bellinghman: (Caricature)
bellinghman ([personal profile] bellinghman) wrote2015-03-27 11:02 am

Oh my

'perhaps the most prolific poetry plagiarist of all time'

What a damning phrase that is.

I don't normally pay much attention to the world of English-language poetry (even less to foreign language poetry if I'm honest), but it appears that the advent of Google and other search engines has been setting the cats among several flocks of pigeons. The short version is that various published poets are now being discovered to have been engaged in behaviour varying from creating poems from a bricolage of others' words and phrases all the way through to taking existing poems, filing off the serial numbers and entering them in competitions. Some of the articles make it sound as problematic as the cycling world's drug problems, with entries being disqualified only for the runners-up to be disqualified too.

How did I stumble over this though? Well, Google of course. I decided to search to see what my one-time lodger was up to these days, only to discover him embroiled in this scandal, with that opening phrase applied to him.

I have one book by him, but it's a short novel and he maintains those were not copied.

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