Stumped like this,…..
we hear the Years…..
…………………cascade
And stoop to grace….
the Water……………….
…………………..‘s Fall,
The last Haiku from La-Croix-Ma-Fille in the process of being illuminated
in Chiang Mai by Julija Lebedeva of Oslo, Norway.
.
You’re in Cowpattyhammer.com, the blog of Christopher Woodman. You can click on About the Author if you have no idea where you are. This page is a new Preface not only to the blog but to the whole idea of a poet writing about himself as a ‘conflict of interest.’ Which is why it’s so hard.
..
THE HARD PART FIRST
The earliest posts in the Cowpattyhammer/Scarriet Archive were written between October and November, 2009, the last throes of what was essentially an ‘Uprising’ in contemporary American poetry. If you are unfamiliar with what happened at that time you may find some of the early discussions on this site unsettling. But they’re important, and I do hope you will have a look.
……………………………………. … C.W.
To scroll back to those very early threads you must enter the site with the URL: https://cowpattyhammer.wordpress.com , and at the end of each section you must click on “OIder Entries” until you get back to the very beginning, September 22nd, 2009.
..1.
A PAINFUL BUT HEALTHY CONFLICT
OF INTEREST
The establishment of the first American MFA program in 1940 saw the American poetry community expand almost as fast as the post-war economy, and as in all such success stories there were inevitably conflicts of interest. This was true not only in the awarding of poetry prizes and book publications, but also in the distribution of the new teaching posts upon which American poets were becoming increasingly dependent. Prizes led to publication and on to good teaching positions — there was no conflict of interest there as long as the process was transparent. 
But what happened was that a handful of MFA programs became particularly influential because their teachers were so charismatic and their students won the big prizes over and over again. Perhaps it was just because the best teachers were teaching the best students at the best schools, as was at first argued, but little by little evidence emerged that some of the teachers were indeed manipulating the judges, and some significant resignations followed.
That’s why the whistles blew so hard during the American Poetry ‘Uprising’ (2004-2010), and it wasn’t always pretty. As a result, stricter anti-conflict-of-interest Rules and Regulations did get to be introduced, and our American poetry house is certainly in better shape today. But the general question still remains: Is post MFA America serving all its poets ‘equally,’ and that means not ‘equally’ in a proprietary sense, but ‘equally well?’
For example, how many American poets may be overlooked because they’ve never been in one of the new writing programs? Some poets need to be completely alone to work, after all, and others may be side-lined by the anti-social demons that have always bedeviled poets. Are there poets who are also handicapped by having little or no formal education, or too much perhaps, or are they sometimes dismissed as too old, or too far away to be taken seriously, too difficult or too easy? And what about the American poet who is very, very slow, as some of the best ones are? Will that poet be expected to write faster and less self-critically in order to keep up with the new fashion of writing in close-knit peer groups? Are there any American poets who are just never going to be able to do that?
Not surprisingly, most of those who challenged the conflicts of interest in American poetry from 2004 to 2010 came from outside academia — i.e. from among those who had chosen not to opt for an MFA degree or a career in Creative Writing. They were extra-curriculars, so to speak: homesteaders and hobbyists, expatriates, mavericks, artists, librarians, free-thinkers, and home-schoolers. Of course there were a few troublemakers among them not unlike the ‘townies’ of the old ‘town & gown’ university/urban conflicts, and a small number of those could be difficult. But the majority were unattached ‘lay persons’ for whom the writing of poetry was very important and who were concerned about American poetry becoming an exclusively academic pursuit.
Whoever they were, the protesters who spoke out in public were put down by the establishment critics as “amateurs,” their observations were dismissed as “irrelevant,” and their voices as “shrill.” The protesters hadn’t been trained in the writing, critiquing or publishing of poetry, one influential teacher/critic insisted, and were therefore not qualified to comment on how poetry should be written, taught, judged, or distributed. And this statement isn’t made up — ideas of this sort were widely discussed in the on-line poetry Forums and magazines like Poets & Writers at the time. On the other hand, some of the most revealing exchanges were deleted by the moderators of the Forums because they were felt to undermine the Management, or so the moderators said. In addition, the best Forum of them all, the Poetry Foundation of America’s Blog Harriet, was closed down altogether because its moderator simply couldn’t handle the heat — he mistook creative energy for ‘snark,’ and set about banning the most engaged and articulate contributors until there was no commentary left. On the other hand, he was very young, had just landed a plum poetry job, and was obviously trying to impress his employers. And he was surrounded by his friends as well, a whole gaggle right there on-line rooting for him even as Blog Harriet self-destructed.
