August 27, 2005

• The Cutthroat and Corrupt World of…
  …Poetry?

  I’m a little late picking up on this, because most of the flap was
  occurring during those eleven weeks this spring when I didn’t have a
  computer.  Greyfox apparently hadn’t heard about it until
  recently, either.  He read something somewhere and mentioned it to
  me.  I asked for details and he said I should google it.

  foetry.com
  has been online for over a year, exposing fraud, nepotism and
  favoritism in the poetry publishing field.  The site’s owner has
  named names and accused various people of favoring their old
  friends, classmates, students, and lovers for prizes in the poetry
  contests which are generally the only way most poets’ work gets
  published.  He was
  anonymous for the first twelve months, until this April when one of the
  poetry contest judges and
  publishers he had outed, outed him.

  Alan Cordle is a reference librarian at Portland Community College in
  Oregon.  Given the passion with which he has been pursuing the
  inequities in poetry judging and publishing, it doesn’t take much of a
  logical leap to guess that he might also be a poet.  However, it
  is his wife, Kathleen Halme, who is the
  poet.  Ironically, Cordle has attacked a contest that she won in
  1994.  He has said, “She’s disappointed in my persistence in a
  world she feels should be hers, but we’re fine.”

  Cordle contends that the “old boy network” system now in place ensures
  that only known or well-connected poets get published.  Since the
  contests charge “reading fees” of $20 to $30,
  there’s more at stake for the young unknown poets than an author’s
  ego.  That limits the options for many struggling poets, but some
  of the publishers involved say that Cordle is wrong about it being a
  big money-making scheme for them and that they barely break even.
    Some of the poets and publishers he has accused
  have charged him with libel and slander, and at least one of them has
  gotten cease-and-desist orders against him.

  Now, Alan Caudle has another cause about which to express his outrage:  internet privacy. 
  Caudle remained anonymous for a year, using GoDaddy’s Domains by Proxy
  service.  Assailed by furious poets and publishers, GoDaddy
  cancelled Caudle’s service and revealed his identity.

  “I was probably naive,” Cordle said. “I thought that they would
  completely protect my privacy. That’s the whole purpose of DBP. They
  don’t do anything else but purport to protect domain privacy.”

  Yeah, he was naive.  The user agreement at DBP states, “You
  understand and agree that DBP has the absolute right and power, in
  its sole discretion and without any liability to you whatsoever, to
  close accounts (or) reveal your name and personal
  information.”

  I feel I made a wise choice when I decided that I have nothing to
  hide.  What’s the point?  The harder you try to hide
  something, the more your attempt at secrecy is going to make someone
  else want to find you out.  Many of those in the academic,
  publishing and poetry circles affected by foetry say that the system
  has long been in need of a clean-up, but they object to Caudle’s year
  of anonymous sniping.
  

  • 5:57 pm
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