VI. How Plagiarism Is like Adolescent Sex
The poem below had two therapeutic purposes for me when I wrote it...

Poet and Audience [12]

I
The Argument:
You Wondered Why You Weren’t Published

It’s because the postman has opened
All your submissions and kept them,
Tucked your words, as it were,
Under his proverbial, federal wing.

And just so you know,
Your love poems work.
He reads them to his wife in bed
Before what has recently become
Most lyrical sex; he even adds

A few verbs here and there
For the sake of flow.

II
The Consolation

But you’ll be pleased to know
He generally leaves your
Enjambment alone,
And understands well
The way irony goes;

A fulcrum for your failure
And his formally elegiac evenings,
Which he now has the diction
And courage to call epiphanic.

His only regret
Is that you ain’t
More prolific.

___________________________________________________________
mmm that's great.
aidaily top of the righthand (essays & opinions) column today: “Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good,” said Nietzsche. There can come a point in life when this begins to make sense... more»
VQR » The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality -- Erik Campbell
-this article looks great. appeals much more to me than whatshisname's article on same topic. Franzen. recent article by him, right? v plagiarism, how we are all quoting, much of the time. but those are my words not Franzen's or was it Lethem? plagiarism, influence, what's in the air. the water.


V. Confession the First: The Anxiety of Influence (the Author Accidentally Commits HP)
Hard Plagiarism (HP)—line-by-line copying without attribution

Writer Nicholas Delbanco, in his essay “In Praise of Imitation,” explained the trouble with this medley of inspirations (using sexy diction and, I think well yes I think so, riffing off of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in the first sentence quoted):

All writers are promiscuous; we fall in love repeatedly—desiring this one’s knowledge of the world, that one’s way with character. . . . [W]e study with practitioners we never get to meet. So what passes for originality—a voice the reader can identify and an inflection he can recognize—is likely to come from a chorus of the young writer’s influential because admired predecessors: borrowings too numerous to name.[7]

As Auden told me first. (The Dyer's Hand -- in a school for poets, have them imitate.)

I wrote the lines of what would later become the last section of a poem entitled “Cat, Man, God.”
I sensed that I needed to better cinch up the theme of what we anthropomorphize and why. I then vaguely remembered something I had written about my cat and God, and so began thumbing through a blue notebook in which I jot down random thoughts. And there it was, the perfect ending, scrawled almost illegibly in the corner of a page (under the lines I had written “CONSIDER”):

Our cats like God
Have never spoken
A word that wasn’t ours.

Brilliant, I thought. I’m so shamelessly brilliant.
And then, of course, I began to worry. Normally poems come to me very slowly. Unlike, say, Stephen Dobyns, I am the antithesis of prolificacy. “Cat, Man, God” came too quickly, and I knew that its composition was heavily expedited and inspired by the strength of its “found” last line. And that enigmatic “CONSIDER” had me concernedly considering.
So I went through my Stephen Dunn collection (the most likely source of my possible pilfering) wondering if I had and hoping I hadn’t lifted the line from his work. I spent all evening reading and found this, from Local Visitations (2003): “God knows nothing we don’t know. / We gave him every word he ever said.” And then this, from The Insistence of Beauty (2004): “It can’t, / alone, be fully what it is. I’ve / given it every one of its thoughts.”

So I became convinced of two things: (1) that Dunn occasionally repeats himself, which is his right, and (2) that I was guilty of Influence, not Plagiarism. I had taken a sentiment and made it my own, “pure and complicated”;[10] it was no “My Sweet Lord.” At the most, I surmised, I was answerable to SP; I had obviously been colored by Dunn’s idea, but my rendering was a riffing, not a ripping off. I spent another few days on the poem and submitted it to several journals.
Two weeks after mailing out the poem, I had an essay accepted by a very good journal. I was feeling good about myself and decided to celebrate by rereading Dunn’s Loosestrife (1996).[11] Toward the end of the book I suddenly went cold. I suspect that, had my bladder been full, I would have wet myself, in which case (to paraphrase James Joyce) I would have gone warm, and then cold. In the poem “Parameters” I discovered this line, which I had somehow previously missed: “Our cats like God have never spoken / a word that wasn’t ours.” The only difference between “my” line and Dunn’s was the enjambment. I had decidedly, yet unknowingly, committed HP. I was too shocked to try to will myself dead.
earlier: Times such as these, I like to play a little existential game with myself, one that I think Nietzsche would appreciate. The idea is to see if I can “will myself dead,” to, say, conjure up a myocardial infarction or a brain aneurysm by an act of sheer concentrated will. It never works. Instead of unbecoming I usually end up nodding, renouncing articulation for gesticulation (my co-workers always accept the gracious indefiniteness of the nod). Soon the talk turns to women anyway (we’re usually in a bar), which amounts to the only esoteric art most of my colleagues are interested in pursuing.

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this whole not-short essay seems great

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