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on plagiarism

lest we forget

Despy Boutris
Jun 7
Share this post
on plagiarism
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Happy Tuesday!

I have a lot of stuff for you today—I’ve been trying to read more, and I’ve been organizing my email and old documents et cetera et cetera, so I’m sharing a lot of stuff here to keep an archive of everything.

Here’s what’s in this newsletter:

  • On plagiarism

  • Quotations

  • Tweets


On plagiarism:

Okay, so part of going through my email, trying to minimize my use of storage, included seeing old emails exchanged between me & my colleagues in the past.

It reminded me of the ~poetry drama~ that has occurred in the last few years.

As someone who reads voraciously—and who gets poems’ lines stuck in her head, sometimes for years at a time—my biggest fear is accidentally plagiarizing another poet. If it ever does happen, god forbid, I hope I’ll fess up & take responsibility & make it right in every way I can.

Not everyone has that same reaction—as Sam Cha eloquently notes in “Sorry-not-sorry: on plagiarism.” The essay is absolutely worth a read, but—to summarize—it responds to this email exchange, wherein poet Claudia Cortese confronts poet Lisa Low after discovering that Lisa plagiarized several of her poems.

This exchange shows pretty damning evidence.

When Lisa writes “after Claudia Cortese,” what she means is

that she’s taken poems from these two poets, field-stripped them, and then built them back up with different nouns. (x)

Indeed, it’s a poetic practice that consists “almost entirely of the process of de- and re-cellularization.” (x)

That is: “after” is a pretty generous way of describing the resulting poems.

Claudia Cortese noted:

Low not only plagiarized my words & images but--even worse--she stole my voice, trauma, a girl I love dearly--a girl I spent years creating, a girl who let me pour into her all of the pain and pathology of my girlhood--my book WASP QUEEN did not come easy, this is NOT OKAY (x)

On pages 7-8 of the email exchange, you can see Claudia’s & Lisa’s poems side-by-side.

Again, the evidence here is pretty damning, but it’s Low’s reaction to this evidence that really gets me:

The irony is that my project centers on an Asian-American experience of being silenced and invisible in real life/the media, and that is what is happening to me now. Ruby is a version of my younger self, an amalgamation of my experiences and insecurities growing up as an Asian-American girl in a white world, and it feels like you are telling her she doesn’t matter. This is the most heartbreaking part for me.

Sam Cha comments on this response:

Sounds pretty plausible, no? It’s not plagiarism, it’s commentary about the ethics of fiction-making. It’s not plagiarism, because it’s about taking a white person’s poem and repurposing it to build the narrative of a person of color. It’s not plagiarism. When you call it plagiarism you’re silencing me. When I substitute Ruby for Lucy, substitute white girl for father, put tofu where the spruce goes, put tampon where the marbles go, I am saying something specific about my experience.  It’s breaking my heart! Don’t I matter?

I’d have been willing to buy it, if it hadn’t been after the fact.

But I can’t.

And as an Asian-American poet—as somebody who’s Asian-American in no small part because he wanted to write in English rather than in his mother tongue—as someone who has, in effect, given up his first home for the medium of his art—as somebody who tries to address, in his writing, identity and hypervisibility/invisibility through the lens of race and whiteness and racial stereotypes and microaggressions towards Asian-Americans, this hurts.

It hurts because Low has a point when she says it’s not the same when she addresses whiteness and Claudia Cortese addresses whiteness. It hurts because it bothers me when Claudia Cortese implies that Ruby talking about the white girls at school is the same as Lucy talking about the white girls at school.   Because it isn’t. Can’t be. Shouldn’t be. It hurts because I have two graduate degrees in English and poetry, and not even the vestige of a Korean accent, and strangers on the street still ask me what country I’m from and whether I speak English and because I will bet you a solid gold toilet that Low gets those same questions—more in the last two years than ever before; more now than ever before—and I will bet you a Mar-a-Lago that Cortese does not. And because, when I see Cortese writing that she wrote in an essay that Lucy’s self-hate is shaped by living in a “white-supremacist rape-culture,” and that therefore when Low says that Ruby is “an Asian-American girl living in a white world” Low is plagiarizing Cortese’s earlier essay, I instinctively bristle, my whole body clenches like a fist, and because I then have to back down, because let’s face it, Cortese is right. It hurts because even with the screenshots of Low poems side-by-side with Cortese poems, my first instinct is protective. I want Low to be innocent. I want her POC point of view to be more than a concept that she’s deploying in self-defense. It hurts because her plagiarism makes a mockery of her POC point of view. And of mine. Because Low’s made it so she can’t, in fact, talk about her own experience and turn it into poems, and I want to be on her side, but I can’t.