What a loss for American poetry all that was. Tragic.
NOTE from the Cowpattyhammer management: The Poetry Foundation was just getting started at the time and, looking back on it, we feel it was probably right for the management to have supported the Blog Harriet Moderator as it did. The Foundation had appointed him after all, inexperienced as he was, and simply had to let him get on with the job. On the other hand, by the time he had finished there was nothing left to salvage.
Among the “amateurs” involved in all this was a little known American poet in his late 60s who was sending out new work from a small post-office in South East Asia. He loved what he was doing, and assumed it would be considered carefully for publication by the recipients. Indeed, he hoped that one day it might become available for others to read, and that he might actually meet some English-speaking poetry readers in person as there were none where he lived.
That “amateur” poet was me, of course, Christopher Woodman, and little by little I came to realize what the protests were about. 
I realized that getting published in America had a lot to do with where and with whom you had studied how to write poetry not about what you wrote. Everybody seemed to have forgotten that in the past writers developed their skills on their own through intensive reading, imitation and practice, and that some of those accomplished a very high level of proficiency at a very young age without any coaching at all: John Keats, the Brontë sisters, and T.S.Eliot in their early 20s, Rimbaud, Rudyard Kipling, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Jean Rhys at 18, Edna St Vincent Millay at 16.
As for myself, the difficulties came to a head at 69, and I refused to remain silent as you’ll see if you visit some of the early Cowpattyhammer/Scarriet posts from Sept. to Dec. 2009 in particular — no wonder I spooked some people! The irony is that that was also the year my poem, “He Mistakes Her Kingdom for a Horse,” appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal and was in turn nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize, an honor beyond my wildest dreams. As it turned out that was also the end of the road for me as nothing of mine ever got published again.
And the “healthy” part?”
Not easy to say. Although my awakening had begun years earlier, I never stopped trying to get published by the same world that made me feel so uncomfortable. This is the sad part of my story. Little by little I had to acknowledge a ‘conflict of interest’ in myself: to keep on sending out and sending out and sending out even when I knew it was not only wrong but damaging to my own prospects. In the process I came to understand that the syndrome was also in my own person, and to realize just how hard it is to kick a bad habit when there is so much personal hope invested in it. Yes, it is, and it’s very hard to say the real word too, “ambition” — not always a bad one but still hard to say, even for me.
The 12 year ‘boycott’ (for want of a better word) of my work from the Pushcart nomination in 2010 to the present was a heavy sentence. On the other hand, how deliberate it was I will never know, and to be frank I don’t really want to know. Because those years of isolation also turned out to be my most creative period, helping me to pioneer my own sort of self-crafted ‘Books-in-the-Woods,’ and to beautifully finish them too — even with a split infinitive as garish as that when it works!
And capable even of this, the very last poem in Galileo’s Secret:
………………….AUBADE
……………………..If I could be what I meant
……………………..not stand on my head on top of a tree
……………………..with my feet in the stars
……………………..on a high frosty night
……………………..the chickens could chuckle lined up on the roost
……………………..and the deer be alright like the ridge
……………………..with no poem
……………………..or the moonlight —
……………………..and lying here still I’d be still
……………………..on your side of the bed.
…………………………………………………….….North Fish Creek
C.W.
Chiang Mai, October 4th, 2023
2.
A FORTHRIGHT APPEAL
Driggs, Idaho, July 2022.
I’ve been been working for sometime on this — and it’s grown shorter and shorter as it gets nearer and nearer to appearing in public. Indeed, have a look at the date on the first part with the dream-word, or the date as it was originally listed in the Directory on the left. Some of you may even have seen it when it was first visible — it was up and down for a long time, punching way over it’s weight much of the time, flailing.
At 83 my time is growing shorter, needless to say. On the other hand, I’m still in excellent health and good spirits, and would support to the best of my ability anyone who wanted to publish me. I’d be there, in other words. And I wouldn’t feel the need to talk about any of the old stuff, don’t worry about that. Just the new.
At the very least I hope that this Appeal will give anyone who lives on the margins with his or her distinct voice intact but unheard a lift.
A FORTHRIGHT APPEAL
You can CLICK on the Title to read the Appeal.
Cowpattyhammer 
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