sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with plagiarism

This was a Facebook post from a couple of years back; I re-read it and decided it really belonged on the blog.

Just a personal thought. A poem, to my mind, is or should be an organic whole. That being so, it doesn't actually exist on the lyric heights for the whole of its length; it has peaks and troughs. Every line does not coruscate at you, jumping up and down shouting "notice me!" There are quiet, unremarkable lines, which swell up like waves under the surface of the sea until they foam over into something brilliant. These are lines which can easily be rubbished by a careless reviewer, who will point out the "boring" or "predictable" language, but in fact they are paving the way for what comes next. Try for yourself quoting brilliant, memorable single lines from a poem. Do they work outside their context? Would you not often feel impelled to quote the few lines before, to show where they emerged from, what they convey: why, in short, they are so brilliant and memorable?

Now there's a type of poem much written and admired, in fact often known informally as a "competition poem", which does try to make every line a peak. It isn't an organic whole; it is a series of flashy, notice-me lines which don't obviously grow from the poem. I don't care for these poems, finding them shouty and ultimately unmemorable because they are trying too hard to be unforgettable. But there's another thing, connected with the fact that these lines don't seem to grow naturally from the poem. They don't seem to come from anywhere, and paradoxically when a line doesn't come from anywhere, it COULD actually come from anywhere, including where it shouldn't. In fact, when marking student work, this kind of poem rings alarm bells. There might be all sorts of reasons for derivative work, but I'll put forward the notion that thinking in terms of fine phrases, knockout lines, moments rather than whole poems, might be one of them.

The exercise in the page photographed above (photo by C J Southworth) comes from a book called The Practice of Creative Writing: a Guide for Students by Heather Sellers, pub. Bedford Books 2007. Basically it quotes a poem by Bob Hicok about his home town and then suggests the students make substitutes of their own for certain key words and phrases (like "Michigan"). They will thus "build their own poem in between the lines". The helpful advice continues… "After you write lines of your own built from Hickok's lines copy out just your poem, on a new sheet of paper. As you copy, tinker with your lines. Delete and add words to make them connect to each other. […] If you decide to submit the piece to a literary magazine or a class anthology, you can simply put 'After Bob Hicok's 'A Primer'" under the title if you feel it is still very closely related to the original. Poets and writers often talk to each other in this contemporary fashion; it's not unusual at all. Imitation is, after all, the highest form of flattery."

I used to teach creative writing. This isn't it. There is a world of difference between this and the process whereby one reads a poem, thinks "wow, that's just how I felt when X happened" and then goes off to write a poem about X. That is identifying what was universal in the poet's experience and how it was manifested in yours. I have used that as an exercise, and blogged about it here. This, on the other hand, is pretending to have had the experience someone else had in the poem. Hicok wrote about Michigan because it meant something to him. You're writing about Halifax, or whatever else you substituted for Michigan, because your tutor told you to. And it will show in the writing – there's a name for this barren, tick-box process, "ghosting", which strikes me as most appropriate for a pallid, insubstantial imitation of someone else's reality.

And it goes further. You are not just appropriating Mr Hicok's experience, you are copying the mechanics of how he chose to write about it – the syntax, the rhythms, the use of images. "Another image for how your place looks – comparison that spills over onto next line" advises the book helpfully, in case you should have accidentally done something original. The implication of "if you feel it is still very closely related to the original" is that it might not be; the student might somehow, out of this sterile parroting, create an actual new poem. But even Ms Sellers seems to recognise the danger that it will indeed still be very closely related to the original, in everything save originality, hence the advice to include the epigraph "After Bob Hicok". Here's my advice: putting "After Fred Bloggs" on a flagrant imitation of that gentleman's work will not stop Mr Bloggs objecting, and if he happens to be an irritable man, books or noses may get pulped as a result. The term "after" in an epigraph properly means that one has been inspired by a poet's work to produce something somehow related, but of one's own. It might be a parody; it might be a whole different take on his material; what it is not is a reproduction of his poem with some of his words crossed out and replaced by yours.

Some people who use this technique, of course, omit the stage of "tinker with your lines". They also omit the attribution "after" and publish their ghosts of others' efforts as their own original work. We call them plagiarists, and rightly scorn them, but being taught in this lazy way is arguably one reason they think such conduct acceptable.

