From a tipster

[alan]

The fact that Arnold went to Yale is conflict-of-interest enough for me, but read on . . .

Can anyone confirm?

I haven't read through your site exhaustively, but I didn't see anything about "the Merwin Yale Fraud." You've heard about the Craig Arnold
incident, right? In Merwin's first year of judging the Yale, he refused
to select a winner. If forced to select a winner, he said he would
choose Arnold's manuscript, which hadn't been entered. Yale refused to
allow a winner who didn't submit to the contest. So no winner was
selected the first year and Arnold won the second year. Meaning, you had
no chance to win the Yale for the first two years that Merwin judged.
(And his manuscript selections, from the ones I read, were pretty
boring).

More on Arnold's good "fortunes" in this press release.

[HungryCaterpillar]

He didn't choose anybody?

What a conpetition!

P.S
can someone please clarify? I'd really like to know too.

[HungryCaterpillar]

BTW, what's with the "cooking course"?

Sounds like our conpetitor is a real glutton.

[Bugzita]

Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Glück observes in her foreword, “Green Squall begins and ends in the garden...”

More here:

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/youngerpoets.asp

I'm looking around for past winners, and I will post them here.

Bugz

[Bugzita]

The Yale Series of Younger Poets champions the most promising new American poets. Awarded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Past winners include Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, John Hollander, James Tate, and Carolyn Forché. Louise Glück is the current judge of the Series.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/youngerpoets.asp

But I'll also look for specific years and judges.

Bugz

[Bugzita]

From Wikipedia:

Recent winners of the competition include:

(1973) Field Guide, by Robert Hass
 
(1976) Gathering the Tribes, by Carolyn Forché

(1977) Beginning with O, by Olga Broumas

(1980) One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, by William Virgil Davis

(1983) Picture Bride, by Cathy Song

(1987) Above the Land, by Julie Agoos
 
(1989) Out of the Woods, by Thomas Bolt

(1990) Hermit with Landscape, by Daniel Hall

(1992) Hands of the Saddlemaker, by Nick Samaras

(1993) Stone Crop, by Jody Gladding

(1994) Thinking the World Visible, by Valerie Wohlfeld

(1995) Living in the Resurrection, by T. Crunk

(1996) Cities of Memory, by Ellen Hinsey

(1997) My Shining Archipelago, by Talvikki Ansel
 
(1998) Shells, by Craig Arnold

(1999) Ultima Thule, by Davis McCombs

(2000) Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, by Maurice Manning

(2001) Discography, by Sean Singer

(2002) Famous Americans, by Loren Goodman

(2003) The Cuckoo, by Peter Streckfus
 
(2004) Crush, by Richard Siken

(2005) Green Squall, by Jay Hopler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Series_of_Younger_Poets_Competition

[alan]

Thanks for that partial list BUT the "contest" goes back even earlier.

One example: Auden solicting Ashbery's manuscript, which had not been entered.  Surprise!  It won.

Here's the Yale anthology at Amazon, which allows a peek at the contents.  How many of the "winners" went to Yale?  How many studied with/knew their judges?

[Monday Love]

That's unbelievable.  

Merwin finds no winner, requests that Craig Arnold who did not submit should win--then the next year Craig Arnold wins.

And Yale tolerates this??

I googled a bit and found that Craig Arnold "raises eyebrows" because he gives readings "in leather pants."   oooooh.   He must be in the "Legitimate Dangers" anthology!    I wonder if Craig Arnold looks like Jim Morrison.  

Judge Merwin digs leather, obviously.  

"Where's the manuscript by that poet who wears leather pants?"

And here's an excerpt from a 'review' from a site called "Pif" of  Arnold's "Shells," the book that won the Yale Younger. (The review is gushing in its praise, 100% positive)

Page one drew me further in, with the book's first poem, "Hermit Crab."

A drifter, or a permanent house-guest,
he scrabbles through the stones, and can even scale
the flaked palm-bark, towing along his latest
lodging, a cast-off periwinkle shell

The second time through the poem, I realized that it rhymed: guest and latest, scale and shell...

This sums up the stupidity of the modern poetic temper.    

Arnold's poem sounds like the text for a children's book on sea creatures, but what struck me was the way the reviewer convinces herself that she is in the presence of genius.

The "second time through the poem" she "realized it rhymed."

Rhyme that is nuanced is always considered by twits with tiny brains as a sure sign of a poet's sophistication and modern sensibility--the poet has his cake and eats it too, not jangle-rhyming as in the old days, but still rhyming--so says the logic of the twits.

But look.  In the above example, "scale" does not rhyme with "shell" and "guest" does not rhyme with "latest."

Take any random passage of prose and half-rhymes abound.