It hurts because Low and I, we’re trying to do many of the same things, we are chasing down the same fucking whale. And she’s taking these concerns, these traumas, these obsessions, this work—that we share, that we investigate and pursue and harpoon, in some important sense together (I mean, sure, she does it by playing Mad Libs with other people’s syntax and form, and I do it by drinking lots of coffee and typing till I can’t see straight, but nevertheless: together)—and she’s taking all of that,  and repurposing it as a goddam excuse, a fucking alibi, so that—what?

She’d be able to have a link on her website to her plagiarized poem in Hobart?

Are you kidding me? (x)

Here’s a little more:

Twitter avatar for @theclaudsterFat Femme Care Bear @theclaudster
Imagine seeing the images, character, world you spent YEARS crafting to embody what you wanted to say about your particular experienced recycled in someone else’s poems?

December 8th 2018

1 Retweet21 Likes
Twitter avatar for @theclaudsterFat Femme Care Bear @theclaudster
(2of 3) She said, “I’m sorry we find ourselves in this situation.” That’s low key manipulation. She never apologized for the plagiarism. When I asked her to stop writing the Ruby poems, she said Ruby was different from Lucy & in her descriptions of Ruby, plagiarized me

December 8th 2018

22 Likes
Twitter avatar for @theclaudsterFat Femme Care Bear @theclaudster
This was the first sign I couldn't solve this privately with her. She was plagiarizing me to me while saying she was not plagiarizing me! I couldn't believe what I was reading. She was recreating the problem before my eyes while saying the problem didn't exist
Image

December 8th 2018

1 Retweet18 Likes

&, from Waxwing:

Twitter avatar for @WaxwingMagWaxwing Magazine @WaxwingMag
Our statement on the Lisa Low / Claudia Cortese controversy.
Image

December 9th 2018

8 Retweets74 Likes

Anyways:

I believe in the power of owning-up to wrongdoing.

I believe that there are certain rules that come with imitation.

I believe in tracking your influences.

I believe in showing your work.

Twitter avatar for @itsdboutsDespy Boutris @itsdbouts
feels weird for y'all to consistently publish a writer who's a serial plagiarist & who gaslit another writer when confronted but ........ go off i guess

June 6th 2022

1 Retweet28 Likes

Since we’re talking about plagiarism:

  • Here’s another wild instance from several years ago.

    • Pushcart-Nominated Poet Accused of Plagiarizing Multiple Peers

  • And I’m sure y’all know about this one

  • 12 Literary Plagiarism Scandals, Ranked

  • "Me Before You" Author Jojo Moyes Has Been Accused Of Publishing A Novel With "Alarming Similarities" To Another Author's Book

  • Poetry competition winner exposed as plagiarist

  • Plagiarists, beware: the internet will find you out

  • Plagiarism, ‘book-stuffing’, clickfarms ... the rotten side of self-publishing

  • HarperCollins Pulls Book by a Trump Pick After Plagiarism Report

  • The girl who stole my book: How Eilis O'Hanlon found out her crime novels were swiped by a stranger

  • Stealing Books in the Age of Self-Publishing

  • Publisher pulls books after late Canadian poet laureate accused of plagiarism (white fuckers stealing from Black people ….. what else is new)

  • Poet returns Stephen Spender prize after accusations of plagiarism

& a tweet:

Twitter avatar for @plagiarismtodayJonathan Bailey @plagiarismtoday
News broke this morning that upcoming author Jumi Bello plagiarized from Plagiarism Today when drafting a plagiarism explainer essay.
plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/09/pla… #plagiarism #jumibelloPlagiarism Today Plagiarized in a Plagiarism Atonement EssayNews broke this morning that upcoming author Jumi Bello plagiarized from Plagiarism Today when drafting a plagiarism explainer essay.plagiarismtoday.com

May 9th 2022

64 Retweets213 Likes

Onto lighter news!

Here are some lines from poems I read this week & loved & wanted to scream about.

Quotations:

What could be more natural than such a promise, such a yearning after.

-Chase Berggrun


Everything is a little dewy this morning, blue

crowning the slanted grass, its sun chains,

its longing, its shorn smell. Shore

up your promise, take me to the meadow,

the rocklaid lake.

-Katherine Gibbel, “Squill”


Like shrapnel, light scatters.

-Beth Bachmann, “On Beauty”


River like

a steeple intent on its elsewhere, river giving

its name to the dead-end road, dividing

what we thought we knew

from what we never could.

-Kasey Jueds, “Litany (Easter)”


Come summer, our own feet would blur

to ghosts when we swam, blanched then vanished

into the river’s dim.

