One of the most common pieces of advice given to poets is to avoid self-consciousness—to carefully partition the artifice from the art, to hide the crafting from the crafted. And it’s good advice. The pleasure and insight we receive from poetry comes from our ability to enter it, to suspend our disbelief and become fully absorbed in the moment’s object. It’s almost impossible to get lost in a poem when the author keeps popping out from behind the bushes with a sign that says, “You’re still reading a poem.” Yet this is exactly what Matthea Harvey does in what might be the greatest poetic sequence of this young 21st century.

Harvey’s “The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future” sequence, from her book Modern Life, is abecedarian, meaning that the lines proceed alliteratively through the alphabet—in this case bookended with F for “future” and T for “Terror,” her grist all the words that start with G through S in between. As described in American Poet (1MB PDF), she stumbled on the form accidentally, after hearing the phrase “the future of terror” repeated over and over again on the radio. She wanted the words to “mean something concrete as opposed to being an amorphous umbrella of dread.” (American Poet, 11) A trip to the dictionary had her making word lists on a whim, as her fingers traveled from “future” to “terror,” and certain words that seemed to relate caught her eye. Those lists grew spontaneously into a post-apocalyptic narrative of 21 poems—11 moving forward through the alphabet, 10 moving in mirror, backward T to F.

The result of this formal “gimmick” is wild alliteration, some of it almost too musical to tolerate:

We all carried plump pods filled with poison
that quivered as we made our daily rounds
of the ruins. Giving sadness the run-around
was even harder after your Sergeant succumbed
to Salt Lake Syndrome. At night in our
smokeproof sleeping cars we dreamed
of sharp sticks that would make wounds
a simple surgeon’s knot couldn’t fix…
(Modern Life, 13)

At times, particularly during longer runs of S’s and P’s, the speaker seems to channel Looney Tunes’ Sylvester the Cat, spraying the room with spit: “Our poets were Pied Pipers handing out/ photocopies—parroting, parenthesizing.” (12) The language is so acoustically rich that it’s impossible to forget at any point that you’re reading a poem, that an artist is carefully spoon-feeding you art.

It should be difficult to become engrossed in 21 pages of this richness, akin to 21 slices of chocolate cheesecake. Yet the imagined world that emerges from the abecedarian sequence is so haunting that it happens anyway. Matthea Harvey set out to give form to the umbrella of dread that’s been dogging us all since September 11th, and she has. She’s made tangible the real terror of terrorism, the deep and occluded unease about everything we thought we knew—a future full of soldiers without orders making daily rounds of civilization’s ruins. With one line she captures our despair: “We ate our gruel and watched the hail/ crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.” (22) With another she crystallizes a culture of paranoia: “Suddenly the sight/ of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.” (11)

The simplicity and acuity of that line is astounding, and its easy to see how it evolved out of the form, from the alliterative key words “suddenly,” “sight,” “schoolbag,” and “scrambling.” The image, so perfectly attuned to this moment in history—not a “handbag,” but a “schoolbag,” denoting childlike innocence and its loss—wasn’t something she held in her mind and shaped into a poem, it sprung spontaneously from the poem itself.

Harvey acknowledges the spontaneity of the process in her essay: “…the words led me, pulled me in new directions, created a narrative I didn’t have in my head. It was perhaps the most wonderful experience of writing without knowing where I was going that I’ve ever had.” (American Poet, 12) She goes on to call her experience with the form “one of extraordinary exhilaration and surprise.” Indeed, and seemingly unintentionally, she surpasses her own amorphous dread to explore dozens of relevant social issues, moving beyond the apolitical nature of her previous books. Some lines comment on the incumbent President:

We could all do impeccable imitations
of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on
a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.
(Modern Life, 11)

On torture:

When we got jaded
about joyrides we could always play games
in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.
Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish, and Kick
the Kidneys were our favorites.
(11)

On our disillusionment with the government:

Out of glass blocks
we built a glorious latrine which we meant
to show the governor when he arrived
with his hand on his heart, but for some reason
we hesitated. Was it the rust on the hinge
of his briefcase? His car horn’s half-hearted honk?
(14)

All of these scenes seem to be generated by the chance alphabetical lists of words, but as Marcel Duchamp once said, “Your chance is not the same as mine.” The real operator here is the interaction between randomness and the author’s unconscious mind, which has been mulling over these issues of war and terrorism since the start of the “War on Terror.”

