"We" Is An Army Of One: The Outing Of Foetry

"We are not afraid; our work is just beginning."

--Alan Cordle as "Foetry," on Mobylives.com, before his public
outing.

"Strangely enough, I cancelled this domain's hosting recently.
The end was coming anyway, even before this."

--Alan Cordle, on the Foetry website message boards, after his
public outing.

The italicized comments below are excerpts from an email I sent to a journal editor who, at the time, was researching the efforts to unmask Foetry (though no article was planned). He'd been searching web and found me (among other, more relevant sources, I hope). It's interesting to read what I wrote to him a week ago in the wake of the website's demise a little over a week later.

Your task is truly Herculean. I have been trying to follow everything. I've given up quite a bit. But one of my initial reactions remain. Namely, that if the whistle-blowers aren't even willing to stand by their accusations with their own names, then there is no reason to take any of their accusations seriously. Is trying to reveal Foetry's identities criminal? I don't think so. Is it sour grapes? Only if you think star-sixty-nining a crank caller to speak with the brat's mom is sour grapes.

Over the weekend, Foetry's anonymous administrator, thanks (as near as I can tell) to the efforts of Jim Behrle, Janet Holmes, and Who is Foetry?, was revealed to be Alan Cordle, a research librarian living in Portland, Oregon and husband to a published, prize-winning poet. Cordle, now having the shadow of accountability looming over him, soon followed up these revelations with a belated confession, a backhanded apology for being forced to create Foetry, along with an announcement to close Foetry down. Currently, only the message board entries having to do with Foetry's demise are accessible. The rest of them allow access only to Cordle.

Is [Foetry] necessary? The only way to answer that might be to examine the facts they present with a fine tooth comb to see if any of them stand on any solid ground. Having a little experience in journalism, I've been trying to perceive the Foetry website from that standpoint, and I find it wanting on the basis of its facelessness alone. Experience tells me that good journalism is when reporters hide names of sources to protect the sources while standing by the information. Bad journalism is when writers hide behind false names to protect themselves.

Names or not, it's really absurd for them to compare the effort to "name" certain Foetry members to McCarthyism. If anything, McCarthyism is reflected in their naming of names without accountability. [Not sure why I put "name" in quotes, but I must have had a good reason at the time.]

With modern journalism in today's America, it is near-impossible to even claim objectivity. As a freelancer, I've sat on a story or two about the small press world due to my connections with some of the story topics. Cordle must have realized the same thing with his now-obvious connections to the poetry world. He was faced with a choice: Either overcome the obstacles with good writing and solid research, or hide behind anonymity and make an ass of yourself. No need to guess which was chosen.

It should said that one thing more pathetic than the comparison to McCarthyism (though Cordle's list of offenses by certain poets seem to be turning into one big laundry list) is one poster on Holmes' site comparing Cordle's anonymity to that of Thomas Paine (So Foetry's time was like the days of the American Revolution. Yeeeeah I see the connection).

As of this writing, Cordle is now putting the Foetry domain up for sale. In the meantime, while sending legal threats to Janet Holmes and using Old Hag to track down people posting under pseudonyms (presumably for further legal action), he is offering on his site apologies to those he offended in the past on posts that are no longer accessible even through registered users. The most notable apology is to Reginald Sheppherd, who no doubt has copies of the offending pages. It is fascinating, albeit in a disgust-invoking way, to contrast Cordle's behind-the-curtain bravado with his new last-minute humility. What a terrible coward.

Jim Behrle is a prime example of everything Foetry is doing wrong. Though I wouldn't give thumbs-up to everything Jim Behrle has done (I am not sure why he called out Michael Hoerman the way he did--though there might have been something on the boards that I missed), the fact is that Jim Behrle puts his name behind everything he does. That puts him miles ahead of the game.

Also, Jim Behrle is known to be against one or two of the main things that Foetry has cried out against (contest fees, academia in poetry). The fact that they lost Jim Behrle as an ally suggests to me that the issue of anonymity is being used to cover up sloppy research, poor journalism, and (if some of the posts can be believed to be sincere), bad poetry coupled with ill-conceived criticism.

I don't have an opinion either way about the Jorrie Graham controversy (if it truly is that and not a figment of Foetry's collective imagination). But when they accuse Jim Behrle of attacking Foetry to advance his career, I have to laugh. Jim Behrle doesn't care. He has been anti-publicity and anti-accolade for as long as I've known him.

Jim Behrle is going around now offering to buy the Foetry domain. Jokingly, I suspect, but it's actually a good idea. I truly believe that Jim could have started a Foetry dot com. A Foetry dot com, mind you, not the current creation. The fact remains that Cordle couldn't see a natural ally in Behrle or any of the other younger writers of note. Instead, he chose wannabes who don't understand that it's really easy to criticize language poets if you don't know what you're talking about. Instead, he lobbed all opponents of Foetry in one big conspiratorial bubble. That move alone is quite a testament to his ignorance and his lack of credibility as a critic of poetry. If his wife was indeed against Foetry, it was surely for a number of reasons he couldn't grasp.

The sad part is that the issues Foetry claims to tackle are relevant. They should be openly addressed. Especially since poets are becoming more connected between the blog boom and the continuing marginalization of the form. The debate, however, may be spoiled for a while, leaving out any intelligent discussion not despite but because of Foetry.

The truth of the matter is that poetry is much too marginalized to be assessed by an outsider (or an individual with such poorly informed ideas that he comes across as an outsider or a dillentante). The next critic who comes along is going to have to understand the state of the art form as well as the state of the industry. The criticism should be allowed to continue, but Foetry, unless taken over by someone with a public identity and logical, understanding mindset, should be allowed to be written off as a poor joke.

Final thoughts: Who Is Foetry should end even the appearance of hypocrisy and reveal their own identities to the public. Same goes for those who have left posts as Cordle's wife (who is not being mentioned here). It is a sick pleasure to watch the lawsuit threats build up (as they most likely have) to the point where Cordle's threats are beyond his financial means, thereby getting a feeling of the helplessness his targets must have felt. But it is a much-too-easy and cheap pleasure. If you sign your own name, you are already leagues ahead of Cordle both mentally and morally.