|Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 17:26:46 BST
|From: "James James" <[log in to unmask]>
|To: [log in to unmask]
|Subject: Re: mimesis sinister
|Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]>
|There is the famous example of Milton's granddaughter, was it, in 18 C who
|was so poor when _Paradise Lost_ was selling like hot stakes.
This would be an issue if everyone else were not poor. I am inclined to
think hereditary an excellent basis for the distribution of wealth, being
descended from kings and queens, but I cannot support it logically.
You know I *always smell a rat when someone says "It amuses me". These rats
are of different sizes and ages. Some live in houses and some on ships. Not
all are infected. It may just be an olfactory disease
|It always amuses me to see the assiduous Copyright (C) at the end of very
|small press - stapled, sale-or-return - pamphelts: as if anyone is going to
|pinch their poems...
Spend five minutes in the poetry section of a bookshop, if they have such a
section, and look at some of what is being published. It would seem
perfectly reasonable to me to suppose that someone might steal my work given
*some of what is published.
The category of *poems you refer to is of poems published stapled. I can
well believe that such a dreadful thing would preclude one from being given
a prize - the other lottery, but it's a poor judge who judges the poem on
its mode of publication. There are plenty of poets in perfect bound book
today who have had staples through their middles
I put the copyright claim on all my work and the work of others published
under my imprints unless they object. To me the assertion of copyright is to
do with my and their artistic rights and an assertion of the value of their
artistic effort. That legal problems arise over others' artistic rights,
when one poet quotes another, is the way things are. That we find there
isn't a black and white answer is indicative that we are on the right
track - thou shalt not is nearly always missing the point...
L
ps my spell check wanted to change "shalt" to "shallot" and I was rather
tempted
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