What is Plagarism?

[annaswirls]

No, it isn't. But a new one is.

The poem this person has posted today is also plagiarized.

secret_neo's poem

the original lyrics

wow this is like a new contest: the plagiarist revealed

you know, special prize for who catches them first?
I think this person might like attention-- to see who git's im first.

no I am not making light of plagiarism, it sucks. has happened to me. I know there have been times something comes out of my brain and it is a phrase I have read somewhere-- mostly in all of a sudden passion suddenly, but ya gotta be a bit mental to regurgitate an entire song.

good morning. it is good to be home.

 

[WickedEve]

No, it isn't. But a new one is.

The poem this person has posted today is also plagiarized.

secret_neo's poem

the original lyrics

Maybe Laurel should refuse any work from an isp of a plagiarist. This person is obviously just playing a game.

 

[TheRainMan]

wow this is like a new contest: the plagiarist revealed

you know, special prize for who catches them first?
I think this person might like attention-- to see who git's im first.

no I am not making light of plagiarism, it sucks. has happened to me. I know there have been times something comes out of my brain and it is a phrase I have read somewhere-- mostly in all of a sudden passion suddenly, but ya gotta be a bit mental to regurgitate an entire song.

good morning. it is good to be home.

Is there a prize involved in this contest?

Everyone has lines pop out their heads from other places every now and then, things they've read or heard people say. That is unavoidable.

This one is just a cut and paste job.

Good morning.

 

[TheRainMan]

Maybe Laurel should refuse any work from an isp of a plagiarist. This person is obviously just playing a game.

If they aren't playing a game, then it is pretty sad.

I didn't report it, because I don't know how.

Another good morning.

 

[annaswirls]

Is there a prize involved in this contest?

Everyone has lines pop out their heads from other places every now and then, things they've read or heard people say. That is unavoidable.

This one is just a cut and paste job.

Good morning.

Good Morning! Um a prize? I have some extra fair trade green tea and organic chocolate left over from my gift box....sometimes Santa overdoes it.

Actually, I have some shade grown coffee, too, if you are a coffee guy.

 

[WickedEve]

If they aren't playing a game, then it is pretty sad.

I didn't report it, because I don't know how.

Another good morning.

Good morning and you're coming down outside right now--rain that is.

 

[annaswirls]

If they aren't playing a game, then it is pretty sad.

I didn't report it, because I don't know how.

Another good morning.

it is just a curiosity to not at least check someone who has been caught before?



I want to contact the plagiarist and see if they will try to get something by that is really really super duper obvious like maybe Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a snowy evening or Twinkle Twinkle little star.

 

[LeBroz]

No, it isn't. But a new one is.

The poem this person has posted today is also plagiarized.

secret_neo's poem

the original lyrics

.
Thanks for alertly catching this. The thing's been pulled. Saw it early this morning and thought not another lyric - from where? There's plenty of original work to look at without cluttering us with verbal regifting of someone else's works.

.

 

[Tzara]

I came across this poem the other day. I think it poses some interesting questions and, possibly, problems. I have removed the "author's" name. Is this poem an example of plagiarism?

Why or why not?

To a Waterfowl

Where, like a pillow on a bed
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude
Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron
And one clear call for me
My genial spirits fail
The desire of the moth for the star
When first the College Rolls receive his name.

Too happy, happy tree
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
Forget this rotten world, and unto thee
Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And she also to use newfangleness...
Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?
Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Unaffected by "the march of events,"
Never until the mankind making
From harmony, from heavenly harmony
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies!
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you
Sunset and evening star
Where roses and white lilies grow.
Go, lovely rose,
This is no country for old men. The young
Midwinter spring is its own season
And a few lilies blow. They that have power to hurt, and will do none.
Looking as if she were alive, I call.

The vapors weep their burthen to the ground.
Obscurest night involved the sky
When Loie Fuller, with her Chinese veils
And many a nymph who wreathes her brow with sedge...
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
In drear-nighted December
Ripe apples drop about my head
Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
O well for the fisherman's boy!
Fra Pandolf's hand
Steady thy laden head across a brook...
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
Fills the shadows and windy places
Here in the long unlovely street.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The freezing stream below.
To know the change and feel it...

At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips
Where the dead feet walked in.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street.​

 

[TheRainMan]

I came across this poem the other day. I think it poses some interesting questions and, possibly, problems. I have removed the "author's" name. Is this poem an example of plagiarism?

Why or why not?

To a Waterfowl

Where, like a pillow on a bed
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude
Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron
And one clear call for me
My genial spirits fail
The desire of the moth for the star
When first the College Rolls receive his name.

Too happy, happy tree
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
Forget this rotten world, and unto thee
Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And she also to use newfangleness...
Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?
Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Unaffected by "the march of events,"
Never until the mankind making
From harmony, from heavenly harmony
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies!
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you
Sunset and evening star
Where roses and white lilies grow.
Go, lovely rose,
This is no country for old men. The young
Midwinter spring is its own season
And a few lilies blow. They that have power to hurt, and will do none.
Looking as if she were alive, I call.

The vapors weep their burthen to the ground.
Obscurest night involved the sky
When Loie Fuller, with her Chinese veils
And many a nymph who wreathes her brow with sedge...
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
In drear-nighted December
Ripe apples drop about my head
Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
O well for the fisherman's boy!
Fra Pandolf's hand
Steady thy laden head across a brook...
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
Fills the shadows and windy places
Here in the long unlovely street.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The freezing stream below.
To know the change and feel it...

At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips
Where the dead feet walked in.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street.​

Just scanning, after it became obvious - I see Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Keats (more than once), Milton (more than once) . . . I'll stop now.

Where did you find this, Tzara?

