Plagiarism?

I've had several "what do you think?" questions about the current crescendo in revelations of plagiarism in the poetry world, and attempting to set my mixture of thoughts on the matter down is as good a reason as any to revive this long comatose blog.

First it seems that there are a range of 'offences' being brought to our attention: in some cases the perpetrators have simply stolen somebody else's work and, after small alterations, have passed it off as their own. Then there are cases where some greater degree of rework has been done, and lastly there are instances where the accused has made a "mash-up" of as many as 50 other sources.

For me, the only clear-cut case is the first - where someone has passed another's poem off as their own, possibly with minor alterations. This is without any doubt utterly unacceptable.  The other cases are potentially more interesting ... is it conceivable that a piece of writing with many borrowings could be more than the sum of its parts? In rare cases I think the answer might be 'yes', and the implication of this is that we should perhaps look more closely at the final resulting product, and at the same time temper our judgement of the methods of construction.

Borrowings are nothing new. I remember Peter Porter once saying he was dismayed to find that what he considered to be one of the best lines in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland had been directly lifted from Dante: "I had not thought death had undone so many." Eliot, it must be said, did include an end note with a reference to the original.

I have previously mentioned a wonderful essay by Felicty Rosslyn in an old P. N. Review (No 111 from 1996). At that time I was commenting on a poem by Harry Mathews which was an uncredited reworking of an admittedly famous poem by Thomas Wyatt.

Rosslyn's essay is about Pope's translations of Homer, and I'll reprise a little of it here. Rosslyn demonstrates how the opening of Dryden's Iliad (1700):

The wrath of Peleus' son, O Muse, resound
Whose dire effects the Grecian army found.

was clearly in Pope's mind when he wrote in his 1715 version:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring
Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess sing!

Two days after Pope's Book I appeared, a rival - one Thomas Tickell - brought out his own translation, which began ....

Achilles' fatal Wrath, whence discord rose,
That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber'd Woes,
O Goddess sing.

Pope angrily annotated his copy of this, but admired the clear initial focus on Achilles, and the unnumber'd woes. His 1736 edition has a rewritten opening:

Achilles' Wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess, sing!

The modern reader may feel somewhat uncomfortable when it is realised how Pope's translation was built upon the work of his predecessors and contemporaries. Much the same is true for the King James Version of Bible, whose anonymous team of translators relied heavily upon earlier translations. The 'collaborative' nature of Pope's translations based on the work of others and in the end involving the work of a team of assistants, much like a Renaissance master painter with his school, does not sit entirely comfortably with the modern conception of the individual creator. We dwell still in the shadows of Romanticism with its cult of the individual rebel genius ... think Beethoven, think Byron, think Picasso or Stravinsky. Yet Stravinsky understood well the value of constraint in the creative process and this links him back to the pre-Romantic Bach with his heavily constrained fugues.

The recent quote unquote scandal of Andrew Slattery, Graham Nunn, and other Icaruses burnt by their strange rush to the poetic limelight, copying lines and whole works of others, passing them off as their own, and even winning major prizes, has brought news articles speaking of the plague of internet-fuelled plagiarism. But where precisely is the problem? Presumably this is primarily an issue of psychology, perhaps a tragic tale of ambition outstripping talent, or something morr commonplace like carelessness or cheating. Peter Bakowski has suggested it might be akin to the psychology of kleptomania. But some commentary would have us think there is a problem with today's poetry ecosystem. Is it perhaps that poets read too little and forgeries can too easily pass undetected? Full marks, by the way, to Anthony Lawrence for spotting Slattery's reused phrases. Is it that the taste of the day allows an evocative and suggestive surface pastiche of plausible sounding phrases to pass muster as a poem? John Ashbery explicitly championed a Chinese whispers approach to meaning, and has been influential in setting the tone of the times (is 'Zeitstimmung' a word?).

Derek Walcott once remarked: "you know you just ravage and cannibalise anything as a young writer". So is plagiarism a young man's caper? David R Morgan is now 58 but his prolific plagiarism started in his late twenties, thirty years ago. It seems like a bad habit he couldn't kick, and which he returned to in times of stress. If the internet is to be trusted, it seems Nunn (b 1971) is in his early 40s, Slattery (b. 1980) and Christian Ward (b 1980) are both in their early 30s. I can't find any information on C. J. Allen., one of whose victims, Matthew Welton, has finally spoken out here at the Carcanet blog.

