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Sunday, April 03, 2005
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FOETRY UPDATE; or, If called by a panther Don’t anther. From Alex Beam, Boston.com columnist: ‘ 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.”’ |