2007 May : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for May, 2007

Kenneth,
First, a message for you. The legal folks at the New York Transport Authority have delivered a court order to me to testify against you. Apparently, they have decided to sue you for plagiarism. There is a very angry team of train schedule writers waiting to either get justice or jump you for robbing them. I tried to explain about “found poems”, but they were not feeling me. One really irate worker shouted, “So, you think you can just find anything along the way, knowing full well that it belongs to someone, and all you have to do is call it ‘found’ and it is yours? That is a load of caca!” They are just not feeling me. I tried to explain that you really made no money on the book, and more than that, you really are not interested in becoming famous for having “written” all that stuff. They were not really convinced. I know they were quite angry. I may have to testify, Kenneth, I am sorry, I just don’t know what to do…
Now to your questions:
- Do you copyright your poems? Why or why not?
I don’t. I rely on publication to copyright my work. Why? because I find it very hard to believe that anyone would want to steal my poetry; and in a sick kind of way, if they do, I would be flattered. Now I am not so blase about song lyrics and story treatments and that kind of thing. But the poems? Naaah. I know a lot of less experienced poets who will ask me how to secure copyright for fear of someone stealing their work. Most of the time I want to tell them that no one is going to want to steal that stuff, but that would be rude. Still, it is fair to say that with poetry there is far less at stake financially than with other genres. Hence my quarrel with thieves would be mostly a principled one about morality, more than anything else. A year ago, a friend of mine read a passage of text in a memoir that seemed just too familiar to him. The narrative was so close to one that he had retold in a poem. The thing is that the author of the memoir had been the editor of an anthology to which my friend had submitted a few poems including the one in question. The editor did not accept the poem, but it seemed he had borrowed from the poem. My poet friend wondered what to do? I could think of nothing. What was at stake? Principle, really. The most my friend could do was publish his poem and date it in the published text amnd hope nop one would accuse him of plagiarizing the prominent poet and memoir writer. A more attractive option would be for him to write a poem about how he was robbed by a major poet. But sue? That would seem excessive. It would be a hard case to win. That is why I tell poets to try to secure copyright by publishing and if they can’t publish they might try the old self-addressed-selaed-envelope trick. I hear that it has some legal standing. I remember feeling this anxiety about folks stealing my work when I was much younger. I have a more realistic view of the currency of poetry now.
- As a poet, what is your relationship to copyright issues, in general?
Not a big issue for me as a poet, but as a writer in general I have serious concerns about the existence and enforcement of strong copyright laws that will allow artists to be paid and that will discourage plagiarists and other thieves. Of course, as a scholar and critic, I have to deal with copyright issues in my own work. What is “fair use”, for instance? The laws in the US are quite different from the laws in the UK which are equally different from the laws in other places and the implications for a writer seeking to quote from the work of another writer can be quite significant. I had to rewrite my entire book, Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius when I could not secure permission from the Marley Estate to quote as much of Bob Marley’s lyrics as I wanted. And what about photocopying short stories for class or showing Block Buster videos to a larger audience than simply my household? The issues are important and I have to stay abreast of them.
Not sure if there is anything especially profound about this matter, but there it is.

05.31.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

Calabash, The Third Day

I have been writing this final entry on Calabash for four days. Having returned to South Carolina to finish teaching my short semester course, “Love African American Style”, a close look at romantic black fiction, I have had to fit in the bits and pieces of the final day of the Bash between everything I have to do. It has been good to think about the festival, about what it all means, but mostly, I write this to complete the circle.
So, we are on day three of the festival. It all begins early in the morning…

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05.31.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

My New Work

My son, Judah Darwin Zucker Goren, was born at home (in the water) yesterday morning. We were gently and lovingly attended to by a midwife and a doula. My husband and our older two sons (and Lindsey, our poet/babysiter) witnessed Judah’s arrival. It was everything I could have hoped for. It was, in the most profound sense of the word, awesome.

05.31.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Kenneth Goldsmith

Goldsmith on Poetry & Copyright

Dear poets, we are privileged to live in an economy of no economy. Let me refine that: our economy is purely an intellectual one, not a financial one.
I have no copyright restrictions on my work—economically or legally—in perpetuity. I don’t believe that the result of my lifetime’s labor will have any economic ramifications, even long after my death.
I don’t doubt that it will have intellectual ramifications, though, but those consequences are entirely based on the work being made freely available for all. If I were to propose an economic model, the entire premise of my work would be undermined.
Putting on my UbuWeb editor’s hat now, I must say that it is a fallacy that in the field of poetry, your heirs will financially profit from your work as a poet. Sometimes on UbuWeb we see unenlightened heirs holding on tightly with both hands, trying to wring a profit out of their deceased works (fees for reprinting, use on websites, etc.). What they essentially do is pull their beloved’s work out of circulation forever, ensuring it’s extinction. Little do they realize that by giving the work away, they will have a much better chance at preserving greater longevity for these works. If you can’t access them, they don’t exist.
Ours is an economy based on plentitude and abundance; the more copies of our work there are out there and the more readily available they are, the greater the impact our works will have. This is in contrast to economic forms based on scarcity: diamonds, paintings, fine watches.
Now I suppose there are exceptions, but they’re very few and far between. I’ve had some rather famous people agree with me when it comes to our free distribution theories on UbuWeb. When the New York Times asked Merce Cunningham if he was upset that we didn’t ask his permission to place his audio files (lectures and interviews) on UbuWeb, he responded that he felt that the greater good of having his thoughts out there, freely available, would far outweigh any economic benefit he would receive from them.
Everything I publish I also make freely available on the web. And here’s a funny story: A few summers ago, I was taken on an all-expenses paid reading tour of Scandinavia. I read to packed houses, stayed in beautiful hotels, ate marvelous meals, had vast newspaper, television and radio coverage. And the punchline… not a single person in Scandinavia had ever seen a book of mine. All they knew of me was from what I posted on the web. With my books in runs from tiny houses, never totaling over 1000 copies, it cost them more to ship from SPD than the price of the book. Again, friends, if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist.