When the overt, conscious mind becomes preoccupied with form, the wellspring of the unconscious is free to rise to the surface and assert itself. For decades, psychological studies have shown a link between distraction and persuasion—the over-mind serves as a kind of shield for the more malleable under-mind—and I believe the effect works in the opposite direction, as well. Formal poets often describe how their own meter and rhyme becomes a kind of crutch; after awhile they can no longer access their own creativity without having their focus fixed on the form. It becomes the only way the formal poet knows how to enter what Elizabeth Bishop called the “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration”—the meditative state necessary to create great art. Without the form, they’re left with what the Buddhists would call too much “willful will”—the stronger, overt mind resists the emergence of the transformative, covert mind.

Harvey seems at the cusp of understanding what’s really going on when she develops a metaphor for what she calls the “abecedarian’s particular combination of restraint and freedom”:

Perhaps writing with full access to every word in the language is like looking at a 360-degree panorama from which we can choose to look at any thing at any time. The thing about the panorama, though, is that, while it’s available to us, we don’t use it all at once. We can’t ever keep the entire possibilities of the language in our heads at one time… By contrast, writing abecedarianally…is more like walking up the stairs of a castle and looking through a series of small windows. From one you see the forest of F, complete with flora and fauna. Through another you see the meadow of M… There’s a lushness to the abecedarius that speaks to the old saw about form allowing freedom…
(American Poet, 13)

She understands that a narrowing of focus leads to an expansion of consciousness. All that’s missing from her description is the underlying why.

“The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future” comprises less than half of Modern Life, and it isn’t the only sequence that deploys a poetic gimmick in pursuit of new understanding. Other sections use other gimmicks with varying degrees of success. The dozen or so “Robo-boy” prose poems remind—or were perhaps inspired by—Haley Joel Osment’s role as an android in the Spielberg film A.I. They work individually, and remain interesting throughout, yet fail to match the cultural resonance (and relevance) of the abecedarians. The subject makes sense for the book, and certainly seems like meaningful commentary on “modern life,” but rather than formal and full of chance, the conceit is situational, and thus too overt, the stylings too plainly stylized. The Robo-boy poems fit within the metaphor of the small window—the narrow opening, this time, being the narrative of the young android—but the narrowing isn’t distracting to the author’s will, and so doesn’t have the same revelatory effect.

This problem has far more excruciating results in a series of extremely brief poems, each written around a kind of joke between “I” and “You.” Here’s a complete example:

You Have My Eyes

Give them back.
(Modern Life, 75)

The initial idea is as quirky and interesting as that of “The Future of Terror” or “Robo-boy,” but the conceit leaves absolutely no room for input from the interior. Here the idea for the poem is the poem; the only will is willful. These are the poems that, in an otherwise glowing review of Modern Life in the New York Times, David Orr calls “coy productions.” In other words, they’re too self-conscious, the gimmick too glaring.

“The Future of Terror,” on the other hand, uses the gimmick of the abecedarian poem to quiet consciousness, thus allowing the poet to act spontaneously within the work. Later in his review of Modern Life, Orr remarks that “One suspects that the reason Harvey likes to talk about the safe subject of form so much is that she’s a bit unsettled by her own project.” That unsettled feeling is what makes the sequence so powerful—and it feels so unsettled, I believe, because the raw imagination was exposed through her close attention to its form.

I went about a month without writing a blog post, but there was a good reason.  Megan and I got married on October 18th, at a beautiful little ceremony in Malibu.  Megan O’Reilly, Rattle’s assistant editor, is now Megan O’Reilly Green, which makes me smile just to see.

