Ken, you are an awesome genius with all those details and references! You
must be a professor (oh, strike that, I'm not feeling all that happy about
professors today but I need to get over that because the last one I had was
as wonderful as you are).
U Rock!
Thanks!
Judy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 1:15 PM
Subject: Re: "Fled is that Music. So Change the Record"
> 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
>
|