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current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Adam Hardin, ULA
Bin Ramke:
The Fall of a Demi-Puppet!
Bin Ramke has a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches
at the University of Denver. He has had seven books of poetry
published, and won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1977. Since
1984, he has been the Editor of the University of Georgia
Contemporary Poetry Series.
In January 1999, Jorie Graham is asked by Bin Ramke to judge the
University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Prize, and she chooses
Peter Sacks manuscript, O’ Wheel, for publication in 2000.
Prior to January 1999, Jorie Graham, a Professor in the Iowa M.F.
A. Program, and Harvard Professor, Peter Sacks, are in Graham’s
own words, “good friends.” Peter Sacks is a poet and critic.
In 2000, Peter Sacks, serves on the hiring committee that
chooses to bring Jorie Graham to Harvard, and gives her the
prestigious Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Chair.
In 2000, Peter Sacks and Jorie Graham are married.
On March 23rd, 2005, Jorie Graham appears on WBUR’s The
Connection and discusses “ethics” at length with the host who
never questions Jorie about her own ethics, and who dismisses a
caller when the caller asks a question about Jorie’s long
history of choosing former students and friends in contests in
which she served as Judge.
On March 31st 2005, in the Boston Globe, Jorie Graham attempts
to defend herself claiming that she personally pointed out the
conflict of interest to Bin Ramke, and that Bin Ramke agreed
that it was a conflict of interest and chose the winner, without
Mrs. Graham. He selected Peter Sacks.
If this is true, then one wonders why Bin Ramke just two years
later, in 2002, allowed Brown Professor C.D. Wright to chose two
of her former students, Mark McMorris who has a Ph.D. and M.F.A.
from Brown, and Sam Truitt who has an M.F.A. from Brown. C.D.
Wright published Sam Truitt’s first book through her Lost Roads
Press. The book , Anamorphosis Eisenhower, was reviewed by Bin
Ramke in the Boston Review in December 1998. Sam’s second book,
Vertical Elegies 5, received the prize while C.D. Wright and Sam
Truitt had an on-going business relationship as publisher and
author. This was reported by the ULA.
In May of 2005, Alan Cordle, the man behind Foetry.com, obtained
a letter Bin Ramke wrote to the director of the University of
Georgia Press in 1999. In the letter, Bin Ramke says that Mrs.
Graham “enthusiastically concurs” with his decision to pick Mr.
Sacks’ work.
In May of 2005, after the contents of the letter are made
public, Bin Ramke resigns his position as Editor of the
University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series.
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