This bit of hand-wringing is amusing, coming as it does from the folks who last year brought us a celebration of Flarf and Conceptual Writing—two “movements” aiming to elevate plagiarism to an art form.
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* This post’s title is a tip of the hat to Bob Dylan’s great song “Ring Them Bells“.
You're right, Awyn. All Bush has to do is call his memoir Flarf or Conceptual Writing and he'll be in the clear!
An acquaintance from Scandinavia told me that in her town in Finland, students were required to have studied FOUR languages before being allowed to graduate. Mention the classics and you're often given a blank stare, or raised eyebrow that implies "You actually READ that stuff?!" And the news that a former president is being accused of plagiarizing his own memoirs (for which he was
I'm glad I'm not in charge of programs of any kind! Multilingualism is wonderful, but there have been plenty of awful multilingual poets. Of course, I speak as someone with just 3 years of Latin—in Denver public schools! (surely the last cohort to have that option)—and enough Spanish to be dangerous. It does mystify me that languages aren't required at many universities anymore; I
Joseph,<br /><br />thanks for the reminder (via the "Poetry Foundation" article)that avant-gardists (whatever the appellation) are most of them plagiarists. It's wholesale raping & pillaging of language (imo). But, frankly, it's understandable why a generation of poets with no grounding in real language can work up the nerve to admit that plagiarism is a bona fide literary