I still feel uncomfortable talking about my personal life in this space, and I haven’t decided whether or not I should make an effort to get over it, or keep this blog more professional.  But I’ll dip in a toe to test the water, by posting a few pictures from the wedding. Let me know if you want to see more of this kind of thing — do you care about the life of a poetry editor, or should I just stick to the poetry?  I can’t help but wonder why you’d care about us.  But I suppose that’s the nature of the new century.

Anyway, we’re married now, after almost 5 years together, and happy for good.  Here are some photographs (by the amazing, John Li):

(more…)

Swamped with no time for a proper post.  You’ll know why soon, but in the meantime I wanted to put this up.

It’s made up the background art for this website for a couple months, but the cover for American Fractal is finally official. The breathtakingly intricate image is by Stacy Reed.  The big thumbnail doesn’t do it justice. Check it out (click the pic for a larger version):

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I’m the featured poet this week (or maybe last week at this point) in Santa Cruz’s indy web weekly, The Good Times.  Browsing around, it’s a nice publication, and makes me wish I lived in Santa Cruz.  Of the five poems, a few are already available on this website, and a few are appearing online for the first time.  Click here to check it out (and leave me a comment so I feel cool).

Most of you know that Hayden Carruth passed away last week, at 87, at his home in Munnsville, NY.  I’m late to the party because this is a busy time of the year, but also because I was trying to hunt down the audio of our interview with him, which, as far as I know, is the last interview he ever did.  At that point, December 2005, Carruth was pretty much confined to the first floor of his house, tethered to an oxygen tank he had to wheel around with him.  Unfortunately, all I have is a microcassette, and no way to transfer it to the computer.  (One project in the future is going to be converting all these tapes we have to digital files, so we can put them online.)

For now there’s no audio, so you’ll just have to order a copy of issue #25, or the Rattle Conversations anthology, where it’s also featured. The interview is probably my favorite we’ve ever done — and probably Alan’s favorite, as well.  I’m not sure if it’s because he was nearing the end of his life, or if he was just always like this, but Carruth was one of the most open, honest, and direct poets I’ve ever met.  He speaks of his successes and his failures in equal measure, refers to himself as a “basket case” and a “name-dropper,” and admits that at the time his greatest problem is loneliness — in fact, the interview stretches beyond the planned length, because he asked us to stay.

Beyond the insights into his own personality, Carruth reveals countless truths about the life of the poet in general — the kind of truths you won’t hear in a creative writing program.

FOX: Well, do you think writing poetry can be taught?

CARRUTH: Essentially not, no. It’s a fraud, it’s a fake, the whole thing. And I used to tell the students that all the academicization of poetry and literature was a mistake. It was bad for poetry, it was bad for people. And I still think that, and I’d advise my students to get out of a university and go get a job on a farm or something like that—honest work. And that their poetry would improve, and I think I was right.

That comment is about more than just Yankee Pragmatism; getting away from the art is an important part of the creative process.  For a few summers I worked a as a landscaper, digging gardens, trimming hedges, pitching mulch, and daydreaming.  So far those have been the most prolific periods of writing for me — working with your hands somehow makes you want to go home and work with your mind.  It was validating to hear Carruth describe the same experience:

CARRUTH: …it used to be when I was working in the woods, I would think of poems, and I’d get strings of imagery running in my mind, and strings of language along with them, and then I could just go home and write them down and I’d have a poem.

Even more confirming was Carruth’s resistance to revision.  I think the act of revising is drastically over-emphasized in the universities, for a very simple reason: it’s an easy way to teach.  It’s easy to have students bring in a new messy poem every week, and then work through ways to clean it up, and then send them on their way as if they’ve learned something.  It’s much more difficult to teach the creative process itself, from inspiration through composition — the spontenaity, the precision, the absorbsion in detail.  Elizabeth Bishop’s “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”  How do you teach that?  And yet that’s where the real art lies.

FOX: Would you say that when you were writing, you wrote pretty quickly and edited quickly?