I hope it is obvious that no one should pass off the work of others as their own. Someone once, I am told, took some of Peter Bakowski's poems, changed their titles and published them as his own. Sadly, this is the sort of thing that seems to have occurred in many of the recently publicized cases. For instance here is an example, first the original

SAVANNAHS by Eric Ormsby

Acknowledge the savannahs of our origins,
Those smooth, descending pastures to the sea

Then the 'reworking'

WHAT THE HERON KNOWS by Graham Nunn

away from the savannahs
Of our origin
Those smooth, descending
pastures to the sea.

Alexander Pope took words and phrases from others and produced a better version in the end, but here Nunn seems to have simply mucked up the original poem which had sound syntactic and semantic cohesion; the pilfered reworking seems a mess. In this case, if I had been the original writer, I suspect I might be even more upset at the mindless vandalism, than in the outrageous theft and false pretences.

Where do mash ups sit in the spectrum of plagiarism? Having not yet read the prize-winning Slattery poem which is apparently a mash-up of 50 sources, nor seen an account of the borrowings, I can make no comment, other than to say I do find it somewhat surprising that a poem constructed by such means was the best available to the judges of the prize: it feels as if any meaning or sentiment in the poem would have to be external and accidental, but one must remember Stravinsky's game of notes, and understand that we might be equally surprised to learn that a great piece of music could be based on a theme built from the German note names of the composer's name B-A-C-H.  So difficult as it may be, we really should disregard any hype about the method of making, and look to the created work itself. The Wasteland is part mash-up, part parody, yet is still regarded by many as one of the more significant poems of the 20th century.

Singular Intensity - Concentrating All Her Gifts

Mark Doty described Lynda Hull's all-or-nothing approach to writing, and how this worked on him as an influnce: "She worked at her art with a singular intensity, and in each new poem she'd raise the stakes as high as she could, putting everything at risk, putting herself into her coruscating, elegant texts. So one had to live up to that, poems had to matter that much."

I am reminded of Richard Aldington's recollection walking through a graveyard with T. S. Eliot and discussing Thomas Gray's Elegy. Eliot remarked that "if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success."

And I also think - with closer relevance - of Van Gogh's remarks about working furiously because the opportunities for work do not recur, and working quickly like an old lion who kills with a single blow of the paw, and his talk of the delight, and the troubles, cares and disappointments, and the times of helplessness, that go with the calling of an artist.

I remember reading some of Lynda Hull's poems in litmags towards the end of 1993 and being struck by them, the way whole worlds were created with rich detail, and the way deep feeling seemed part of the fabric of each line. I was thinking of writing to ask for some poems for a magazine I was editing, but procrastinated. Months went by and then by chance I heard that she had died.

Snow and Fire

Perhaps it is the temperature hitting 41 a couple of days ago, or today's news that Lake Wendouree is on fire - the lake has been dry for a while (see the No Swimming sign), but I have been thinking of snow - one of the many things I miss about living in Europe - les neiges d'antan! Louis MacNeice uses this phrase from Villon as a title of one section of 'Out of the Picture', but it is a short poem of his, written a few years later, that came to mind. It directly captures the dreamfeel in the clarity and surreality of the image:

The Brandy Glass

Only let it form within his hands once more --
The moment cradled like a brandy glass.
Sitting alone in the empty dining hall...
From the chandeliers the snow begins to fall
Piling around carafes and table legs
And chokes the passage of the revolving door.
The last diner, like a ventriloquist's doll
Left by his master, gazes before him, begs:
'Only let it form within my hands once more.'

There's a recent review in The Times by Paul Batchelor
of George Szirtes Collected Poems. I first came to Szirtes via the book Reel, which I found myself returning to many times, and have since worked my way backwards with An English Apocalypse and The Budapest File. The 520-page Collected is a real treat. Batchelor's review makes special reference to snow: "Snow invariably wakens something special in Szirtes; he is drawn to its transience" and quotes the following lines

Snow takes form: the shapes it makes mount up
and vanish against sky, a paler more transcendent
cloud, a broader emptiness, briefly dependent
on whatever it clings to, fit for the hands to cup
and pack solid.

