Dear Christian:
The first time I experienced being plagiarized was a few
years ago. I was calling my parents to check in on them, as I do weekly, and
got into a long conversation with my father about the recent success of a much
younger cousin of mine, who had just sold a popular web-based company he’d
developed. We were talking about his extraordinary success—quite proudly, as if
we’d had something to do with it—and while we were talking my father mentioned
that he’d once proofread my cousin’s college entrance essay for him. It was
only natural he would have been asked to do this: my father has a PhD in Political Science and spent a couple of years as a teacher at a local college. Years
of close reading had trained him not only to be an excellent editor but to have
an exceptional memory for facts and passages of text, improving on what I
suspect now might be technically classified as an eidetic memory. “Listen to this,” my father said, and recited
for me the basic narrative of my cousin’s essay.
The essay
was about my cousin and his mother, and the fraught time they’d had together on
a trip to Asia. My cousin and aunt are both Chinese American, and though they
may appear visually “the same” to outsiders, my cousin wrote about how they are
in fact quite different. My aunt was born in Malaysia and emigrated to the United
States: in many ways, she still has the immigrant’s hunger for success and to
instill in her sons “Chinese” values of loyalty and duty. My cousin, on the
other hand, was born in Seattle and raised to be the normal, if astoundingly
intelligent, American teenager. For these reasons, and other, he could and
could not relate to his mother, was and was not part of this Chinese identity.
The essay ends with the two of them arguing in a restaurant, in front of a
shopkeeper who watches the two of them closely until they stop and then
approaches them. The shopkeeper looks at my cousin.
“Your mother?”
she asks in English. When my cousin shrugs resignedly, the shopkeeper nods and
says, “Same eyes. Different feelings.” Then walks away. My cousin smiles, and
my aunt coughs. They decide to pretend she is right.
“Isn’t that
extraordinary?” my father asked me on the phone, recalling that last passage.
It was.
Because that scenario, indeed that very ending, was mine. This was almost the
same story—and end line—I had written myself in an essay entitled “We Do Not
Belong Here We Are Only Visitors” that appeared in my first volume of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. My
essay, too, was about the fraught relationship between a child and parent, in
this case of different racial appearance and ethnic loyalties, who spend a
difficult period of time traveling in Asia together and who end up in a shop,
arguing in front a shopkeeper. In my essay, my mother and I stand before the
shop keeper, hissing out our resentments at each other in front of a long bolt
of cloth, all the while regarded with curiosity by the shopkeeper.
“Your
mother?” the shopkeeper finally asks me, in English. When I nod, she takes the
bolt of cloth from me and begins to ring it up. “Different faces, same
feelings,” she says. My mother coughs and I smile too broadly. We decide to
pretend she is right.
This is
exactly how my own essay ends. And now you can see why I might have been struck
by the similarity.
It is
possible that my father, who might have read my essay long before, got it
confused with my cousin’s college essay. But like I said, he has an amazing
memory for the books he’s read, and when I told him the ending of my essays—an
essay published in a book that I know my uncle and aunt purchased to support
me, that I had seen lying around their house,
and that had been published a year before my cousin would have begun applying
to colleges—my father finally admitted he had never read my own collection.
“That’s extraordinary,” he said again, but softer now, calculating the likelihood
that my cousin, accidentally or not, had plagiarized the ending of his college
essay.
I didn’t
say anything. My cousin is family. I felt, of course, a moment of piercing
annoyance at the possibility that he had done a bit more than “borrow” his
ideas for his own essay. I was also bemused by the fact that this same essay
was one of the many things that helped get him into a fancy ivy league school,
where he was trained to be an entrepreneur, and from which he’s since graduated
to a successful career in technology. It doesn’t hurt that he has, from what
little I know about his personal life, never written a poem, story or essay
since.
You’ll
notice I used the word “bemused” above. That’s a word Helen Mort used to
describe what you did to her when you took her poem “The Deer” and passed it off
as your own. Helen Mort is clearly a very good poet, because that word “bemused” exactly describes much of what I feel too: a heady mix of anger,
resentment, amusement and bewilderment, even a touch of embarrassment as well. But
though anger falls first on that list of nouns, it is not, in fact the first
emotion that I feel. To a certain extent, I feel more pity than anger, mixed
with the chagrin of feeling that what you’ve done really isn’t that far away
from what so many writers do and have done, what we flirt with continually in
our own work.
I have a poem
entitled “The Orchard” that appeared in my last book of poems, Animal Eye, which I agonized over. I had
been reading Robert Hass’ book Time and
Materials and I was deeply struck by his poem “Pears”: a poem that among
other things chronicles, through the frame of a dream, the death of his English
uncle and the passing away of one world (the world of what we might consider
“Old World” values) into the more modern world of the speaker. Two deaths
wrapped into one, signified by a bird that flies away at the end of the poem. I
was moved by this poem, and began working on a similar elegy that takes the
same dream-narrative frame to describe the death of my Chinese grandfather, who
had always seemed to be fluent in English but who I recently was told had actually
not been able to speak English much at all. The effect of this on me was that
one narrative erased the next, making my grandfather appear to “die” twice in
my memory, so that now I can barely remember his voice, or any single word he
said to me, at all. My poem is set in the garden my grandfather built, and like
Hass’ poem, contains an image of a bird which, at the end, flies away. “The
Orchard” and “Pears” are formally and, to an extent, thematically very close to
each other. And I was terrified someone would think I had plagiarized him.