Ah, but the foets live in a world so much more nuanced than the rest of us.  

The reviewer, practicing to be a real foet, no doubt, retains some humility still, for she confesses she had to read the poem twice to hear what she didn't hear.  

A real foet hears what he doesn't hear right away.

[yohejohn]

To be fair, the poem does rhyme: the "st" sounds and the "l" sounds. Merwin does it a lot. It's a subtle rhyme, unlike a Hallmark greeting card.

But it's not about wether you like the poem or not. That will always be subjective. It's wether the story is true. Which, if so, would dissappoint me greatly, since I am a great fan of Merwin's. But innocent until proven guilty, right?

[Monday Love]

To be fair, the poem does rhyme: the "st" sounds and the "l" sounds. Merwin does it a lot. It's a subtle rhyme, unlike a Hallmark greeting card.

But it's not about wether you like the poem or not. That will always be subjective. It's wether the story is true. Which, if so, would dissappoint me greatly, since I am a great fan of Merwin's. But innocent until proven guilty, right?

You are a “fan” of Mr. Merwin’s?  Do you cheer when we walks into the room?

It matters a great deal whether I like a poem or not, and in this instance, it matters a great deal whether I like Mr. Arnold’s poem or not, for if I can satisfy myself that Mr. Arnold is not a good poet, I can at least make a case that Mr. Merwin is a bad judge and let his friends call him a good man—for no doubt he is.

Surely you realize that rhyme involves more than the sound-agreement of consonants,
and involves more than sound-agreement itself. The harmony of the rhythm between the lines also determines the force of the rhyme.  The less forceful the rhyme, the more it falls into the category of *accident# to the ear of the listener, who will unconsciously hear a host of similarities in any random series of words, similarities which evoke no harmony, no art.
The naïve modern temper is overly impressed with half-rhyme; to those less naïve, the earnest use of partial rhyme is merely annoying to the ear, such as we have all experienced when an unmusical person whistles the better part of a day a partially realized melody.  

A Debussy Mr. Arnold is not, for what impressionist would patiently inscribe for us the scientific facts of a crab climbing the bark of a tree?  Now which is it?  Is the crab a “drifter” or a “permanent house-guest?”  I want to dream, and you’ve only made me confused.

[adamhardin]

The poem is of a certain mundane quality that makes me think the poet went on Wiki and looked up crabs, and then composed his poem from the information at hand. Or did he watch Sesame Street? I swear that Sesame Street when I was a child talked about crabs carrying their houses on their backs. Was it turtles? Maybe there's a good poem about turtles. Maybe you can off-rhyme Galapagos with hobos. Turtles look like wrinkled hobos who ride the rails. Right?

[Monday Love]

The poem is of a certain mundane quality that makes me think the poet went on Wiki and looked up crabs, and then composed his poem from the information at hand. Or did he watch Sesame Street? I swear that Sesame Street when I was a child talked about crabs carrying their houses on their backs. Was it turtles? Maybe there's a good poem about turtles. Maybe you can off-rhyme Galapagos with hobos. Turtles look like wrinkled hobos who ride the rails. Right?

Galapagos and hobos!  Genius!  We’ll burn Hallmark to the ground with that half-rhyme!  The combination invokes both natural science and social historicism.  All we have to do is find some leather pants for you, Adam, and Merwin will be knocking down your door with not only a contest application form—but a prize!

[yohejohn]

Monday:

Surely you realize you come off like a complete ass, and that you are what gives this site a bad rep. Thank you for the reminder to never get involved on a thread in which you participate.

[Monday Love]

I Hear The Merwins Singing Each To Each

I looked in vain for the world
in the lobby of the hermit crab hotel
when peace came to me in leather pants
half-rhymes of a periwinkle shell

a vision of hunger in sea foam
where the animals always forgive us
in the valley of the yale younger
where trees appear to be lonely

among the rough rocks
in light that longs to be in the world
where are the leather pants
mr Arnold you don’t know me

I was judging a contest and
the world fell into a hole
where yoko ono lets me and
what seems now to grow from bad naropa and

turtles I can trust the turtles and
you might want to let me choose and
if you don’t mind I will carry it and
please hurry the animals are certain

we could ride over the last whale
the last flower the whole world waiting
in the last light almost afraid to touch the world
the wives of graves nurturing you and I

[Wilson]

Over the years I have had my differences with Monday Love.  But I really cannot respect half-brains who resort to name-calling and writing people off as idiots without the common courtesy to explain why said person is an idiot. If you are willing to make a claim then back it up or stop wasting our time and buy yourself a drool-cup.

Even if Monday is dead wrong about something, he does not suffer from a shortage of words to explain his position.  And in that you can usually see where his logic has taken the off-ramp to Iowa City.