-Kasey Jueds, “Litany (Easter)”


I’ve looked

into the ocean & mistook it

for a mirror

tarnished & infinite, I’ve called out

in the dark against

& for god.

-Flower Conroy, “Dead Girl Drowning”


Who calls

the sparrows to cling

to the rim of you and trace

their momentary outlines

against the flux of sky?

-Kasey Jueds, “The Silo”


Little engine

of the mind stuttering, little

needle skipping against

the record’s black disc

where it hits the scratched

place, the damage—

-Kasey Jueds, “The Silo”


The heart thuds with lack, / lack, lack.

-Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, “Discharge Questionnaire”


I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo

-Hanif Abdurraqib


I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone

-Hanif Abdurraqib


listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.

-Hanif Abdurraqib


My life can pass like this

Waiting for beauty

-Solmaz Sharif


Morning I am still new

Still possible

-Solmaz Sharif


tonight we touch. grandiose

experience, that. my hand,

your hand, your hand, yes,

mine.

-TR Brady, “Phantom Mirror II”


O spit of girl, O rot

of moss and lichen, cloud,

grouse, minnow mouth.

-Micaela Bombard, “Survival Spell”


Sorrow, like hunger,

always comes back.

-Ellen Bass, “On the Other Side of Sorrow”


Fading from gunmetal

to amethyst smoke,

remember Michigan sky

over spruce trees, first

raindrops stippling

the pond out back

like the rows of tulips

breaking through soil

-Michelle S. Reed


That’s what anybody’s story is, in the end: a forgiveness.

-Sam Cha


Tweets:

Twitter avatar for @itsdboutsDespy Boutris @itsdbouts
joan retallack
Image

June 6th 2022

1 Retweet5 Likes
Twitter avatar for @clhubesLucy Huber @clhubes
A few years ago I was freaking out about accomplishing nothing in life so instead of having a meltdown I put an event in my Google calendar for five years from that day to postpone my success freak out for five years and I just saw it on my calendar for next week.

June 6th 2022

36 Retweets1,746 Likes
Twitter avatar for @tlecaqueThomas Lecaque @tlecaque
I am not over the fact that a gun company made a gun named the Crusader, stamped Psalm 144:1 on it, it's in such high demand that there's a 12-18 month waiting period, and we don't treat it as a call for religious terrorism.

June 6th 2022

15,119 Retweets67,686 Likes
Twitter avatar for @jdeshpanJay Deshpande @jdeshpan
Lucie Brock-Broido on people saying "It is what it is": "Every time I hear a person say this phrase (especially if they mean it), I’m stunned anew. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever simply accepted that anything — is what it is. I’ve no such calm to speak of."

June 6th 2022

89 Retweets603 Likes
Twitter avatar for @CaitJGibsonCaitlin Gibson @CaitJGibson
A friend of mine died of colon cancer this week. She was 39. Two years ago, after marrying her incredible wife, she asked her doc for a colonoscopy. Her father had died young of colon cancer, putting my friend at higher risk, and it was on her mind. She wanted a screening. 1/x

June 6th 2022

6,006 Retweets28,878 Likes
Twitter avatar for @borborygmir꩜ @borborygmir
‘does your boyfriend know he’s in a queer relationship?’

binnie @binni3isnthuman

your *straight cishet boyfriend does not see you as non-binary. and he is not inherently queer because he’s attracted to you.

June 6th 2022

7 Retweets67 Likes
Twitter avatar for @MuseWendiWendi Muse @MuseWendi
whether people realize and want to acknowledge it or not, state violence also looks like allowing millions to die bc implementing mitigations was "too hard" and "people wouldn't like it." it's a violence via neglect, indifference, and inaction.

June 5th 2022

1,555 Retweets6,064 Likes
Twitter avatar for @kycarrerolopezkcl @kycarrerolopez
academia loves to establish hierarchy with titles like ‘visiting assistant just-popping-in associate substitute non-senior junior varsity’ professor

June 6th 2022

309 Retweets4,270 Likes
Twitter avatar for @masonmennengaMason Mennenga @masonmennenga
trying to explain sodom and gomorrah to evangelicals:
Image

June 5th 2022

6,055 Retweets47,612 Likes
Twitter avatar for @ha1eyghaley 🎷🐛 @ha1eyg
growing up as a lesbian, you get told you’re “dirty” and “disgusting” so that’s why this pride month im partnering with mr clean

June 3rd 2022

5 Retweets25 Likes

That’s all for today.

As always, I hope you’ll consider buying some books or art or zines or giving me attention on Instagram. No pressure, though.

See you soon—

-Despy Boutris

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