Mairead Byrne wrote:
>
> Oh my God Frederick I thought you were Alison I'm sorry. Alison your
> dressing gown sounds adorable I'm sorry I thought you were Frederick.
> Mairead
>
> On Sat, 6 Jul 2002, Frederick Pollack wrote:
>
> > Alison Croggon wrote:
> > >
> > > At 6:37 PM -0400 6/7/02, Mairead Byrne wrote:
> > > >Reznikoff used thousands of volumes of law reports for "Testimony," and
> > > >transcripts of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Eichmann trial in
> > > >Jerulsalem for Holocaust. He was completely upfront and modest about his
> > > >usage.
> > >
> > > To outlaw pillaging other texts would instantly vapourise a huge
> > > amount of writing, including large bits of mine. But you might as
> > > well start with The Waste Land... It's an enormously subtle question.
> > > Reznikoff's usage seems to me to be completely legitimate, though I'm
> > > speaking through my hat because I haven't read the poems. But I
> > > would think in approaching that kind of material it would be more a
> > > matter of ethics than question of copyright, an issue at heart of
> > > human respect. Though Reznikoff wasn't using copyright material,
> > > trial transcripts and so on are not copyright and from my foggy
> > > memory of law come legally under qualified privilege. A writer's
> > > ethics (someone said, I can't remember who, though it is probably
> > > several people) is in how she approaches language.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > They were transcripts of US trials from the 1880s, 60 or 70 years before
> > R. used them.
> >
Perfectly OK ... Alison's dressing-gown does sound fetching tho' in
rather an abstract way - we're suffering 105 F heat.
Reznikoff is one of the three or four poets who have had the largest
influence on me and whom I most deeply love.
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