Poet and teacher Neal Bowers endured one of the most frustrating battles a writer can face: his work was plagiarized by an unknown man who made minimal changes and got it published under pseudonyms in reputable poetry journals. Bowers discovered the crime in 1992 when a fellow poet contacted him and faxed him a copy of one of the plagiarized works. In the ensuing years Bowers became a detective of sorts in order to track down his plagiarizer and put an end to the activity. Bowers chronicled his difficulties, first in a magazine piece published in American Scholar, and more recently in his book, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist. Words for the Taking covers more than just Bowers's search for a criminal. It also reveals the level of indifference he encountered both in academic circles and among the editors and publishers of poetry magazines. Booklist correspondent Gilbert Taylor wrote that the work is "courageous for Bowers to publish and important to read for all who work in creative spheres."

In his Washington Post review, Jonathan Yardley called Words for the Taking "a thoughtful book that is about a good deal more than the theft of one man's words." Yardley further stated: "Looking back on the case, Bowers finds that he must offer 'not merely a defense of my creative worth but also of poetry's worth.' This obviously should not be necessary—it puts the victim rather than the plagiarist on trial—but it is perhaps inevitable in a culture where the word is of minimal value. This book should be a bracing corrective for that culture, but only the naïve can imagine that it will get the attention it deserves."

Los Angeles Times reviewer, Mark Rozzo, called Bowers's debut novel, Loose Ends, "a low-key psychodrama, . . . all about half-states: between truth and lies, life and death, health and sickness."

Bowers told Contemporary Authors: "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, I made two significant decisions: to stop writing poetry, and to leave the university.

"While there are some good poets writing and publishing in America today, poetry at large has become a diluted commodity hawked by writer's workshops and hustled through various contests. To speak plainly, I grew weary (after thirty years) of feeling like part of the problem. Having no solution to offer, I chose to withdraw.

"Likewise, universities in America have become empty, desolate places. In my own academic area, literature has been supplanted by the text of the moment—often something contemporary, sometimes a grab-bag of letters or journal entries rummaged from another century's attic. Theory has replaced texts, and blab has eliminated meaningful discussion.

"With no significant readership and no possibility of generating an income from what they write, poets wrestle and race one another in an empty arena in competitions that determine book publication. But the world of the novelist is purified by money. If an agent takes an interest in a novel, it's because he thinks he can sell it to a publisher who also thinks it will sell. The trick is to find an agent and an editor who care about language and good writing as an aspect of marketability. Where 'po-biz' is characterized by in-bred stroking and bickering, novel writing offers the pragmatics of a real audience in a much larger world of readers.

"My movement from poetry to fiction has been personally invigorating. The novel presents challenges that are new and exciting to me, and I do not regret leaving poetry behind. The volume of poems that will appear in the coming years—Hazards of the Heart (which has not been offered for publication yet)—will conclude my career as a poet. Soon, I will officially sever my connection with the crumbling university. In however many years I have left, I intend to write as many novels as I can."

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