[R. S. Gwynn]

http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/b...gentryid=48608

[Orwn Acra]

It helps to steal from people who sound all alike.

[Michael Juster]

The publisher must be very nice and very gullible.

[John Whitworth]

I pinch stuff too, but I always say exactly what I've pinched. And I choose people like Wallace Stevens and Beachcomber, people worth pinching from. Oh, and George Bush.

Naughty, naughty, as Auden said in another context.

[Terese Coe]

It strikes me as pretty strange that the publisher is going to delete the offending work and republish it~~after pulping so many books? Why would a publisher do that? Unless it's a vanity press.

[Ann Drysdale]

No, it's not a vanity press. It's a small, well-respected independent publisher and Andy is, as Michael has intuited, a very nice man. I admire him for his loyalty and honesty.

[Douglas G. Brown]

Hmmmm .... Nice spring day here. I think that I will inadvertently borrow my neighbor's Alfa Romeo convertible.

[Michael Cantor]

There's such a thing as being too loyal and too nice. The more I read on this, the more it's obvious that Sheree Mack plagiarized - repeatedly - and that her actions will cost the publisher both money and face. And it appears that there were other cases with other publishers. To reward this behavior by republishing the book strikes me as ludicrous. I hope the publisher reconsiders.

[Julie Steiner]

My husband left his first engineering job in disgust when, after a few months, he figured out that the company's business model was apparently "See what the Japanese are doing, reverse-engineer it, and then produce the same thing cheaper because we didn't have to pay for our own research and development."

Not only did he feel it was unethical to steal other companies' work, he felt that he was being forced to betray his own vocation and talents. He had wanted to become an engineer since he was about eight years old, and it wasn't because he wanted to recycle other people's old ideas. He wanted to invent brand-new stuff--stuff so breathtakingly cool that it was undreamed-of by anyone else.

I would hope that people who become poets do so for the same reason--because they want to contribute something previously undreamed-of to the world. Sadly, this is not always the case.

I will never understand why rearranging a paragraph from a textbook (and/or using a thesaurus to change it enough to fool the reader) is plagiarism...but taking someone else's poem and doing the same thing is supposedly a legitimate technique called "erasure." And this brain-eating zombification gets celebrated in venues like Poetry Magazine and taught as a legitimate technique in workshops, which is why we keep seeing egregious examples of it, year after year.

I am fine with the use of other folks' work to synthesize something new (with appropriate attribution).

I am fine with centos--in theory, if not always in execution, heh--and collages and parodies and tributes and poems written "after" or "in the spirit of" poems by other authors (again, with appropriate attribution).

I'm also fine with both faithful and loose translations, so long as the original authors are credited, and their intentions are not misrepresented without the reader's knowledge.

I am NOT fine with the bankrupt strategy of reverse-engineering or "improving" someone else's work, anytime a soi-disant poet--a word derived from MAKER in Greek--runs out of ideas of his or her own from which to MAKE something. Gack.

Here's a revolutionary idea: If you're really this hard up for poem ideas, take a year or two off to GET A LIFE. Then you can write about that.

[John Whitworth]

But she's not doing an of that, Julie. Though I agree there is an awful lot of claptrap talked. much of which you have put your finger on. I blame the pseudo-universities and many courses in creative writing. Itaught creative writing but that was QUITE different becuse it was me. What she is doing is simply copying other poems. She is producing fakes, just as Van Meegeren produced fake Cezannes etc etc and requires to be publicly pilloried and showered with used bumroll and cabbage stalks.

She s not the only one. Do you remember a fellow called C. J. Allen?

Nobody has to get a life. Everybody already has one.

Centos are a different matter altogether and extremely difficult to do. I know. I've tried.