CARRUTH: Oh, yes, I did. I used to…often I did do exactly what I just said, I would think of a poem when I was out walking or working in the woods or doing something like that. I’d come home, I’d write it down in longhand on a piece of yellow paper as quickly as I could. And I’d type it up and look at it and change a few words, and that was it…  I never did a lot of revision. There were other poems, I had projects like writing long poems like “Contra Mortem” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” and I worked on them for a long time. And I know what it means to sit down every day and try to continue a piece of writing that you were doing the day before. It’s pretty difficult sometimes.

There’s much more worth mining from the interview — too much to list here, and anyway, the interview isn’t supposed to be the focus of this post.  What I wanted to say was that Carruth was the sort of person I tend to gravitate toward, the sort of person I tend to respect.  He was gruff and frank; he always gave it to you as straight as he could.  Maybe it’s the masochist in me, but that’s the kind of person I admire.

There’s a letter from Carruth pinned to the bulletin board above my desk, sent shortly after he saw a copy of the issue in which he appeared.  The body of the letter is one sentence:

Dear Sir,

I am struck by how easy it would be to change your name to Prattle.

Sincerely,
Hayden Carruth

To this day, I’m not sure how that letter was meant.  For a while, I reveled in the insult.  You have to admit, it’s a pretty good zinger.  From blurbs to cover letters, this business is full of so much flowery pandering that even the most brutal honesty can seem refreshing.  I pinned it to my corkboard with pride.  When I had to contact him a few months later, and he was as warm and generous as ever, I wondered if maybe it was senility, if he’d simply forgetten what he wrote.

It hadn’t occurred to me until recently that maybe he was only refering to his own interview within the issue. The hypothesis fits my experience of him so well that I’m amazed it too so long to think of it. Maybe Carruth’s “Prattle” comes from the same place as his loneliness, his “name-dropper” and “baseket case.”  Maybe it was only his reputation for being difficult that made me assume the worst — a reputation, perhaps, built up through decades of similar misunderstandings.

He was “fired” as editor of Poetry for defending Ezra Pound at a time when most people saw him as a traitor.  He famously called Thoreau a fraud.  Things like these gave him a reputation as a curmudgeon, but it’s easy to see them as further examples of his openness and honesty.  He was a brilliant mind, who couldn’t help but speak the truths he saw.  And those are the kind of people I can’t help but respect.

The fall e-Issue just went up last night, featuring selections of poetry from a pair of great books by Carol V. Davis and David James, artwork by Lois Gold, Andrew Kozma’s review of a suite of chapbooks, and a preview of the Winter 2008 issue. You can download it for free at the e-Issue page, or directly by clicking here (1.2 MB PDF).

The highlight, though, is clearly David Alpaugh’s essay: “What’s Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?”

Alpaugh is an journeyman poet, with stops all over the literary map.  As both winner of a book contest (The Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press) and organizer of one, he speaks with authority on the subject.  Rattle published a pair of his visual poems in issue #30, but he might be best known for his influential essay “The Professionalization of Poetry,” first printed as a two part series in Poets & Writers in 2003.  That essay detailed the sacrifices poetry has made to become a viable profession within academia–the diluting of talent, the rise of esotericism, the praise of the banal.  In Rattle e.5, Alpaugh turns his attention from the university to the free market, exploring the opportunity cost of so much good intention–the founding of (yet another) poetry book contest.

I say “good intention” intentially, because, beyond the numbers, that’s the important truth that Alpaugh articulates so clearly.  It’s easy to paint those who run book contests as dishonest or greedy or self-important–maybe thanks to Poetry.com and Foetry.com–but in reality, every contest is a labor of love.  Every editor and judge thinks their contest is special, that they’re adding something unique meaningful to literature.  If it wasn’t a labor of love, they’d be looking for another job, one that pays more (or often just pays at all).

The problem is that book contests are convenient–that’s why there are so many of them.  No need for fundraising, or sales strategies, or PR.  By the time you’ve chosen the manuscript, it’s already paid for itself.  And since there’s no shortage of poets hoping to be published, and willing to pay the price of admission, the environment is primed for exponential growth.

