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.