I agree Mole. the issue of ownership/permission is tricky in poetry,
because it is the outcome of the writer's (sometimes questionable)
artifice & it's something the poet HAS & OWNS & loves as an entity --
theft is a very unlikely scenario, especially for marginal or
underground-upcoming poets, but it's an automatic fear because of the
nature of a poet's work.
copyright has come up recently for me, because I'm co-authoring a
collection of my & four other poets' work; we don't have the money to
purchase legal copyrights, but while the potential for theft of our
poems exists, it is a marginal & unlikely threat especially since our
collection will probably only find its way into the hands of a couple
hundred people, at best. the initiator & informal 'leader' of our
project, Alex Fear, said that the existence of our poems in a bound,
hard-copy, published book is enough to establish a copyright (or a
precedent, should someone be weird or foolish enough to use our poetry
elsewhere without permission *knock on wood*), even if it isn't
authorised in legal documents per se.
what do you think, how important is a purchased copyright? absolutely
necessary? optional? not worth the trouble?
KS
On 14/12/2007, TheOldMole <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think she goes a little overboard with someone who sends copies of a
> poem to her friends, but otherwise right on.
>
> andrew burke wrote:
> > Nothing new here, but Wendy Cope attacking the non-copyright use of
> > poems on the Net:
> > http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2223830,00.html
> >
> >
>
> --
> Tad Richards
> http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
> http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
>
> The moral is this: in American verse,
> The better you are, the pay is worse.
> --Corey Ford
>
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