland, whose wife had won one of the same contests a decade earlier. Being named did not slow the site down. He kept publishing under his own name for two more years.

This is the part of the internet I can read about and cannot remember. In 2004 I was a Turkish engineering student and the American writing-program prize system was not something I had heard of, let alone had a position on. What crosses that distance is the shape of the site rather than its subject: one person with a spreadsheet and no institutional standing, auditing a field that had been grading its own work.

~ the record ~

~ the georgia case ~

The case that made the site's reputation was the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. In 1999 the judge, Jorie Graham, chose a manuscript by Peter Sacks, who had not entered the contest. Graham and Sacks married the following year and both ended up on the Harvard faculty. Foetry laid the sequence out with dates attached and let it sit there.

The same investigation turned up something about the reading itself. Bin Ramke, the series editor, had been discarding roughly half the submitted manuscripts without reading them, and every one of those manuscripts had arrived with a fee attached. Ramke resigned his editorial post. A second thread on the Vassar Miller Prize at the University of North Texas Press traced judges and winners back through shared appointments at Utah and Missouri.

~ the rule it got written ~

Foetry's real output was not a scandal, it was a clause. Contest after contest adopted language barring a judge from selecting a former student or anybody they had a personal relationship with, and the clause picked up an informal name that stuck: the Jorie Graham rule. The Georgia contest put it into its own rules. Graham stopped judging contests.

Naming a conflict-of-interest provision after a living poet is a hard thing to undo, and it is worth being exact about what the provision claims. It does not say any particular book was undeserving. It says a process that cannot show its work should not be charging a fee per manuscript to find out.

~ why it stopped ~

The site closed on 18 May 2007, a little over three years after it opened. By then the clause existed in the rulebooks, the editor at the center of the Georgia case had left his post, and the argument had moved into the field's own journals, where the people making it held tenure and did not need an anonymous message board to make it from.

What Foetry proved is that the audit had been available the whole time. The winner lists were public, the judge lists were public, and the connections between them had been sitting in the open for as long as the contests had been running. It took one librarian to put them in the same document.

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