And I am reminded of an Alan Brownjohn poem, 'Snow in Bromley' which appeared in the October 1958 issue of Poetry and Audience, and the July/August issue of New Left Review and discussed and quoted at some length by Roger Garfitt in his essay 'The Group'. I first came across it in the Brownjohn / Hamburger / Tomlinson Penguin Modern Poets #14, purchased around 1981 secondhand for $2.80 on the way home from school.

Snow in Bromley

As of some unproved right, the snow
Settles the outer suburbs now,
Laying its claim unhurriedly
On gnome and monkey-puzzle tree.

Observe its power to shape and build,
Even in this unfruitful world,
Its white informal fantasies,
From roofs and paths and rockeries.

And swayed by such soft moods, I fall
Into forgiving nearly all
The aspirations of the place,
And what it does to save its face:

The calm and dutiful obsession
With what is 'best in our position',
The loyal and realistic views,
The rush-hours with the Evening News --

The snow fulfils its pure design
And softens every ugly line,
And for a while will exorcize
These virulent proprieties.

Within one mile of here there is
No lovelier place to walk than this,
On days when these kind flakes decide
That what it boasts of, they shall hide.

Reading it now I am struck by the 17th-century poise and wit of the ending ... the fleeting conceit of snow 'deciding', the parenthetical syntax, the full end rhyme. And this reminds me too of early Thom Gunn, take for instance the final stanza, and especially the final line, of the poem 'Lerici' from his 1954 collection Fighting Terms ...

Byron was worth the sea's pursuit. His touch
Was masterful to water, audience
To which he could react until an end.
Strong swimmers, fishermen, explorers: such
Dignify death by thriftless violence --
Squandering with so little left to spend.

Horses' Mouths

Reginald Shepherd reminds us of Allen Tate's essay where he discussed 'Ode to the Confederate Dead' and says that he is far from an expert on his own poems. Once I discovered by chance that one of my poems had been used in a Year 12 (VCE) examination paper (no one had informed the poet) .. when I got hold of the paper, which included at least one multiple choice question asking what the poet had intended, I found myself quite unsure of what the examiners thought would be the correct answer, as I recall two of the four options seemed plausible, but neither hit the mark.

A recent post by Jane Holland describes some rough notes she made on the composition of long poems. This prompted me to dig out my old copy of Helen Gardner's The Composition of Four Quartets, and it struck me how much useful and interesting is this sort of simple work record than the more common commentary and interpretation. Getting a glimpse of a poet's revisions, and explanations in correspondence of various phrases, lines, and passages, provides more insight than a shelf of criticism. Gardner's book shows how Eliot was - amongst other things - striving for clarity. And surely this is true even of many 'difficult' poets: Geoffrey Hill in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin wrote "I have no ambition to be famously - or notoriously - obscure. The difficulties of daily living get in the way and my poems, unavoidably it seems, collide with the densities of common existence"

Ludic lines

David Caddy has written an appealing piece on Tom Raworth, drawing connections back to the verbal play of radio programmes such as Much Binding in the Marsh and The Goons. This is a useful insight, although I now fear that I will always hear an inner Neddie Seagoon when reading Raworth. I recall one of John Forbes' titbits of advice to me - he used to visit when I lived not far from him in Carlton - was that one could spot the crap in your own poems if you read them aloud in a silly voice ... he recommended Japanese Science Fiction voices.

Raworth stands in that tradition of 'ludic and literary self-consiousness' which Morrison and Motion picked up on - for them it was primarily manifested in the work of the Martians (or the School comprising English poets with the initials C.R. - the U.S equivalent including Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi is another thing altogether). The somewhat notorious use of the word 'ludic' came after M&M had curiously commented that nothing much had seemed to be happening in England in the 60s and 70s. But of course the playfulness goes back at least as far as those 'proto-ludic' figures, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Although here of course we do run into the unclearly marked divide between light verse and serious. Oscar Williams' A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry had a separate substantial section at the end for light verse. The anthology was influential if only because Geoffrey Hill's father bought him a copy on a shopping-trip into Birmingham when the young Geoffrey was about fifteen. Hill carried the Little Treasury around Worcestershire in his jacket pocket for years until it disintegrated. At one time he knew by heart every poem in it. Bunting in his seventies carried the Penguin Njal's Saga around in his pocket. An enquiry into poets' jacket pockets through history might prove enlightening.