When I first read the essay several months ago, I had a few counter-arguments.  Alpaugh argues that presses don’t take the marketing of their winners seriously, because they don’t have to–but I’d counter that no small presses take the marketing of their books seriously, because they don’t have the means to.  You know that when you’re working with a small press, the onus of finding an audience is on you.  You have to arrange your own readings, mailing lists, press kits…  I’ve only experienced this once, but everyone I know who’s published a book describes the same thing.  No poet is Stephen King with a PR rep.  Maybe the contest winners feel content to rest on their laurels instead of doing the legwork (they are, after all, Prize Winners!), but whose fault is that really?  And what contest-awarding press is going to tell their winner, “Don’t go out and market yourself, we don’t want to sell more books”?

But that was June.  In the time since, I’ve had a great experience with Red Hen Press–they’ve done a lot to help with the publicity of American Fractal.  What’s more, I’ve spoken about this with more former contest winners, and for several, all their press gave them, to quote one, was “a box of books with a letter inside wishing me good luck.”  I hadn’t realized this was so prevalent.  Presses have less of an investment in their contest winners, and it seems to show.

The only counterpoint I can still make is that, while I agree that the proliferation of contests do muddy the quantitative waters, I think they might be a boon to quality overall.  A small press, even a non-profit, has to always worry about just breaking even with a book.  And so they’re forced to look for books that will sell, rather than books that are actually good.  There are, of course, the perfect storms where each go hand in hand, but given the choice of a decent book by a writer with a ready-made audience, or a great book by an unknown, they’ll pick the merely decent book every time.  By subsidizing the winning book, poetry contests allow the presses running them to ignore any fiscal yardsticks–they already have broken even, so they’re free to just pick what’s best.

I think this might be a bigger problem than the problem with contests.  Whether you want to point to horrible poetry books by Jewel or Billy Corgan or Leonard Nemoy, or similarly dull books by already-established poetry stars, there’s a lot of bland poetry being published simply because of marketability.  Is that really what’s best for poetry, that a knack for publicity should be a trump card?  These days its Whitman every time–Dickinson’s only shot would be to enter a contest.

But even this argument hinges on the numbers game.  Out of 500 entries, is a contest guaranteed to receive a better book than that aforementioned bland poetry by a fading star?  I’m not so sure.  Having never run a book contest myself, I really have no idea–does the judge find dozens of books worthy of publication, or none?  If you ask, the judge will surely say dozens, but is that the truth, or kindness?

As difficult as it is to find fault wth Alpaugh’s central argument, it’s even harder to think of solutions to the problem.  As long as poetry remains on the margins of American life, poetry books need to be subsidized to exist.  The contest “losers” can subsidize the winner, or members of a poetry collective can subsidize each other.  Small presses can avoid this only with individual donations and grants, and that’s no easy task.

Evolution isn’t a complicated process, and neither good nor bad–it’s just what happens when stuff sits around in an environment for a long time.  A rock evolves smooth in the same way a bird evolves into wings.  The current state of poetry publishing is just what happens as poetry lovers tumble down the paths of least resistence.  It’s neither good nor bad, and won’t be changing any time soon, but it’s important to pause every so often and examine what you’ve become.

In any event, this isn’t the first time David Alpaugh’s held a mirror up to the poetry industry and asked a lot of provocative questions, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.  It’s a good read, and a subject well-worth pausing on a Monday afternoon to think about.  So go read it.

The new issue of Oak Bend Review features an interview with yours truly (click on “Honorary Guest”), along with a generous spread of poetry (including one previously unpublished), glowing praise for American Fractal, and even a posting of that YouTube video Poetry.la did a while back.  I don’t know about “honorary,” but I truly am honored.  The last editor/poet to be interviewed there was Christian Wiman, so more than honored, I feel a little out of my league.

The interview drifts between commentary on the state of poetry in America, poetry itself, various issues we’ve done at Rattle, and our editorial outlook.  In addition to my aforementioned tendency to yodel out an avalanche of bad metaphors, you’ll notice a more general tendency to spew forth whatever comes to mind, unfiltered.  I can see this getting me into trouble some day.

