Feb

15

Steal This Blog! (Part 2)

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

February 15, 2008 |

It’s been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and, occasionally, that’s even applied to plagiarism. Actually forgery is the sincerest form of flattery because it says an artist’s name is just as valuable as their work–but that’s another story. Plagiarism isn’t any more flattering than someone taking your lunch from the office refrigerator, and, for some authors, it’s a matter of serious consequence. Plagiarism is bad enough when it happens in the classroom, when a student turns in something that shows that all they’ve learned is how to open a book and copy from it, or, in the digital world, how to cut and paste. When it happens out in the academic world and beyond, when plagiarized work is actually published, then it reaches a whole new level.

The poet Neal Bowers was more than a victim of just plagiarism. Someone publishing under the name David Sumner, but whose real name was David Jones, made a few small alterations (including changing titles) and re-published two of Bowers’ poems as his own in numerous small publications. Although Jones took poems from other poets, including Sharon Olds, he seems to have had a special fascination with Bowers. Bowers says in both his essay in the Fall 1994 issue of The American Scholar and his book-length telling of the entire event, Words For The Taking, that plagiarism isn’t a capital crime, and but I hope he’ll forgive me for quoting his essay in which he says, “plagiarism is a disease of silence.” He wrote those words before he discovered a shocking and awful truth: his plagiarist was a former teacher who had been stripped of his license and sentenced to jail time for sexually assaulting two students. (The fact that Jones also wrote a letter to Bowers’ wife asking for forgiveness adds even more creepiness, as well as a greater sense of invasion, to the story.) Compared to that plagiarism seems harmless, and yet plagiarism is, in itself, a kind of assault. The poems Jones–or Sumner–plagiarized dealt with the death of Bowers’ father, so they were deeply personal poems. It was not a physical invasion of privacy, but a mental one; someone else was claiming his experience as their own. What’s shocking is that some of Bowers’ friends responded by shrugging off the event and saying he could just write another poem. His response to this is, “Against this emptiness, a few persist in the belief that words are our most precious possession.”

Bowers hired a lawyer but discovered that, at least to those outside the community of poets, and even to most poets and magazine editors, poetry is a pretty low stakes game. Bowers couldn’t prove any monetary loss, and, even if he could, he would have spent more in legal fees than he could ever hope to get in return. And since some magazine editors were forewarned about Jones and published plagiarized poems anyway there was, and still is, no way of stopping him. Bowers did finally get some kind of vindication in the form of outrage from journalists. As he notes in his book, a journalist who’s caught plagiarizing is out of a job permanently. And the review of the book at The Complete Review is, understandably, filled with outrage against the plagiarist.

The response of journalists highlights something which The Complete Review review also mentions: plagiarism isn’t just an unethical act. It isn’t just, no matter how personal the poem, a violation of personal space. When a plagiarist takes work from a contemporary it’s a violation of copyright law. This is more likely to go to court when there’s money involved, but, if a web site’s owners can be sued for having copyrighted content that their users–outside of the owners’ control and knowledge–have added, couldn’t a poetry magazine similarly be sued for publishing plagiarized work, especially if they’ve been warned in advance, especially if the poet who’s being plagiarized, as Bowers did, provides them with his own copies of the plagiarized poem? As Bowers himself explains, though, proving plagiarism can sometimes be tricky. In his book he compares a poem he wrote with one by Mary Oliver. Her poem predated his by several years, and he’s certain it had been at least a year after writing his that he first read her poem, but someone litigious enough could make a case of it. The legal ramifications of plagiarism, and the very nature of copyright law, are difficult, nebulous areas.


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