Publishers and magazines have been working to take down poems and suspend sales of collections by David R Morgan after the American poet Charles O Hartman realised Morgan’s poem “Dead Wife Singing” was almost identical to his own, three-decades-old “A Little Song”.
Assiduous digging by the online poetry community, led by the poet and academic Ira Lightman, then discovered that Morgan, a British poet and teacher, had lifted lines and phrases from a host of different writers. One of Morgan’s poems, “Monkey Stops Whistling”, won him an award. Opening: “Stand to attention all the empty bottles, yes … // the long-necked beer bottles from the antique stores, / the wine bottles and pop bottles left on beaches; / steam off the labels and line the bottles up, the green ones / with the brown, black, yellow and clear ones,” it was found to be virtually identical to a 1981 poem by Colin Morton, “Empty Bottles”.
“When an American poet spotted his own poem under David R Morgan’s name on a website that blogs new work, he contacted its editor, and its editor contacted me. Within around one hour, I’d found a dozen more. Everything online by David R Morgan that I could find since Jan 2011 I could trace 90% of to another person’s poem,” said Lightman, who also discovered an alleged plagiarism of Roger McGough by Morgan dating back to 1982.
The case follows that of Christian Ward, another prize-winning poet found to have lifted work from other writers earlier this year.
The issue here seems pretty straightforward — passing of someone else’s work as your own is the textbook definition of plagiarism. But what of the poet who relies on citation and open and honest appropriation? I am thinking about poets as diverse as C.D. Wright, Martha Collins and T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and so many others, poets who take outside material and reshape it for their own purposes.
I raise this issue because it hits close to home. The impact that citation and the blending of outside sources or others’ words have on a poem — often a long poem like Collins’ brilliant Blue Front — was the subject of my master of fine arts thesis and is a technique I use often. The book-length manuscript I recently finished (and am actively shopping) makes use of the technique, as does a number of other poems that I’ve written. And I’ve struggled with how and how much to put in end notes.
In Collins, for instance, newspaper accounts and post cards allow for the competing voices necessary to create competing narratives that raise questions about the accuracy of the history being rediscovered and rewritten. Mark Nowak does something similar, banging his sources up against each other in a way that makes each quoted work comment on the other (see Coal Mountain Elementary and Shut Up, Shut Down). Eliot and Pound reach back to earlier, classical writing in English, Latin and other languages to reclaim and reaffirm a sense of tradition. The notes provided in each case, however, fall far short of what one might find in an academic work. In some cases, there is nothing more than a bibliography listing sources.
Citation is a form of collage and the use of outside sources has significant historical precedent that goes back to the Greeks and is a significant component of contemporary music (what is sampling, after all, if not audio citation). Borges, in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” addresses the most extreme form of this kind of textual appropriation, anticipating the post-modern theory that it is the audience and not the text — and certainly not the text’s author — that creates meaning. From a 1997 essay by Martin Johnston on Jacket:
Borges, not believing — quite consistently — in the intrinsic value of any work of art, has said that writing gains its justification through endless dialogue between writer and reader.
It is important to note, I think, that Menard in Borges’ story is an overt appropriator whose goal is to create a dialogue between a historical work and the modern world. The narrator/reviewer believes the passing of 300-plus years creates new contexts and therefore new meaning. (In this, as numerous critics have pointed out, Borges anticipates post-modern theory.) This dialogue can only be created, of course, if the appropriation — whether on a small or large scale — is announced as such; it must be overt and the reader must be clued in to the larger project.
Morgan and Ward were not seeking this dialogue, but claiming others’ work as their own, which makes what they are accused doing theft. Of major concern is the danger that citational poetics may be swept up in any dragnet designed to root out plagiarizing poets.
What Morgan and Ward have been accused of is intolerable and unacceptable, but the potential fallout is far greater than any of us may realize. What they have done has the potential to undercut a venerable poetic technique.
Hank Kalet 