Moreover, looking back at the interview–which we did about two months ago–it occurs to me that I’m pretty damn opinionated.  I’m humble about my own insight into poetry, or lack thereof, particularly when it comes to weilding my imaginary editorial clout.  In other words, I really don’t think I have any special understanding of literature; though I read a lot, I’m not particularly well-read, and so on.

But boy, do I have my opinions about poetry–somewhere along the way I’ve developed a fully formed poetic ideology, from creative conception to life on the page.  I think I know what poetry is, how it works, and why it’s useful–and not in some general sense.  My poetic ideology is specific and nuanced, centered around my personal interpretation of eastern philosophies, but also informed by cognitive science and psychology.

When I read other peoples’ comments on poetry, I’m past the stage of absorbing them — I’m merely judging them in relation to my own theories, saving those that fit, discarding the ones that don’t.  This has been coming up more often lately, as I’ve been reading essays on poetry for Aram Saroyan’s class.  I’m always thinking, “Pound is right when he says X, but seems not to understand Z.”  I’m even looking forward to turning my thoughts into a book, a project that at times seems more interesting than writing new poems.

This kind of opinionated arrogance flies in the face of my editorial stance as a relative novice, open to anything.  But I guess four and a half years of full-time poetry will do that to you.

Anyway, do check out the whole issue.  I’ve only had time to skim parts of it, but in the poetry section, I’ve already enjoyed Drew Riley’s bawdy voice, and E. Darcy Trie’s delicacy.  There are some names, too, familiar to Rattle readers–Antonia Clark, Martin Willits, Jr.–that I’m saving for later.

The journal is very young, but editor Sandee Lyles fully realizes the virtues of the young with her enthusiasm and dedication.  The format is interesting, too, both online and print-on-demand.  Think about submitting some work.

One minute ago I will have posted the winners of the 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize.  (I’m writing this before I go to bed on Sunday night, which should explain the unusual verb tense — what is that, pluperfect?)

As I type this, Megan is wading waist-deep in SASEs, which she’s filling with notifications to all of those who didn’t win.  It’s quite a sight.  Each letter is sealed with a bit of regret — I never win anything; I know what it feels like to get the thin envelope in the mail and not even bother reading it.

I don’t think it’s possible to judge a contest honestly without worrying that you’ve made the wrong choice — worrying that you may have missed an amazing poem because you were too tired, or your brain too numbed from the dull poems that happened to precede it.  There’s always the temptation to read through the large stack of poems left over at random, and see if you might come across something good you missed.  And I always give in.

But one thing is certain.  I read the 50-odd semi-finalist entries at least a dozen times each, and Joseph Fasano’s winning poem was the only one that became more enjoyable and moving each time.  That’s a rare thing.  And when we got down the the final three, Alan read each of them aloud in his raspy baritone (think Garrison Keillor, only Alan doesn’t mangle with melodrama), and immediately the decision became unanimous.

More assurance that there’s rhyme to our reason (or reason to our rhyme?):  Two of the honorable mentions, Ted Gilley and Hilary Melton, already have poems appearing in the December issue of Rattle, and another, Douglas Goetsch earned an honorable mention in 2006.

As we were reading these poems, we had no idea who the authors were — we even made a game of guessing gender before we unveiled the winners to ourselves, and performed pitifully.  That we chose the work of poets we’re already publishing demonstrates that, as subjective as our tastes may be, at least those tastes are consistent.  We can pick the needles out of the haystack.  So while I’m sure another team of editors might have chosen differently, I’m confident that we selected the best eleven poems we received, according to our own proclivities.

Talk of contests and ethics and curious decisions abound lately.  ‘Tis the season, I guess.  But we should all remember to turn our cheeks as we throw the stones, lest we be judged, too, or something. In other words, this is a messy, complicated world we’re all trying to navigate, and your information is usually incomplete even when you’re playing the role of lead actor, let alone the uncredited extra.

But some folks deserve the ire they draw.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend, who was upset that, after googling herself, the highest ranked link is a poem published at Poetry.com several years ago.  She describes the poem as awful, and it probably is — bad poetry happens to the best of us, and bad people will publish it and tell you it’s great, and ask you to buy a limited-edition silver-plated platter with your poem engraved on it for $500.

