judy prince wrote:
> Not good news, Ken. By the way, I should have thanked you for taking
> me seriously and giving all that explanation of your pome which made
> me understand it very well.
>
> I'm sad now, and it has nothing to do with your pomes which I always
> like very much. Actually my heart is broken. I'm holding the poem I
> got back today in class. She gave me an F on it. She said it was
> plagiarized which means copied. But why would I copy anything when I
> love to write poetry?! I'm a sad person right now, K.
>
> J (I never was yo mama, but maybe you could be my papa right now)
That's appalling. I don't read you as a sociopath whose specialty is
appropriating other people's work as their own. What makes this teacher
think you helped yourself to someone else's work? Can she point at what
in your poetry is a lift or steal, and from whom? People define
"plagiarism" according to different standards. In some cases it's easy:
I take something you wrote and present it as my own work. It's more
difficult if I'm "influenced" to some degree by another writer's work.
Is that plagiarism or learning your craft? Are David Wojahn's poems(?)
about John Berryman, his teacher at UMinn, plagiarized because he
deliberately adopts the Dream Song stanza form? Where's the line
between tribute, influence, and theft?
It sounds, Judy, like you've got one of those "strict constructionist"
teachers who doesn't even want to detect an influence. What else could
make her think you swiped someone else's work?
If you want to read about REAL plagiarism in action (you may wish to
eventually), Neal Bowers at the University of Iowa was systematically
ripped off by a guy who took his published poems, changed a word here, a
line break there, and got them into refereed journals under his own
name. There's a review of the book here:
http://www.smallbytes.net/~bobkat/bowers.html
Ken
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