“It begins with ‘p’ and it isn’t poetry.”

There’s been a couple of interesting brouhahas in the publishing world over the last couple of days revolving around plagiarism.

Or, as Ben Shephard, one of the participants in said brouhaha put it:

There is a word for this. It begins with ‘p’ and it isn’t poetry.

Which was quite an entertaining line.  But I digress. In New Zealand it was revealed last week that Witi Ihimaera (and it’s running as this week’s cover story in the NZ Listener) has admitted that he used material in his latest novel, The Trowenna Sea, that he didn’t write and didn’t attribute. Jolisa Gracewood, in reviewing the novel for NZ Listener, noticed (as she puts it) “uncanny resemblances between a review book and other sources”.

Ihimaera owned up apparently and his publisher is contacting the sources to put things right. One suspects no malicious intent, but one also wonders how this got through a) one of the surely more experienced editorial teams in the country, and b) one of the most well-regarded authors in the country, not to mention a Professor of English at a University (Auckland) where the issue of plagiarism and the consequences are drummed into students fairly strongly. (Yes, alumni here).

There is a different kind of P-Word kerfufflay occuring in the UK, where Andrew Motion (former Poet Laureate) is being accused by the aforementioned Ben Shephard of using passages from Shephard’s non-fiction military history work in his poetry. This is a very different and much less straight-forward beast than Ihimaera’s with Motion pretty much totally unapologetic so far and positing his corner as being in the tradition of “found poetry”. This raises a lot more sticky arTIStic (emphasis my own) issues – sure you’re using other people’s (presumably non-arty) words to create your art, but that does mean those people don’t deserve an acknowledgement?

Hard to know. But possibly pointing out passages of Shakespeare that were clearly lifted from other sources is a little disingenuous when you consider that Shakespeare didn’t operate under copyright law.

There is probably no absolutely clear answer on this. Shephard clearly feels his ownership of his own material has been impinged upon without payment, and Motion equally clearly feels he took that material and changed it enough to make it his own kind of art. But I did like the Times Online’s final line in the piece (written by Dominic Kennedy, Investigations Editor - just so as we’re clear):

Perhaps it amounts to nothing more than a literary misunderstanding: the historian examined the poem like a work of history and the poet read the history book as if it were a poem.