Plagued by Plagiarism

Okay, plagued is too strong a word as it's just a single case, and with the hard 'g' in plagued and the soft 'g' in plagiarism, the alliteration doesn't even work well enough to overcome this objection. But it's the best I can do today.

So yesterday I get a lovely email from a reader who had found my work in a journal and had looked me up online to read more of my poems. Which is an extremely pleasant thing to happen. And the comments from the reader are so encouraging. At the end of the email, he tells me that by the way, a poem of mine has been published under another name at a certain journal, and perhaps it's a pseudonym of mine, but just in case he thought he'd just let me know. He gives me the link.

I click on the link, and there's my poem, every word of it, credited to someone else. A year after it originally appeared under my name in a prominent journal (and after it appeared in an anthology and on Verse Daily, but before it came out in my book). So I write the journal to let them know and they very promptly write back to apologize and suggest a course of action to rectify the situation, one acceptable to me.

In the meantime, I start to worry about this same person using this poem or perhaps another of mine elsewhere. So I do an internet search for her. And here's what I find: she was an undergraduate at the time of the publication at the school that the journal hails from, and within months of publishing my poem under her name, she was in a traffic accident and died. This immediately causes me to feel conflicted--don't want to disparage the dead and all that, despite the fact that I am feeling quite violated. Well, let's just say I'm glad I contacted the journal previous to having this information. It's all just too depressing.

Half-Price Poetry

Black Lawrence Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books, has a stable of poets I adore. I own quite a number of their books already and have never been disappointed by their poets, so when I heard they are having a 50% off sale on all poetry books for National Poetry Month, I hurried on over there and ordered myself 5 books. Wish I had known about this sale earlier in the month so that I might have had weeks to mull over which books I want the most (I want them all!), but I know I won't be disappointed with any I get. At least, I never have been yet.

Poetry on YouTube

The other day I posted that BOA Editions has their own YouTube channel. Now C&R Press has started a YouTube channel as well. There's only one video so far, featuring poet Travis Wayne Denton, but hopefully there will be more soon.

I hope to put a list together of poetry YouTube channels eventually, so if you know of any, please comment below.

Who Do You Write Like?

Here's a fun website that's being cited all over the place these days. It's called "I Write Like." You paste your original text in the text box and the site "analyzes" your style and tells you who you write like. I put in the last two poems I've finished, and the first was apparently in the style of Arthur C. Clarke (yes, the science fiction writer), and the second was a la James Joyce. (Ironically it was my poem about Mendeleev, the father of the period table, that was Joycean not science-y, while my poem about mothers-in-law was science fiction-y). Well, this analyzer a totally useless tool  (is that an oxymoron? if something is useless, can it even be considered a tool?) but still kind of fun.

Tonight I was too tired to write but I still stared at my notebook for awhile until an image which I have been thinking about for months suddenly matched itself up with a line. So I got a line and a half out of the evening, and paltry though that may be, I'm pretty happy about it because I tried to force this image into the last two poems I've written (the ones mentioned above) but could not make it work, so I took it out again and just kept it around to see what happens. You know how you're told as a writer not to save anything for the next project, but to use it all up in the current poem with the trust that there will be more images and more wonderful lines coming in the future? Well, I completely subscribe to that policy, but you still have to be sure that everything you put into the poem, no matter how perfect it is on its own, works to further the piece. If not, out it goes, and you hope that someday it will work somewhere.

And tonight it did.

Feel free to tell me who you write like too, if the spirit moves you.

eRead All About It!

I don't have an eReader. (Or is it e-reader?) Well, whatever it is, I don't have one. I still feel ambivalent about reading on a screen versus reading a physical book. This is true despite the fact that every single friend I have who has had the same reservations and gotten an eReader anyway has loved it. Without exception. Nobody has said to me, "Wish I hadn't spent the money on this." (But if that's your feeling, please chime in and say so in the comments section.)

Recently I found out that Amazon offers free Kindle apps for the Mac, the PC, the Blackberry, the Android, the iPhone, the iPad...probably for other devices as well. That's what I'll do first, I suppose, download a free app and see how I like reading on a screen. And then I'll decide.

But I'm so ambivalent that I haven't yet downloaded a free app either. I never did like change. Will let you know when I have done this first baby step.