Here's some alternative advice:

1. Imitate (or better, emulate) the how, not the what. This means working out not just what it is you admire in a poem but also how the poet achieved it. Thomas Wyatt, in the line "That now are wild, and do not remember", heightens the emotion of the word "remember" by throwing enormous stress on it. He does this by means of tinkering with his rhythms: leaving out a stressed syllable before the word in a basically iambic line. Don't waste time trying to do this exact same thing with a different set of words: just note for future reference that stress rules, like most others, can be broken to great effect.

2. Work out what you want to write, not what somebody else wanted to write. This is the heart of the exercise I've linked to above: the students had first to identify an experience of their own and only then look at how others might have used similar material. Then they wrote about their material; all they had brought from the poets we read was how that might be done by identifying what it was about this material that stuck in their minds.

3. Don't be constantly looking for lazy short cuts. That's all "ghosting" is – letting someone else have the experience, process it in his mind, work out the best techniques for expressing it…

4. If you honestly can't think of anything you want to write about, or any way of doing it, without borrowing from others, consider that maybe you're not cut out to be any kind of a writer. Being handy with words doesn't matter if you've nothing of your own to say.

Back to plagiarism… sorry to the non-writers for whom this isn't necessarily a Big Thing in their lives, but it's a debate that doesn't go away in the poetry world, principally because it's become clear in recent years that it happens far more often than we have cared to admit. We're not talking of influences, parodies, hommages here, but of Poet B shamelessly nicking Poet A's actual lines and phrases and not crediting them.

You wouldn't think this would divide the poetry world much, or only along fairly obvious lines – all the honest folk on one side and all the thieves on the other, surely. But in fact there are a few writers and publishers who insist that there can be no ownership of words, no "originality", on the ground that we all use the same dictionary, and that if you, as Poet A, happen to have written a heartfelt lament for your father, you shouldn't make a fuss when Poet B appropriates it with some trifling changes and makes it about his mother; if anything you should take it for a compliment. (That example actually happened, and Poet B won a competition with it, until it was sussed.)

The interesting thing is that both sides of the debate sometimes cite the practice of creative writing courses and workshops in support. I've seen it so often asserted that in these forums, students are taught to "sample", imitate, cut and paste, "ghost" (a particularly pernicious practice, in my view, whereby someone uses another's ideas and structure as a template for a new poem). Those who approve point out that there are ways of crediting, like an epigraph that makes it clear the poem is "after" so-and-so. But what gets me is the notion that all such courses use these shortcuts – sorry, I mean techniques, of course. I can only say I didn't, nor did any of my colleagues on the CW degree where I taught. Of course I used the writing of others as models, just not that way. Just by way of illustration, this is an exercise I used.

Stage 1. Think of someone you know well, probably family or close friend, who is known in their circle for doing some particular physical activity. It could be sport, painting, music, housework, cooking, gardening: anything from setting a fire or putting clothes on a line to playing an accordion or fencing, as long as it involves some physical activity, not just sitting thinking with a pen in one's hand. (Though calligraphy would be fine.) Write a very full, detailed description, not a poem but a prose paragraph or two, or even notes, about this person doing this thing – how they do it, how they look when doing it, how they seem to others, what the result is. These notes in this form will not get shown to anyone.

Stage 2. We read several poems in which the way someone does something becomes emblematic for something about them, or a way into some other knowledge. These were some I used:
Michael Laskey: "Laying the Fire". A divorced woman finds herself having to relight the Parkray, which had always been her husband's job. He made a complicated mystery out of it; she does it more haphazardly but it works perfectly well and in the process she begins to see that she can manage without him.
River Wolton: "Running". River writes a lot about physical exercise and sport; this was an early piece that conveyed, to me, not just her feelings when running, but something about persistence, the mental need to persevere with something not because it was fun but to prove something to oneself.
A D Mackie: "The Mole-Catcher". We had to do a quick bit of byroning for this: in Mackie's poem the pitiless mole-killer is compared to the Angel of Death who sweeps down on the Assyrian host in Byron's poem "The Destruction of Sennacherib". In the Byron poem, the Assyrians are the baddies, threatening the Lord's people. But in Mackie's, by the end we are firmly on the side of the moles, the "sma' black tramorts [corpses] wi' gruntles grey", and having to reassess, in the light of the comparison, how we feel about the Lord and his angels.

I used other similar poems in which physical activity became emblematic of more than itself, just never Heaney's "Digging", which struck me as way too bleedin' obvious.

