Monday, August 25, 2008

Go Read This

I would call it unbelievable, but it's all too true--and it makes me sick to my stomach.

Go read this.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

. . . most of the comments responding to Brown on her site are commiserating with her, and saluting her bravery in exposing this nonsense——

but none are slamming his honor the Hoagland who bops in to these contests and does his ten minute stint as “judge” and then scoots off with another tick on his resume, another notch on his reputation, who doesn’t give a damn if it’s a scam, he doesn’t care if the process is fair and the press treats its poets properly, all he cares about is cashing that fee and that boost to his ego . . .
Hoagland is a Po-Biz whore who will obviously sell his ass out as a “judge” at every opportunity legitimate or ill- . . .

if you’re going to condemn the presses, you must also censure the “judges” of these contests: they’re part of the scam . . . they don’t give a damn about what happens after they take their money and run . . . Hoagland is as much to blame here as Cider is.

Ron said...

Bill, I'm not condemning the presses (just this one), and I'm certainly not condemning the judges--I pay two judges every year to help select chapbooks for my own tiny press, because I believe they should be compensated for their efforts.

I don't, however, deny that "Po-Biz whores" are out there. If there was indeed a gag order on last year's author (I've no reason to doubt this), it's conceivable that T.H. didn't know about the press's unethical dealings. Hopefully, now he does. Whether that makes a difference to him, I couldn't say.

Unknown said...

maybe it's jealousy because i've entered so many of those contests and never won or even made it into the finalist list (you can see scans of these rejections on several pages of my blog). . .

so i resent these "judges"—— i know that in most cases they don't read all the entries, only the few mss. which the publisher screens for them . . .

i myself would never judge a book contest without reading every entry, but of course i've never ever been asked to judge a book contest in the forty years since my first volume was published . . .

so put my comments about the hero Hoagland down to sourgrapes and envy . . . he's a successful poet and i'm a failure,

that's not a judgment, that's a fact——