So this is
what I did, Christian: I went over and over that poem, line by line, to make
sure my language was my language, my ideas were mine. The poem’s elegiac frame was
Hass’, there is no doubt of it, but the heart of the poem—while touching on
his—was mine. And to make sure anyone reading this poem would understand I knew
the two works were connected, that the similarities were not gestural or accidental but deliberate structural responses to Hass’ elegiac imagination, I wrote in
the back of Animal Eye that the poem
was a response/homage to “Pears” by Robert Hass. And then, Christian, I thanked
him for his work.
You may
read these two poems and feel that I did more than what I claim to have done.
You may be able to point to a hundred other poems that fall into this similar,
hazy category in which influence and rote copying can barely be deciphered from
each other. You may think that “response/homage” might be a fancy term for the
same thing that you have done. This is what I was terrified of at the time. But
having read what you did with my poem “Bats,’ I can rest assured now, and
forever, that there is in fact a difference.
You took my
poem. You took all its language,
changed only the tense, and added ten words. Ten words, out of a poem
containing 125. And then you muddied the line breaks, and you put your name on
it, and you published it as your own.
When I
first heard about this from the kind and extremely scrupulous editors at Anon, where you’d published my poem as
yours, my curiosity was briefly, possibly academically, piqued; I thought that
perhaps you were a conceptual poet. That would be interesting: taking my poem
and changing only the name as a kind of experiment, to see if an author’s
gender created new meanings. Interestingly, “Bats” is a poem about the fear of
infidelity and the sadness surrounding infertility. It’s pretty fucking
personal, Christian, and I discovered through your plagiarism that yes, indeed,
the speaker’s sex DOES matter. So does her damn identity. Anyway, I like
conceptual poetry. I’m interested in “uncreative writing.” But you didn’t do
that.
You clearly
aren’t a conceptual poet and you weren’t sampling language in any of the
collage-type ways you now cite from poor, put-upon Eliot: you understood you
wanted the poem to reflect an individual voice that comes from the particular
imagination of a single author. You aren’t conceptual: you’re Romantic. And how
do I know this?
Because you
fucking added your own line breaks and words.
But though
my language has gotten harsh here, Christian, that’s not what really angers me.
What really angers me is something far more primal. It’s not that you took my poem. That annoys me,
oddly, in the same way that my cousin’s tiny theft annoys me. It’s not flattering, as
some have blithely suggested to me that it should be. It wasn’t flattering in
my cousin’s case either, because I’m fairly certain it was done out of
laziness. In your case, however, it
seems to have been done out of compulsion. You’ve plagiarized other poems, and
the fact that you likely got mine from a highly visible American website means
that you are very likely to have plagiarized dozens of other American poets. It
wouldn’t even surprise me to know that you didn’t like the poem. No, I don’t
feel flattered by or angry about your decision to plagiarize me. I feel angry
that I’m having to write this, in some pathetic attempt to get you to
apologize. I feel angry that you made my poem worse. In this, I admit, my
emotions are entirely egotistical, circling around and around the drain of my
own self-loathing and self-regard, the particular pains I took over my work to make
it sound original and beautiful, the particular disgust with which I am forced
to regard it, broken and clunky with your new line breaks, the poem less mine
now than some sort of monstrous palimpsest that only limply resembles the sounds
of the original. In a way, you have
taken my poem from me, from my memory of the pleasure of writing it once, the
sounds I imagined and heard when I read it to others or myself. I read every
draft I write out loud, Christian, so I can hear the difference in the rhythms that
occur if I change even a single word. Because of this, the side effect of my
writing process is that I memorize all my work, so that whatever poem I write
lingers inside me, like a bell still vibrating after the sound has passed. And now that sense, those sounds, that particular pleasure of making—which
is the only reward we ever get in poetry, Christian—is gone.
So thanks
for that.
I know this
sounds silly and abstract and something, really, that only some dim poet would
say. But I am a poet, Christian, and I am beginning to suspect that, deep down,
maybe you aren’t. Or maybe you don’t really want to be one. Because if you ever
got this kind of pleasure, I don’t think you would have plagiarized Helen Mort,
or Neruda or me, or anyone else, because it would be your language you would want to hear, not someone else’s. And this is
what I don’t understand about what you did, or (because I am writing this, and
sending it out into the ether and hoping to get some response from you, some
acknowledgment, and knowing I won’t) maybe I do. Perhaps what you liked most is
what I like, too: the sense of being heard, of knowing that you were heard, and
publication is the easiest way to trick yourself into believing that this has
happened. I get that. Clearly I get it. I wouldn’t write books if I didn’t. And
I wouldn’t be writing this now, and be so angry reading the pieces in the Guardian and The Independent and The Telegraph and not seeing my name listed
among the other poets. It’s disgusting what I feel, and I am continually
brought up short by my self-absorption, ashamed of it, seeing myself now like some
old coot watching someone else get attacked and shouting, “Hey! I once got
mugged, too!” from the sidelines. That’s how this situation makes me feel. But there’s
no way I can blame you entirely for that.
But I also
feel, strangely, a little like I’m stuck in my poem “The Orchard.” Only now,
instead of my grandfather who’s voiceless, twice erased in memory, it’s my own
work, my poem, my language. That’s the thing that’s flown away.
So I’m
writing this letter to you, Christian, because this is my news article, this is
me standing on the street corner shouting about something that really makes no
difference, but that makes—to me—a great deal of difference, who is angry, and
embarrassed, and sympathetic, and, yes, bemused.
I wish you
well, Christian. I hope you can get over this. And I hope even more not to hear
from you again.
Paisley
