He's not scary in person. Alan Cordle is 36, pale and round with thick glasses and soft fleshy cheeks. He smiles often and speaks in a wispy voice, which suits his day job as a librarian at Portland (Oregon) Community College.

Cordle also happens to be the most despised - some would say most feared - man in American poetry. At the very least, he is for the moment the most talked-about figure in this remote corner of the literary world.

Major poets, some with Pulitzer Prizes and MacArthur Fellowships on their resumes, call him an "attack dog," an "assassin," a "hangman" and, worst, a "brat with a major rage disorder." His supporters regard him a whistle-blower, champion and crusader. All agree that, for good or bad, Cordle has shaken up the establishment.

He did most of this from his sofa.

For the last 13 months, he has been running his laptop-created Web site, Foetry, which purports to expose the corrupt world of poetry contests.

The number of annual contests in the United States has ballooned from five in 1980 to more than 100 today. Most charge "reading fees"of $20 to $30 an entry, with some contests drawing thousands of applicants.

In today's literary climate, winning a major contest is one of the only sure tickets to continuing life as a poet. Winners get book deals and professorships; losers look for another line of work. In this world, according to Cordle, judges - often "celebrity poets" who teach at prestigious schools - routinely award prizes to their students, friends and lovers.

It is in his view a world of cozy cronyism that few outsiders know or care about, although poets have been whispering about it for decades.

The victims are the thousands of mostly young poets who pay to get a fair reading, and who are essentially "defrauded," Cordle says. "It's cheating. It's criminal. If this was anything other than poetry, the Department of Justice would be all over it."

According to Ohio-based poetry publisher Kevin Walzer, it would be like holding a big state lottery and then having "buddies of the Powerball operator win the big prize"again and again.

Even if it were coincidental, people might begin to suspect.

What transformed Foetry from just another obscure arty Web site with an attitude was Cordle's penchant for research. Like an investigative reporter, he solicited tips from insiders and used open-records laws to gather information from contest organizers.

Then Cordle did what no one else had publicly done: He named names.

"Exposing fraudulent contests. Tracking the sycophants. Naming names" became the Web site's motto.

Much of what Foetry calls collusion would not pass muster in court.

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