spotlight: Poetry is Plagiarism
Re: Poetry is Plagiarism
What if you spent a week reading a particular poet’s work, then tried your hand at ripping off their style. Would you call it inspired by? An homage? Blatant plagiarism?
C.W. Bryan both poses and answers that question in Poetry is Plagiarism, his debut full-length collection. Following the adage that good artists create; great artists steal, Bryan gives us a collection that is part poetic experiment, part contextualizing memoir, as he guides us through his relationship with, and best imitations of, six world-class poets.
Excerpt from Poetry is Plagiarism
We Loved the Earth, but Could Not Stay
This is a book about stealing.
More specifically, this is a story about stealing the poetic style of famous poets with my best friend, Sam.
Poetry is Plagiarism is not an entirely new concept—many writers and artists much more famous than me have discussed the same sentiment ad nauseam, with “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” being perhaps the best known iteration of this idea. However, for the purposes of this book, Sam and I gave that quote a few arbitrary rules, added some stakes, and began our own journey of stealing.
So, in these next chapters you may notice that some attempts at stealing are better executed than others. This is largely due to the caricatures we created of these famous poets. A week is not a long time to perfect someone else’s style, so we adapted just a few traits. Sylvia Plath, for example, was boiled down to depressing tercets. William Carlos Williams ended up being short, sweet, little punctuation. Charles Bukowski was jaded old man hates the world and here’s why.
Nobody is better at coming up with excuses for not writing than writers themselves. There are a million ways to convince yourself not to write—writer’s block, busy work schedule, lack of inspiration, the list goes on, and Sam and I are no strangers to any of them. Poetry is Plagiarism helped dispel us of that; it made us write more than we would have on our own. I want this book to exist not because it’s perfect, but precisely because it’s not. I hope to inspire every reader to, at the very least, attempt writing poetry.
Writing is not a solitary act. Yes, when you put the pen to the page to write a poem you are the one moving its inky head around, scribbling words and letters. And yes, when it’s published people will read your name above the poem, but behind each word is every poet you’ve ever read, every friend that’s ever offered you an edit, every inspiration you’ve ever felt, every stinky little poem you’ve ever written. I couldn’t have done this without Sam, and Sam couldn’t have done this without me. And both of us couldn’t have done it without standing on the shoulders of giants that came before us.
I owe so much to all of the writers we emulated. This book could not exist without them, so I will once again shamelessly steal a Ted Kooser quote from his book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets: “I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say, ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.’”