#LRB blog RSS Feed LRB blog Atom Feed LRB blog » On Being Plagiarised Comments Feed First Person Singular Hochwasser in Passau alternate alternate -- -- « Previous | Home | Next » On Being Plagiarised Charles Hartman 6 June 2013 -- -- Charles Hartman 6 June 2013 Tags: plagiarism | poetry On 17 May I received an email from a stranger in Qatar, telling me that -- -- On 17 May I received an email from a stranger in Qatar, telling me that someone in England had plagiarised one of my poems. Patty Paine, who teaches at the campus I did not know Virginia Commonwealth University has in Doha, and edits Diode, an online poetry magazine, pointed me to -- -- Mortification was expressed at every turn. The editors of targeted publications are in some ways more obviously victims than the poets plagiarised. My first reaction was: what a dim thing to do these days. The tracking -- -- learn such a thing than to find out whether a particular poem has been published under more than one author’s name. It took me slightly longer to see why this response felt so off the mark. But of course plagiarism isn’t imitation. Imitation means trying to duplicate a process you’ve -- isn’t imitation. Imitation means trying to duplicate a process you’ve watched someone else go through. Defining plagiarism is trickier than you might think, but most of the time we distinguish it from other -- you might think, but most of the time we distinguish it from other kinds of copying (allusion, quotation) fairly easily: it’s plagiarism if the copyist hopes no one will notice. -- -- before he had the pleasure of pointing it out to me. This is probably relatively common, conscious or not. Still, I can’t bring myself to really care. Plagiarism has always seemed to me more pathetic than criminal. Log in to Reply -- -- 2. Timothy Rogers says: 13 June 2013 at 6:53 pm There’s a humorous side to plagiarized poetry, especially when it can be tied into the follies (or impostures) of youth. Here’s an illustrative story. When I was in the ninth grade in 1963 our