Moonlight Musings

Poetry Is Theft

... said some poet, once (it may have been Keats). Many others have quoted it since without attribution, so we don't really know who originally said it. Which rather fits the assertion, doesn't it? Everyone stealing the line, I mean, until its origin is lost or at least becomes uncertain.

What is theft; what is borrowing? What is legitimate allusion; what is illegal and fraudulent? 

Complications of the Internet

In our digital era, where students and researchers use Google and Wikipedia etc., it's easy to copy and paste information. It has become the norm. When is this legitimate and when is it plagiarism? I think it depends whether the source is acknowledged or the material is passed off as your own. When in doubt, err on the side of caution!

In practice it's not always easy, as I find when researching material for The Living Dead and I Wish I'd Written This. Sometimes I give a direct quote; that makes attribution easy enough. But when I paraphrase, and mix information from various sources to make the article more readable, it can get tricky. 

I rely on stock phrases like, 'Wikipedia tells us'. The penalties for breach of copyright, a closely related matter, can be severe. I don't know if the same applies to cases of plagiarism, but a guilty finding would destroy one's reputation as a writer, which many of us might regard as even worse. Even an innocent lack of attribution might cause a student to fail an exam. (Ignorance is seldom an acceptable excuse; we are supposed to check these things.)

However, that's more to do with matters of scholarship. Let's bring the focus back to poetry.

The unwritten word

I read somewhere, once, that some societies don't care about authorship of poems; they just love the poetry. So it doesn't matter in those societies, is not a shameful thing, if one poet uses another's lines and passes them on, perhaps interwoven with his/her own. It's not an intentional fraud, simply something no-one worries about. But these tend to be societies of oral poetry ... or so I read. Asia, the article said, or Russia. 

I don't know about that. Is there somewhere in the world, still, where poetry is only spoken and memorised, never written down? Lots of 'spoken word poetry' happens right now in the Western world, we know – but it is usually written as well. And the Western world is where we take pride in original composition and like to put our names to our creations; even the rappers do that.

I am ignorant of a lot of world history; for instance I know almost nothing of Arabic poetry, or African. So I am open to being educated on this subject. Maybe there is still a tribal culture somewhere, where poets are not proprietary – but in Russia there is a long tradition of poets putting their names to their work, even in the days of Stalin's gulags when it was dangerous to write any poems that didn't toe the party line. In China, Japan, India, Indonesia, etcetera, poets have claimed their writings for centuries, and still do today.

It's true that, before written language, or before the ability to write was widespread, the oral tradition and memorisation were the ways poetry was disseminated and retained, in Europe as much as Asia or any other continent. But whatever happened in ancient times and wherever it happened, for a long time now authorship has mattered to us. I certainly like people to know that it was me who wrote what I wrote.

What's in a name?

So where does that well-known poet, Anonymous, fit into this discussion? S/he wrote such good things! I'm glad they've been preserved for us. But no-one has tried to steal them; it's just that the authorship has been lost. I'm sure, if it was me, I'd rather have something of mine out there with no name on it, getting read, than have it named but unseen. What I would seriously object to, though, would be someone else putting their name on something I originally wrote and passing it off as theirs.  

And yet, we do learn from each other, and borrowing is a well respected tradition too. So when is it allusion and when is it plagiarism? 

Case histories

These thoughts arose when I featured the wonderful Aga Shahid Ali in a recent 'The Living Dead' post. I was startled to discover that his poems were full of allusions, none of them attributed. 

But they were very well-known allusions. The particular poem I featured was a ghazal about rain, which ended with the line, 'No-one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.' Who wouldn't immediately think of e. e. cummings's 'No-one, not even the rain, has such small hands'?

It's interesting to note that Ali has not quoted cummings perfectly; he has slightly altered the line – and yet it is instantly recognisable. His work is peppered with similar examples. As both poet and academic, moving in very literary circles, he must have fully expected that these allusions would be recognised. He wasn't trying to deceive anyone into thinking they originated with him; they were intentional homage. As I said, the originals were very well-known. 

A rather different case happened in Australia last year and caused a scandal. A respected poet was found to have used a number of lines from other poets, without attribution, usually changing them slightly. They came from good poets, but from work not all that widely known (though it was out there, obviously, to be found). He did try to play the 'allusion' card, and also to suggest that these phrases were in his head but he had forgotten their origin and thought they were his own. And haven't we all had that experience? A line pops into your head and only later you realise it was a memory of something you read. Or, even worse, you don't realise until someone points it out. How dreadful if you were unjustly accused of plagiarism on the strength of it!