05.30.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Kenneth Goldsmith

Poetry & Copyright

I would like to ask all of the bloggers the following questions:
- Do you copyright your poems? Why or why not?
- As a poet, what is your relationship to copyright issues, in general?
It would be better if we each responded in a separate post as a comments-based discussion would inevitably get buried.
- Kenneth

05.30.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Patricia Smith

Why has Patti been so quiet?

Almost every day at Calabash, I’d grab my laptop and head down to a lounge chair at the edge of the sea (sorry) to commune with Harriet. Then, fortunately and unfortunately, I would happen upon the copious, deftly crafted musings of Kwame Dawes. Each day he wrote with such unbridled exhilaration. He wrote about the festival with the love of a father.
By the time I’d finished reading his posts, I didn’t feel there was anything to add. It was all there–the celebration, the community, the camaraderie, the rain. And I’m afraid my planned entries were going to be a little (OK, a lot) less insightful:
I saw a really big crocodile!
I totally like saltfish!
My granddaughter Mikaila beat a really smart man (initials Terrance Hayes) at Scrabble!
I thought it was B.J. Honeycutt and it was!
I’ve never had an audience like this!
I drank (mineral water) at a bar built right in the middle of the sea!
I’ve heard Michael Ondaatje giggle!
I’m in Jamaica!
OK, so I’m not as tender and exhaustive as our prolific Mr. D. Maybe it’s just enough to say…
…my life has been changed.

05.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Kwame Dawes

Calabash–Second Day and Night

For the entire day, a sheltering cloud settles over Treasure Beach, and when it rains, the thousand and a half people find shelter under the tent where poets and novelists are reading, their voices clean and assured against the drone of rain beating against the canvas and hushing through the trees. Somehow, the lines marked out for passageways through the crowds remain intact, and the spirit of the festival has not changed–people are happy to be there, they are there to listen to writers read their work, and a little rain (or a lot of rain) will not spoil this for them.

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05.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Kwame Dawes

Calabash–First Night

It is just past midnight. From the seaward end of the tent, just at the edge of the stage with its rustic columns, its thatched roof, its gazebo-like utility when this tented area has been transformed back into a large hall filled with rows and rows of white plastic chairs into a thickly grassed sloping lawn; I am watching people greeting each other as if service has just ended and someone has said, “greet one another with a holy kiss”. Aaron Patrovich has just startled us with a stunning reading of a Beckettian-like stretch of complexly philosophical prose with the intensity and skill of a gifted slam poet–all from memory, no book in hand, just speaking in modulated tones, making characters come alive from his weirdly surreal novel The Session, and nearly a thousand people in the audience have taken the ride with him, laughing at the absurdist jokes, nodding at the twists in ideas, and applauding with force as he leaves them hanging at the end, saying: “And if you want to know who came through the door, buy the book” .It is charming, it is a tour de force, and Calabash2007 has just been launched.

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05.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Emily Warn

From Lebanon – Part Two via Tom Sleigh

I spent the day in the Golan Heights, in a ruined Syrian town, Quneitra, absolutely destroyed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between the Syrians and Israelis. Before the Israeli army withdrew after the 1973 ceasefire, the Israelis evacuated the 37,000 Arabs living there and destroyed the town, stripping buildings of windows, doors, anything that could be carted off: this was sold to Israeli contractors, and then bulldozers and tractors moved in and knocked down most of the stripped buildings, now mangled slabs of concrete and rebar. It was odd, disturbingly odd, to see a herd of cows here and there, birdsong everywhere, the remains of the town overgrown, even a garden full of roses run wild in what used to be somebody’s front yard.

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05.25.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kenneth Goldsmith

No Sympathy, Please

Thank you for the outpouring of sympathetic notes regarding my relegation to the Siberia of academia. But quite frankly, I’m happy where I am. I prefer the coolness and distance of academia. I feel comfortable with its glacial tempo, its seriousness, its studiousness, and the dryness of its protocols. I prefer the long shelf-life of the academic book to the person-to-person immediacy of the reading or slam.
I’m interested in less emotion, not more. The idea of a “warm” literary festival or even worse, a “cozy” residency turns my stomach. The last thing I want is to meet my readership in the flesh. I prefer email to hugs, culture to nature, air-conditioning to gentle breezes, fluorescent lighting to tropical sunsets, theft to originality, falsification to truth, the manufactured to the hand-crafted, Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron, and value artifice more than life itself.
“To only speak with the words of others, that’s what I’d like. That’s what freedom must be.” (”Ne parler qu’avec les mots des autres, c’est ce que je voudrais. Ce doit tre ca la liberté.”) – Raphael Rubinstein

05.25.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Archive for May, 2007

Kwame Dawes

Copyright Matters

Kwame Dawes

Calabash, The Third Day

Rachel Zucker

My New Work

Kenneth Goldsmith

Goldsmith on Poetry & Copyright

Kenneth Goldsmith

Poetry & Copyright

Patricia Smith

Why has Patti been so quiet?

Kwame Dawes

Calabash–Second Day and Night

Kwame Dawes

Calabash–First Night

Emily Warn

From Lebanon – Part Two via Tom Sleigh

Kenneth Goldsmith

No Sympathy, Please

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