THOUGHTS ON THE PRACTICE AND PRINCIPLE SURROUNDING PLAGIARISM

The recent row about a plagiarist being awarded a prize in a poetry competition has troubled me for a week or two.

Obviously, the basic principle is that none of us can take somebody else’s work and claim it as our own. Ideas come into it, too, though that’s a notoriously woolly area.

Since schooldays we’ve all known we can’t copy directly from someone else in the attempt to get better marks or acclaim, but in terms of poetry the borders of who owns what or how much we should own are blurred.

The music industry has been plagued by cases here and there over many years where an obscure artist complains that their copyright has been infringed, usually when a successful singer-songwriter has a hit with a piece that might have some resemblance to what they themselves produced some time previously.

Only rarely are these things obvious. In one of the more recent examples Ed Sheeran, while defending himself, pointed out the similarity of structure in many songs and tunes and said he might as well give up writing music altogether if he was found to have infringed copyright. His point, perhaps, was that we all, to some extent, copy from and build on what has gone before. The court found in his favour.

There is truth to this that can apply across the artistic spectrum. How many blues songs begin ‘I woke up this morning’ or roughly say something like ‘I woke up this morning/ My baby she’s done and gone/ I believe my time ain’t long’? Terrible off-the-cuff lines, but you get the gist. Where do you begin with applying copyright to either the words, structure or the tune that fits the rhythm? Answer, of course you don’t. They have become a part of a vague oral/ written tradition.

Poetry is a more difficult area, and rarely reaches a court room because there’s no real money in it anyway. Obviously none of us should take an entire poem as it’s been written, copy it out and pass it off as our own. Beyond that, who sets the rules? Poets distort, twist, transform language all the time, sometimes bend what they’ve read somewhere, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. We all read so much, see so many words on screens of one kind or another, that replication in some form or another is inevitable. It’s also essential if we are to be understood in a logical sense. The alternative is to break down language and structure altogether and hope someone picks up some meaning from somewhere inside themselves. Then again, this has also been done – look at pretty much any Post-Modern Anthology, check out Sound Poetry or the more chaotic Stream Writers, etc.

I understand there have been cases where, while not an exact copy, a published poem has been a close rip-off of another. In reading up a little about this, I saw an example of a poet who was or is gaining a reputation for competence having to admit she had taken poems shared by others in a workshop – a space where trust should taken for granted – changed a word or three, and claimed ownership. This is without doubt wrong – immoral, if morality has anything to do with poetry. It could be said the poem she wrote was different to the original because she had changed words, but I think most reasonable people would say she has very clearly crossed a line. She was maybe unlucky in that the writer of the original poem was in the audience, felt uncomfortable about it and protested, but her exposure was necessary. As I understand it, this particular thief has also been guilty of other similar offences. How sad.

I’ve written hundreds of poems that are included on here. I have never knowingly stolen the ideas or phrases of another poet, yet it’s perhaps inevitable there may be echoes of something somewhere. Along with many others, I also dislocate lines from time to time in the name of irony or to fill out a character who may be passing through the narrative.

Billy Collins wrote a poem called The Trouble With Poetry that deals with the inspiration we gain from others: ‘…mostly poetry fills me/ with the urge to write poetry/ to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame/ to appear at the tip of my pencil.// And along with that, the longing to steal,/ to break into the poems of others/ with a flashlight and ski mask.// And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,/ cut-purses, common shoplifters’… Collins goes on to use an image he admits he has stolen from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Perhaps his message was ‘let’s not get too excited about this, we all steal to some extent, the result is what matters’.

The borders of what is or should be acceptable are open to some degree of interpretation, which may in the end largely be based on personal preference or sense of right and wrong. Back to Collins, what if I took half a dozen lines of his at random, say, the first and last lines on a page for three pages and see what comes out. Ok, here goes: In the morning when I found History/ had fallen out and become lost in the deep snow…/The emotion is to be found in the clouds/ my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling./ You know the parlour trick/ one that would hold you really tight. I could obviously go through the book to make an entire poem, but these are first and last lines directly taken from the poems The Lesson, Student Of Clouds and Embrace. In my view – and I suggest that of most others – this is out-and-out plagiarism. Collins has chosen and ordered the words, I have simply taken them and put them together to make a six-line ‘poem’, adding only the punctuation. Yes, they make some kind of emotional sense, but emphatically they are not the product of my own creative process. Therefore, without the slightest doubt in my mind, this kind of thing is unacceptable. Yet, no doubt, somewhere, there is someone who will say I have done nothing ‘wrong’, that the words are just words, phrases and images are just that and no more, that everyone owns them as long as they make something else out of them.