 

[Tzara]

Just scanning, after it became obvious - I see Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Keats (more than once), Milton (more than once) . . . I'll stop now.

Where did you find this, Tzara?

You beat me. I only picked out Yeats and Shelley on the first go 'round.

This is an example of a cento: "a poem made entirely of pieces from poems by other authors" (Padgett, The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, p. 42, which is where this example comes from). Angeline's hunky fav Ted Berrigan also produced at least one well-known example, "cento: A note on Philosophy." The cento form is quite old. Padgett indicates that the form dates back to the second century.

This one is by John Ashbery, and is apparently quite famous, at least as far as centos go. I've worked through all the "cribbed" lines and will post them in a bit. Kind of fun to look at how Ashbery pieced these together.

I think of this as being kind of the poetic equivalent of collage in the visual arts. Or even, at an extreme, Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing.

But it does blur that already blurry line about fair use, don't it?

 

[TheRainMan]

You beat me. I only picked out Yeats and Shelley on the first go 'round.

This is an example of a cento: "a poem made entirely of pieces from poems by other authors" (Padgett, The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, p. 42, which is where this example comes from). Angeline's hunky fav Ted Berrigan also produced at least one well-known example, "cento: A note on Philosophy." The cento form is quite old. Padgett indicates that the form dates back to the second century.

This one is by John Ashbery, and is apparently quite famous, at least as far as centos go. I've worked through all the "cribbed" lines and will post them in a bit. Kind of fun to look at how Ashbery pieced these together.

I think of this as being kind of the poetic equivalent of collage in the visual arts. Or even, at an extreme, Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing.

But it does blur that already blurry line about fair use, don't it?

I suppose if the form has been accepted so widely, it establishes precedent.

And if announced by the writer as cento, or parody, or whatever, univerally accepted forms of art as they are, I would think that is acceptable.

I think the requirement to announce by the writer should be established practice (which it is not), if we want the blurry lines to sharpen.

 

[Tzara]

Cento: "To a Waterfowl"
line reference

01: John Donne, "The Extasie"
02: John Milton, "Lycidas"
03: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Evangeline"
04: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Crossing the Bar"
05: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection: an Ode"
06: Percy Bysshe Shelley, "One word is too often profaned"
07: Samuel Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes"

08: John Keats, "Happy Insensibility"
09: John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
10: John Donne, "On the Progress of the Soul"
11: Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar-Gipsy"
12: Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar-Gipsy"

13: Edmund Spenser, "Prothalamion"
14: Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
15: Sir Thomas Wyatt, "Remembrance"
16: William Blake, "The Book of Thel"
17: Lord Byron, "The Eve of Waterloo"
18: Ezra Pound, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly"
19: Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London "
20: John Dryden, "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day"
21: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"
22: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"
23: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Crossing the Bar"
24: Thomas Campion, "The Garden"
25: Edmund Waller, "Go, lovely Rose"
26: William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium," slightly corrupted
27: T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets: Little Gidding"
28: Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Heaven-Haven" (first part), William Shakespeare, "Sonnet XI" (second part)
29: Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"

30: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Tithonus"
31: William Cowper, "The Cast-away"
32: William Butler Yeats, "Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen" (Modified slightly from When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound)
33: William Collins, "Ode to Evening"
34: William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us"
35: John Keats, "Happy Insensibility"
36: Andrew Marvell, "The Garden"
37: Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"
38: George Meredith, "Modern Love"
39: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Break, break, break"
40: Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"
41: John Keats, "To Autumn"
42: John Milton, Paradise Lost
43: Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Chorus from 'Atalanta'"
44: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H.
45: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Tears, Idle Tears"
46: Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A widow bird sate mourning for her Love"
47: John Keats, "Happy Insensibility"

48: William Cullen Bryant, "To a Waterfowl"
49: John Keats, "Hyperion"
50: Thomas Hardy, "The Self-Unseeing"
51: John Keats, "Ode to Melancholy"
52: Lord Byron, "The Eve of Waterloo"

I particularly like the fact that Ashbery even rips off the title from one of the poems he is quoting (the one by William Cumming Bryant). I also love the fact that this is what I would call a very postmodern form, 'cept that it originated in the second century.

I'd rush off to write one, but it seems you have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry to start.

Maybe later.

 

[Tzara]

I suppose if the form has been accepted so widely, it establishes precedent.

And if announced by the writer as cento, or parody, or whatever, univerally accepted forms of art as they are, I would think that is acceptable.

I think the requirement to announce by the writer should be established practice (which it is not), if we want the blurry lines to sharpen.

Well, the Ashbery poem, at least where I've seen it, has no attribution. I'm curious about the Berrigan poem. (Ange, do you know?)

But y'know, my finding this form along with the dust-up we had the other day about parody has caused me to rethink things. I am coming around to a more liberal idea about what constitutes plagiarism and what the author's responsibilities are to make sure that readers understand when they are quoting or otherwise using other writers' work. There is clear plagiarism, and then there is... um... well... other stuff.

Take the Loren Goodman poem that Jim referenced when he started this thread.

Goodman's poem doesn't work unless you recognize it as parody. Remember, it was published in a special "humor" issue of Poetry. If you read the poem and don't recognize that is a slight variation on the Stafford original, it isn't funny. At least not to me.

Now, I'm not sure it is funny anyway, but the point is that I think Goodman's intent is clear within context. And plagiarism is about passing someone else's work off as your own. Passing the same ideas off. Several of the poems we have tagged here as plagiarism have merely taken the original and changed the wording somewhat without altering the basic sense of the poem. That is presenting something as original that really does not differ from the original.

So I think however we try to fine tune this, that the fair use thing still wanders along a wavery watery line. And there probably ain't no way around that.