Stage 3: Go back to those notes from Stage I. Now try to work out what it was about this person doing this thing that stuck in your mind. What did it say about them, or their relationships with others, or how others saw them? What was special, for them, about this thing and how they did it? Whatever it was, that's where the poem is, so now write the first draft of it.

I got some fascinating poems this way, full of physicality as one might expect, and often quite insightful. One I especially recall was by a young widow; her husband had been a plasterer and the argot of his trade included a surprising number of bird-related words like hawk, swoop, hop up. He'd been a small, active, delicate man, and in the poem, busy at his job, he comes over so quick and birdlike, he could have been there in the room.

What I never got was straight imitation of the poems we had read. That wasn't possible, because they'd been sent back to their own experience, not that of the poets in front of them. All they had gleaned from those was how personal experience might be transmuted into something more than itself, and how they, using their own experience rather than piggybacking on someone else's, might do likewise.

I’m thinking about plagiarism at the moment – well, everyone in the poetry business is – but not so much about why people do it, more about why they often get away with it so long. I don’t think there is a single easy answer, but two elements seem to me to be an undue emphasis on “personal story” and an inexactness both in writing and reading.

See, here’s a poem by Laurence Lieberman (The Osprey Suicides) which describes, in quite a lot of informed detail, an osprey diving on a garfish. Next the Australian poet Graham Nunn writes, or I should say constructs, a poem called “The Goshawk”, using techniques he describes as sampling, mixing, or, most memorably “ I’m reading a poem or listening to a song that a door opens and my mind flashes with images from my personal history. It may be a phrase, a line, a metaphor that triggers this, but when it occurs, I give myself over to the images and ensure I capture them. In doing this, the framework of the poem is used to tell my own story and parts of the original text are creatively appropriated in the formation of a new work”. Quite a few parts of Lieberman's poem, in fact, like the phrases “traces the periphery”, “drops like a discharged projectile” and “like a small geyser”. Hm. (It’s archived on this page, though you need to scroll down some). What Nunn does change, though, is an osprey into a goshawk. But this transformation seems to have been a little incomplete, because this remarkable goshawk is still, like the osprey, diving into the sea and hauling out a fish (mullet this time). That will come as a surprise to the RSPB, who are under the impression that the goshawk is a land bird which eats small mammals and birds.

This, of course, makes a nonsense of the “personal story” claim. The osprey poem cannot possibly have recalled to Nunn a personal memory of a goshawk acting as no goshawk ever did. The claim is, ironically in the circumstances, symptomatic of a modern attitude that a poem is somehow validated by being “true” or part of one’s “personal story”. This may in fact be one reason people plagiarise: if their own personal story isn’t interesting enough, they don’t think first of embellishing it or going beyond it, as you’d expect a writer of fiction to do, but rather of nicking someone else’s, like some wannabe mis-mem author who hasn’t had quite enough mis happen to them.

What’s more alarming is that it took me two readings of the goshawk poem to realise it had to be baloney. Once it dawned, of course, it was obvious; I am no ornithologist but I do know the habits of the commoner birds. That first time, I hadn’t read properly or carefully; I had registered “goshawk” as “bird”, as in “yet another bird poem”. And since the poem has been online for over a year without anyone, apparently, pointing out the error of this fowl’s ways, I can’t be the only one.

A reader who was a keen birdwatcher would have spotted it straight off, but so, to be honest, should most readers. A lot of people have been marvelling that plagiarists can get away with it for so long, and speculating that this just shows how few people actually read poetry,. I think it shows how carelessly we sometimes read. And, sometimes, write. I have read prizewinning (and non-plagiarised) poems which got some detail of the landscape or event wrong, not creatively wrong as in changed for the sake of the poem, which is fine, but plain ignorantly wrong, as in importing an animal into an island where it doesn’t exist, or making a plant flower in the wrong season. For any reader who notices this, the poem is ruined, because the writer’s eye can no longer be trusted: we are liars by trade, but you can only give the main narrative verisimilitude if you get the details accurate. W S Gilbert was dead right about that. The kind of writer who dismisses such errors as unimportant is, I suspect, also in thrall to the “personal story” notion. His poem isn’t really about the event or environment where it’s set; it’s all about him, and as long as he gets himself right, he thinks the details don’t matter. But they do, or they would, if we always read as attentively as we ought. My current excuse is that for months I had been reading books for a shortlist, as closely as I could, and I'd let myself relax as a result. Mea culpa.