I told her not to worry about it, and I really wouldn’t.  People who don’t know that Poetry.com is a vanity scam will congratulate her for winning.  People who do will assume it was a submission to Wergle Flomp.

But what really interests me about Poetry.com is that people actually win.

I was in a workshop with Robert Mezey a few years ago, and one day he’d needed a ride from the airport, so a friend ended up driving him to our class, and sitting through it.  If I remember correctly, the man was a doctor by profession, and an amateur poet.  I don’t remember his name, and I don’t know that I’d divulge it even if I did — but, while chatting during a break, the topic of contests came up (must have been this time of year), and it turns out that he won $25,000 from Poetry.com.  And the check didn’t bounce.  He did have to pay the travel expenses to attend the conference, where W.D. Snodgrass presented him with the award. But $25k covers a plane flight and hotel, and then some.

He described his skepticism as he booked the flight, but with Snodgrass attending, he thought, what the hell?  And he was skeptical while staring at his check on the way to the bank.  And skeptical even as he looked at the deposit slip and checked his balance at an ATM machine the next day.  But the money was there.

Of course, when you screw so many naive grandmothers out of so much money, buying 500-page leather-bound anthologies for each of her grandchildren, so they have a haiku about gardening to remember her by, you can afford to throw the dogs a bone every once in awhile. If $25,000 is a drop in the bucket, one wonders, how big is the bucket?

After that class, I came home and looked up the man who’d claimed to have won.  And sure enough, there he was on a few message boards, defending Poetry.com, and on that website itself, listed as a winner.  And the poem wasn’t bad — if pressed, I’d probably call it uninspired, but structurally strong.

That was all the info Megan and I needed, and for awhile we started entering the Poetry.com “competition” ourselves.  We figured — hey, it’s like entering the lottery, only the odds are better, and the ticket is free!  Why not enter every month?  (I think we read the rules and saw that they only allow one entry a month.)  Why not log on to Poetry.com, type up whatever comes to mind, and send it in?  You never know — with your internal critic taking a nap, something good might even magically appear.  But if not, it’s only two minutes of your life you’ve wasted.

So I hereby encourage everyone to enter the Poetry.com “competition.”  I’d suggest using a secondary email address to avoid their spam — and if you hate getting junk mail, you should probably avoid this altogether, because they do require a physical address: When you become a “finalist” (every single time), you have to sign and return a granting of rights, so they can publish your “great” poem in a leather-bound anthology of similarly “great” work.

That was actually the stickler for us — we were just too lazy to keep sending those forms back, so after a month or two, we stopped sending in our spontaneous bad poems.  But if I had a little more free time, or if I’d known about this in college, I’d be much more diligent.

But even more interesting to me is the participation of W.D. Snodgrass.  There’s no doubt Snodgrass participates in Poetry.com, and lends them, with his name, a semblance of credibility.  Here’s a second source for confirmation — and a very worthy read, if you’re curious about what it feels like to be a Poetry.com “winner.”  Snodgrass has been doing this for a long time and has never apologized, as far as I can tell.  He’s a member of the Academy of American Poets.  His last book was published by a great small press.  Last fall I was at an event at SUNY Binghamton where he was the special featured reader.  All of these things are true, of course, because he’s actually a legitimate, good poet, who’s spent his life reading, writing, and teaching poetry.

I just don’t understand why no one seems to care that he participates in this vanity “competition.”  Maybe it’s just old news, and all the outrage is already under the rug.  Did I miss it?  I don’t understand how people can get worked up about Cider Press Review’s judging, which is only perhaps marginally shady, compared to Poetry.com.  Someone please enlighten me.

Another name that frequently comes up is Len Roberts, an English professor with almost a dozen volumes of poetry to his credit.  In an interview here, he defends the methodology of the International Society of Poets (those who run Poetry.com), even while admitting that their letters to poets are misleading.