List poems might be considered problematic if someone wishes to argue similarity is in fact a kind of theft. Any of us can take a brief phrase – say, If I show you – and build a poem based on the repetition of that phrase at the start of a line. I don’t know if there’s a poem out there that begins ‘If I show you’ and runs to most of a page, but if I write one today, I’d say I am in no way borrowing from that other poem. It’s just a phrase and I’ve not read a poem that begins in this way. Yet someone else might say, oh, I’ve read something just like that by so-and-so. You’ve ripped them off.’

One of my well-worn prompts is to use a ‘word-bag’. A couple of my oldest poetry friends use this technique as well. You cut up into small pieces pretty much anything that you find in print – a magazine, newspaper, book too battered to be saved – put the fragments in a good-sized carrier bag, rummage them around as if they were balls in a lottery draw and then pull some out. You then juxtapose words, phrases, images, anything that gets your brain moving – and write. In a sense it’s stealing, in another it’s just another method of getting going, and in my view is absolutely acceptable, just as a ‘Found Poem’ might be.

Picasso no doubt was having fun when he (allegedly) said: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” The irony is that he might well have been stealing the line from someone else.

Critics have often pointed out that Shakespeare stole whole plot lines from other playwrights. And we see this all the time on TV dramas – how many more ‘Scandi-Noir’ series will begin with a body left in a strange place, in how many more investigations will the police hero or anti-hero, who almost always carries some kind of personal burden at home, creep alone into buildings at night, guiding themselves by torchlight? In our house, it’s not long before one of us cries out: ‘Why don’t they go in the daytime?’ or ‘Surely, there’s a light switch in there?’

Back to poetry.

I’m sure one danger of Creative Writing programmes or Stanza groups is that people will echo each other, emulate each other, feed off each other. A leader or tutor, in trying to help people ‘improve’, might say what is good or bad to the point where the result is mass reproductions of the same ‘type’ of poem, or at least poems that are similar in tone, message, subject.

I think it takes a long time before we can be confident enough to work alone, without discussion, except perhaps in a kind of checking process, where we might show our work to someone in case we haven’t spotted an error in say repetition or inconsistency, or perhaps some wasted words.

And yet, although I do work alone, am I entirely alone? After all, I read poetry all the time as well as novels, media articles, tweets… how much of these do I absorb and, to a larger or smaller extent, copy or distort? It doesn’t bother me particularly and, conversely, it certainly doesn’t bother me if somebody has taken a poem of mine from this blog and used it as an inspiration to write their own, similar type of thing. It’s the process by which we all adapt our communication or our art.

Complete originality is almost certainly impossible, given the social nature of the human condition. People, some people, like to write within the structure of a recognised, invented form, a particular type of sonnet, a haiku, or a sestina, maybe. Nobody in their right minds would complain that one sonneteer (is there such a word? Ed.) was plagiarising another simply by using the same form. Yet the effect of using the form may well produce close similarities in ideas as well as structure.

No doubt this whole issue of the practice and principle concerning plagiarism could become the basis for a thesis, which is not the point of a blog.

Suffice to say, for now, that the poetry world is notorious for confusing itself by taking itself too seriously – and though once in a while a plagiarist is bound to pop up, I don’t think it’s worth getting too het up about. I feel sorry that somebody is so insecure that they have to deliberately plagiarise in order to further their reputation but what is fame in the cloistered world of poetry anyway? I’d think the Poet Laureate himself wanders about any town or city in the country without being asked for a selfie or an autograph, so what fame, never mind fortune, is the plagiarist getting by being awarded a runner-up prize in some competition or other? Yes, it’s important from the point of view of the judge or competition organisers because no one deserves to be deceived, but beyond the basic deception and time-wasting involved what does it really damage?

I think, too, that once we get over-excited about the ‘problem’, there is a danger that all kinds of indignant zealots or self-appointed poetry police constables can emerge, intent on discovering the slightest similarity between poems or even lines of poems and screaming ‘Plagiarist! Plagiarist!’, in some weird attempt at self-gratification or self-validation. At this point, I’d wonder who was worse, the rather pathetic plagiarist or the self-righteous vigilante.

Thanks for reading. In the unlikely event that you want to reproduce this ramble and claim it as your own, feel free…