Some will say it's a new age of spinning and lifting, and no one really owns anything, no rights, no nothing. It's "the styl"e that you bring to the use of it. "Don't think twice, it's all fight."
I am sure I am not the only one who read about the Berlin 16 year old precoce noveilist & film director who got 'caught' lifting a whole page from someone else's novel. The judges of a lit contest in which was considered the winner still gave her the prize (thus giving sanction to what she did but comparing it to rappers who lift and lift.)
As a test, take any poem you have written, put one line of it into Google search and see from how many people from whom you have 'lifted.' Words are still, thank goodness, public property, tho everyone from Monsanto on out are not doubt trying to claim ownership of words, phrases and maybe even Church prayers. Which is not to say someone has the right to put their names on our poems or ??? Yes, it is an enigma!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
--- On Fri, 2/19/10, andrew burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Well, & what do poets think?
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Friday, February 19, 2010, 4:14 PM
Yes, I've had trouble in a similar area, both in my own poetry and the
poetry of others echoing mine too closely. When you say something that is an
everyday phrase for tonal reasons in a poem, and someone like Bob Dylan has
used it before, is that a problem? A friend of mine leant on me from a great
height because I did just that. I knew Dylan had used it but it wasn't
'original' and it wasn't used as a major link, like Don't Think Twice or a
phrase like that. He uses phrases like The Darkest Hour Is Right Before The
Dawn, but that doesn't mean it is his? Right? Or wrong? Any thoughts on that
matter?
(Apropos of this, a well-known Aussie poet once apologised to me for using a
phrase I had said late night at a party in one of her poems. As I was then
chemically altered to the max, I had no idea I'd ever said it! Ha ha ...)
Andrew
On 20 February 2010 07:47, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This German 17 year old, if the report is reliable, seems to have practised
> wholesale plagiarism. And now the obfuscation of trendy talk about
> everything
> belonging to everyone.
> I feel for the writers stolen from.
>
> As for poets, Eliot's 'Waste Land' is perhaps a model - borrow but
> acknowledge,
> even though footnotes can be tedious and distracting.
>
> Unconscious or absentminded theft remains a problem. I recall Hugh
> Macdiarmid
> confronted with the mystery of how sentences from a TLS article turned up
> in a
> poem of his unacknowledged.
>
> Max
>
> Quoting Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> >
> http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/publish-and-be-
> damned-young-writers-ego-dramatically-punctured-1904037.html<http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/publish-and-be-%0Adamned-young-writers-ego-dramatically-punctured-1904037.html>
> >
> > Ho hum....
> >
> > Doug
> > Douglas Barbour
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
> > http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ <http://www.ualberta.ca/%7Edbarbour/>
> >
> > Latest books:
> > Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> > http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> > Wednesdays'
> > http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-
> press_10.html<http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-%0Apress_10.html>
> >
> > Swept snow, Li Po,
> > by dawn's 40-watt moon
> > to the road that hies to office
> > away from home.
> >
> > Lorine Niedecker
> >
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
>
--
Andrew
'Beyond City Limits', pub. ICLL @ ECU, available at topnotch indie bookshops
- list at http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
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