Just stumbled across a fascinating
article in the Guardian about a guy who tracks down plagiarism in poetry. Seems there is a lot of it, and in unexpected places. My favourite example is the Franco-Canadian poet laureate:
Quote:
Could former laureate DesRuisseaux really have blatantly plagiarised all those canonical poets? It seemed too mad to be true. When Lightman got hold of DesRuisseaux’s book Tranches De Vie, he found even more apparent thefts. Two days of sleuthing found 30 out of 47 poems that were heavily based on the work of others. There were two more by Angelou, an Anna Akhmatova, a Federico García Lorca, a Ted Kooser. There was even a Tupac Shakur. When Lightman told me he’d failed to find any problems in other DesRuisseaux books he’d got hold of, I recalled his “golden rule”, that plagiarists never do it only once. It seemed to me that Tranches De Vie must have been an attempt to honour the greats by producing intertextual reinterpretations of their finest moments.
Until, that is, Lightman shows me the original source of DesRuisseaux’s Curieux. “It’s based on a poem by Nicole Renwick,” Lightman tells me. “I’d never heard of her, but that does happen.”
He taps her name into his search engine. We’re sitting next to each other and I lean over, squinting at the screen. Some examples of Renwick’s work appear on a site called allpoetry.com. There is the original poem, Funny… But Not. DesRuisseaux had cut it down from 13 lines to nine, and added his own closer. And then there’s Nicole Renwick herself. She looks barely out of her teens. Her bio reads: “Hey everyone, I’m hoping to become a writer one day, so I’d appreciate every comment I get thanks.”
Lightman scrolls down. The poem that follows the one DesRuisseaux had taken is called My Xbox. I read its opening stanza: “Xbox, Xbox/You’re the one for me/I also love my 3DS/And my Nintendo Wii.”
“We’re not talking Seamus Heaney,” Lightman says.
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(I wonder why DesRuisseaux didn't steal Nicole Renwick's
Xbox poem instead of the teenage angst one, btw. I like it.)
The discussion thread of the Guardian article is quite interesting, with two people arguing that plagiarism isn't an issue at all in poetry these days because poets have always been stealing; all the way down the originality rabbit hole...
So, if you paid money for a collection of poetry: would you be annoyed if you found out that a lot of the poems in it aren't "original"?
EDIT: Turns out that Nicole Renwick actually plagiarised the Xbox poem. It's by children's poet Kenn Nesbitt: