Alan Cordle

Virginia Quarterly Review’s well-paid editor calls me bored and frankly, I am.  After his latest rehash of his one trick, I posted a comment and he attempted to divert attention from the real issue.  It’s a technique I’ve seen him use before: tell the person who dares to question him that no one else is interested.  He’s partially correct.  My comment was late to the party and I doubt many people were still reading at that point.  Where he’s wrong is evident on an earlier response to his piece.  On Sat Jan. 16, 2010 8:38 AM PST Matt Bell noted that Genoways’ salary is 134,000 a year, purportedly the same as a full professor at UVA.  I know that if you want to ride ponies in Charlottesville, you’ve got to have some money, but sheesh!  Bell’s comment has been “recommended” by 1327 Mother Jones readers at the time of blog entry.  So Genoways should take note.

Here’s what I said: I’d like to thank the commenter above, Matt Bell, for bringing Genoways’ salary into the open. Last year, I looked up some UVA public records and commented on the VQR’s annual budget, which is more than one half million dollars per year. I posted comments in response to yet another piece he wrote about disappearing literary journals: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/14/ner As a rebuttal, and because I’m a librarian, he suggested that he would fight anyone who would shutter libraries because they are money pits. Huh? It’s time that Genoways comes clean about his incredibly privileged position, which came to be because he is friends with UVA’s president’s son, John Casteen IV. Genoways should acknowledge that he’s used public funds both to publish his own book of poetry and Casteen IV’s. It’s the kind of corruption that Mother Jones used to expose.

The most defensive part of his response reads:

I met John Casteen IV months after I started in this job. More than a year after I was hired. Even if I had known him sooner, the fact that it was a presidential hire doesn’t mean the president sits on such search committees. I never met John Casteen III until after I was hired—and have seen him precious little ever since. And the subvention for the VQR Poetry Series isn’t paid out of “public funds.”

Unless I’m reading the org. chart incorrectly, VQR answers directly to UVA’s President, John Casteen III.  Genoways’ friendship with the prez’s son IS undoubtedly a hugely privileged position to be in.  It afforded the former to take over the fallen University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series and publish both himself and Casteen IV.  Genoways mentioned the subvention paid to produce these books.  Not sure where the money comes from if not the taxpayers.  His pocket?  Well, where does that money come from?  And the University of Georgia must have to pony up something: staff time at the least.  The VQR self-publishing series is a misuse of taxpayer money to create fake credentials for the VQR staff and board members.  And most offensively, the president’s son.  Good Old Boys.

Genoways tries to make this about something else: All because Casteen IV and I said, in 2005, that charges against poets and editors on the website that you ran at the time were “leveled carelessly and with no acceptable standards of proof” and called such practices “wrongheaded and dangerous”?

He should read again what I’m saying.  This has nothing to do with their comments about my site.  In fact, I liked their article.  As many people noted, it was practically plagiarized from my site.  It was flattering in that regard and I chuckled about the two quotes above.  After all, Genoways was the one who leveled charges against Jorie Graham and two of her students in the context of an interview with me.

It’s been almost five years; don’t you think it’s time to move on? Aren’t you supposed to be finishing the memoir that will finally save America?

Not sure how he heard I’ve written a memoir.  And if he thinks it’s going to save America — well — that’s a rave review.  Thanks!