On the surface, Roberts’ argument seems valid — who would disagree that everyone should have access to poetry, including the so-called “common people” (the implied classism aside)?  Who would argue that it should be limited to an academic pursuit by people with college degrees?  If you can view the ISP as a populist poetry movement, a kind of grassroots enterprise that promotes poetry to the masses, I can see how you might be able to support it.

But if you look any closer than that, Roberts’ comments become increasingly suspicious.  He brags, “ISP is committed to allowing just about anyone–your aunt, my grandmother–who publishes their poetry on Poetry.com to attend their conferences.”  But when was the last time you heard of an invitation-only poetry conference?  Your aunt and his grandmother can attend the AWP Conference in Chicago just as easily — and the admission price is much less than $500.

While the conferences themselves might be legitimate environments for learning about and promoting poetry, Roberts acknowledges the underbelly of the ISP:  “I do think the phrasing [of the letters] should be clearer, but that is a marketing decision, one which I have no power over.”

If attendees are broadening their enjoyment and understanding of poetry through the Poetry.com vanity “competition,” then maybe the “competition” can be a good thing — but it’s still a “competition,” with all the emphasis on the quotation marks.  It still preys on pride and ignorance.  It inflates the gullible ego, rakes in the profits, and sends those balloons away to burst on their own.  Almost everyone realizes they’d been mislead in the end, and after bragging to their friends and family, what an embarrassing slap in the face.  Poetry is such a personal activity, it’s so intimate — what could be more cruel than taking advantage of that?

So more than anything, I’m just curious — where is the outrage?  Foetry.com seems to stir up more discussion than Poetry.com — why is that?  If anyone has the answer, let me know.

First off, know that we always keep our promises.  Yesterday afternoon, with Rafael Nadal grunting in the background, we narrowed our 40 “quarter-finalists” down to 19 “semi-finalists” for the Rattle Poetry Prize, so we’re right on schedule to announce the winners on September 15th.  We’d hoped to choose the winner at that meeting, but this year the decision is proving difficult, with no clear-cut favorite, as there has been in years past.  I’ve read through each poem 6 times now, with reads 7 and 8 coming later today.  It’s nearing the point where I could recited them on command, but we’re still unsure which we like best.

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Angie Ledbetter is picking editors’ brains in seven parts over at Roses & Thorns (the blog of Rose & Thorn magazine), and I’m one of the lab rats.  Others include editors from Hayden’s Ferry and Monkeybicycle, Reb Livingston of No Tell Motel, and our old friend (from e.4) John Amen–nine of us in total.

I don’t know how much general readers will be interested in what we have to say, but I personally can’t wait for the subsequent installments.  I’ve never been particularly social with other editors–I avoid book conferences as much as possible, where most mingling takes place, and I didn’t rise through the ranks of other staffs to get here…I kind of came out of left field.  So the truth is, I have no idea what other editors think, and I can only assume our experiences are similar.  I can’t wait to see whether or not that’s really the case.  And I’ve seen the questions coming up: there are some interesting ones.

(I’m definitely going to win the award for worst metaphor.  I’ve already got a nominee in “plague cart” and I’m sure there are more to come.  For some reason, every time I do an interview the metaphor machine whirs to life and I start spewing out the kitchy half-formed comparisons that litter my quotes like lawn art.  See, there I go again.  I don’t really talk like this.)

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On Saturday, I posted the list of book received for review from August, and I’m really hoping someone wants to review John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy.  It’s such a beautiful, thick, expensive book, and the longer it sits on myself the longer I feel like I’m smothering a puppy.  (Damn, maybe I do really talk like this…)

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The cowboy/western issue is closed, but if you’re a kind of desert writer, you should send some work to Phantom Seed.  The call for submissions is here.  I really love collections of poetry that have a cohessive topical focus–themed issues like Runes, themed journals like Alimentum, themed anthologies like Between the Heartbeats.  Phantom Seed fits the bill, and Ruth Nolan is one of those few editors I’ve socialized with, being somewhat local.  I can vouch for her.

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There’s something else I was going to mention, but it’s completely slipped my mind…