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schemingreaderWe were discussing Adrienne Rich, a famous poet whose work some on my flist don't like, and some do. I do like her work, but more than that I like her.
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mechiaeh mentioned in passing that Harold Bloom had slammed Rich for her choices for the Best American Poetry. busaikko said that she didn't know that the world of poetry was so scandal-ridden.
I said I would post links to a bigger poetry scandal my husband told me about. He did an MFA in Creative Writing in the early 1990s and so is kind of tapped in to the whole poetry scene.
Link to article in Chronicle of Higher Education about Alan Cordle, a man on a mission to expose corruption in poetry contests. Here is a link to a page on Cordle's website about poet Jorie Graham. Here is his watchdog page about fradulent contests. Several have quietly changed their rules to avoid the appearance of cronyism.
Obviously, this guy has a total axe to grind. But it is a scandal.
Oh, but you know, this is just corruption. The other kind of scandal, the bad blood-feuding kind, is ever present.
Hope you find this interesting and not merely sordid!
mechiaeh mentioned in passing that Harold Bloom had slammed Rich for her choices for the Best American Poetry. busaikko said that she didn't know that the world of poetry was so scandal-ridden. I said I would post links to a bigger poetry scandal my husband told me about. He did an MFA in Creative Writing in the early 1990s and so is kind of tapped in to the whole poetry scene.
Link to article in Chronicle of Higher Education about Alan Cordle, a man on a mission to expose corruption in poetry contests. Here is a link to a page on Cordle's website about poet Jorie Graham. Here is his watchdog page about fradulent contests. Several have quietly changed their rules to avoid the appearance of cronyism.
Obviously, this guy has a total axe to grind. But it is a scandal.
Oh, but you know, this is just corruption. The other kind of scandal, the bad blood-feuding kind, is ever present.
Hope you find this interesting and not merely sordid!
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Date: 2006-06-11 05:59 am (UTC)On the other hand, I hear on a personal level he's actually a rather sweet guy.
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Date: 2006-06-11 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 08:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 11:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 11:43 am (UTC)orgies, and what have you. Poetry judging is likely very subjective, so a teacher would be more likely to favour students who learnt her lessons well. I can see that. Not that that makes it right, of course, or fair.I am forced to wonder now how many poems were generated by all this fuss.
The worth of a poem, it is true,
depended on which judges you knew:
did they sleep in your bed?
did you do as they said?
If so, well then--you jump the queue!
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Date: 2006-06-11 11:52 am (UTC)It might be true that the world of academic poetry is small, but it's not small because there aren't very many good poets.
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Date: 2006-06-11 01:44 pm (UTC)Is there any kind of popular upsurge in reaction to the Foetry revelations, along the lines of freeing contests and publications from the corrupt hands of their current managers? New contests or anthologies or what have you? It seems like a good opportunity to start up a kind of underground poetry movement.... I'd join if I were a poet but (see above)... no.
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Date: 2006-06-11 11:50 am (UTC)And alas...I'm not crazy about Adrienne Rich. I think I was permanently scarred by a dreadful graduation speech at Smith (not to my class) where she urged the graduates to "tap into the tribal anger of our Ibo grandmothers." I was floored by the cultural imperialism of the statement, and by the overall tone of the speech ("it's right because you feel it" school of feminism). I know I'm very much in the minority, but there you have it...:)
OTOH, Harold Bloom is a pompous asshole and always has been. It's enough to make me go out and buy the anthology just to spite Bloom, who is one of those critics who has power right now and is going to be completely forgotten ten years after he's dead.
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Date: 2006-06-11 11:58 am (UTC)The thing about the Foetry site is that these are contests and institutions with a lot of credibility. It's not like someone sends you a postcard for a vanity press and you pay them to publish. This is like, the Iowa Writers Workshop has a contest and only gives prizes for a few years to Iowa workshop grads. Or, in the case of Jorie Graham, the person is at Harvard. He listed the Yale Younger Poets series! I found that pretty shocking.
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Date: 2006-06-11 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 12:18 pm (UTC)unless it's all a coincidence and the judges just prefer work that has the stamp of their influence on it!