(I remember my dear husband, Andrew, showing me in delight a charming story he'd found on his computer. 'I must have forgotten writing it' he said – a feasible surmise, as he was indeed getting forgetful in his old age. Fortunately, I wasn't. I was able to remind him that a friend had sent it to him. It was true that their writing had similar themes and styles; that's why she wanted to show it to him. So it was a fairly easy mistake for him to make. But imagine how hurt she would have been, and how mortified he would have been, had I not been around to stop him sharing it with the world as his own!)

The trouble was, in the case of the Australian poet, there were so many such instances in his work. It stretches credulity to think someone could be that forgetful! And even if these instances were, as he also (contradictorily) claimed, intentional allusions, they were not well-known like Ali's, so he should still have identified his sources. (Even Ali was assuming a particular, poetically erudite audience. In theory he could unintentionally have deceived others.)

In an even more extreme case, a poet I know had her identity stolen online. Another person not only created a presence in her name on blogs and networking sites, but also stole and posted her poetry there. I don't know if the poet or the poetry was the primary target of this deception, but the poetry was part of the identity of course. The police were brought in and the thief was stopped, but the young poet was traumatised for a long time afterwards. She doesn't post her work online any more, which is our loss.

Those are extreme cases, though. We are much more likely to trip ourselves up without meaning to.

The accidental theft – or accidental give-away

The 'remix' is a popular method now. There are also the erasures and cut-ups which have been around a while longer. And there is all the 'found poetry', which can sometimes be found in other people's writings. I think these are valid methods, and I have played around with them myself from time to time. I am careful to acknowledge what I am up to and where I got the source material.

It gets even more complicated than that. In recent decades writers have started 'asserting their moral right' to be acknowledged as author of their published works. I understand that this is meant to prohibit anyone from altering that work without permission. This seems to be the opposite extreme from another recent practice: sharing one's writings online at sites where other people may come in and edit them. 

No way is anyone going to do that to anything of mine! All my docs in online storage are private, thanks. But, again, my writing is poetry, memoir and related matters, not scholarship. On the other hand, I can well imagine that scholars might have to be particularly careful not to get their stuff misappropriated. 

It's a minefield, isn't it? 

What can we do?

We may exercise great care to ensure that we ourselves are not stealing, but how can we protect our own work from theft? We're a community of blogging poets: our work is out there for anyone to take.

I think, if someone wants to steal it, we probably don't have much hope. The identity thief I mentioned above would not have been caught if she had not also used the poet's actual name and pretended to be her. However, it seems unlikely. 

Because we make our work so public, and participate in a community, anyone who wanted to enhance their reputation would probably steal something less recognisable. Anyone with such considerations would probably not be playing at this grass-roots level anyway, but would have their eye on academic standing or cash prizes. Some of us may do that too, but we are also willing to share our work here, whereas anyone motivated to steal other people's good lines would have to be focused on status and ego.

I think we are more likely to have to guard against the possibility of innocent / ignorant stealing. Most of us do have copyright statements on our blogs, or even on every individual poem. We can only hope it will give people pause and stop them from blithely sharing something that impresses them without asking first.

If they did, you might never know. But if you should find out, the fact of having a blog with dates and actual readers could help in any legal case. Dates can be faked, but if 20 people say they remember reading it on your blog last year, that must carry some weight. You could go one better, by emailing your work to someone, if only to yourself, or putting it in (dated) online storage. You could keep dated copies of all your drafts too. You probably don't need to – but you might.

(A poet friend of mine is also an artist, and one of her sketches appeared as an illustration in one of her books. Some years later a schoolgirl's prize-winning painting was exhibited in a small-town art gallery — where someone who knew the poet recognised that it was her sketch, only slightly altered except for the addition of paint. It turned out that the school art teacher had photocopied a lot of drawings he liked the look of, and given them to his students to play around with. The young girl had no idea about copyright, though the teacher should have. My friend didn't ask for any financial compensation, but her lawyers did insist that the Gallery display a notice saying that the painting was based on her sketch, which it did. I imagine the teacher was told to be more responsible in future!)

I see that a few Poets United people have the 'Copysafe' notice prominently displayed on their blogs. Does that work? And if so, how? I've always wondered.

What about the Creative Commons option? I haven't used it for my own work, but have sometimes been glad of it to get access to other people's (for legitimate reasons, such as to use in I Wish I'd Written This). I imagine that all the detailed wording, combined with free use of the material, would encourage people to make proper attribution. If anyone has licensed their work in that way, what is your experience?

Is poetic theft an issue that affects you? Concerns you? And what, if anything, do you do about it?

Feel free to share your thoughts