Poets on Facebook, who can hardly help being aware of an ongoing plagiarism scandal, will guess why I should currently be occupied with folk who are not quite as they seem. But in fact I've been fascinated for years by people who reinvent themselves, who discard their past, their country, their culture, their name, and become someone else.

Some, of course, are just frauds, like "Robert Maxwell", born Ján Hoch, and I've always wondered if changing one's name does in fact release one to some extent from conscience and shame – not having a family name to dishonour, as it were. And some are opportunists: whenever there's a disaster, like a tsunami, you can bet some persons presumed dead in it will in fact simply have jettisoned their old identity, and a life which wasn't proving satisfactory, and wandered off in search of a new one.

But the ones who interest me most are rather more positive and proactive about it; they have an image of themselves which isn't quite what nature dealt them, so they set out to rectify the error. There are two in particular whose reinvention was almost total, and whom I find endlessly fascinating.

The first, Jan Janszoon, may actually have started off as an opportunist; he was born in Haarlem, Holland, in the 17th century and was captain of a privateer which was captured by Barbary corsairs. The fact that he then "turned Turk", as the saying was, and became a corsair (and a Muslim) himself, may well initially have been pure self-preservation. But having started on a new course, he surely went the whole hog. Murat Reis, as he now called himself, was one of the most famous, and successful, people-traffickers there ever was, kidnapping Europeans on a grand scale to sell in the Tunis and Algiers slave-markets. He stole a villageful of 108 people from Baltimore in Ireland, he abducted 15 from Grindavik in Iceland; he even used Lundy Island as a base for a while. And he had more than one chance to go home to his Dutch wife and family, had he wanted, but he chose not to leave his new family and home, a castle by the shore of Salé.

And yet... it is never clear how much of his old personality remained intact; how much he could not leave behind. In old age, he had a visit from the grown daughter he'd left in Haarlem; they seem to have got on well. He flew the Barbary flag, except when attacking the ships of Holland's old enemy Spain; then he flew Dutch colours. And once he buttonholed an English diplomat in the street and sounded out the possibility of changing his nationality yet again, assuring the man "I was ever a Christian at heart" (unlikely, but with our Jan you can never tell).

I think Jan Janszoon became Murat Reis, and found his new persona suited him better. He didn't so much reject his old self, as find it incompatible with the new. But my other fancy in this line was even more radical, and his motives were purely those of a writer; he altered his back-story, and much else, to fit the character he wanted to be.

Tristan Jones was an adventurer, a talented writer and an extremely skilled and daring sailor. There were circumstances in his back-story that didn't, to his mind, fit this undoubted truth, so he rewrote them. His surname really was Jones, but to his given name of Arthur he preferred the sadder and more equivocal Arthurian hero Tristan. In his mythology, he was the son of the captain of a tramp steamer, which might even have been true, since he was born in Liverpool, but he had no way of knowing, having been born to an unmarried girl and brought up in orphanages. The place of birth was Walton Hospital, but he decided the man he was in the process of creating should have been born at sea (in a storm), so he made it so. Some adjustment was also needed to his date of birth, because 1929, the real date, would not have allowed him to serve in World War 2 as a boy seaman, so it became 1924. And this was only the start…

I admit to a huge degree of indulgence for Jones; I can't think of him without smiling. But it would, I think, be pedantic to class these as lies. In his mind, the mind above all of a novelist and storyteller, these were things that should have been true, and would have been, had not inconvenient reality got in the way. He may have claimed achievements he didn't actually accomplish; he never claimed one that he didn't have the talent to have accomplished, had circumstances been right. If he'd been five years older, or the war had obligingly happened five years later, he would have been a boy seaman; there's nothing more certain.

And this of course is the big difference between him and the would-be poet who has lately been in the news for passing off others' work, very lightly altered, as his own. I think it's possible that a serial plagiarist sees things in the same light as Jones did; he reads a poem he likes and thinks "I could have written that"; by and by he thinks he should have, and makes it so. But to judge by the minor alterations this person makes, inevitably for the worse, I see no evidence that these are poems he could have thought of all by himself, if only someone else hadn't got there first. Not, of course, that this would make it all right to go stealing the achievements of others (another thing Jones didn't do). Jones embroidered his own story; he never would have wanted to appropriate anyone else's, still less speak in their voice; it was his own that fascinated him, and that he wanted to perfect.

But then, Jones was a writer.