Regarding Originality of Work
This is one of these hard to write posts, so I’ll just try to be succinct:
In July of 2011, Niteblade received a poetry submission: “Foretelling” was the poem’s title.
After a few edits, I accepted the poem for publication. Then I came across another poem, this one already published back in 2007. To my shock, “Foretelling” was almost identical to that other poem, not just a few words or even a few lines, but word for word, line for line; sure, that other poem had been cut significantly, and there were a few minor changes, some new line breaks, but it was the same poem.
I informed the original author about the incident; I informed the author who had sent the submission that Niteblade would no longer publish anything by them because “Foretelling” was not theirs, and that this author was no longer welcome to submit to any of the venues I edit for.
A response from the original author told me that the author submitting “Foretelling” to us had tried this before: they had submitted “their” poem to Liquid Imagination where the editor immediately found that it was not originally theirs.
For editors, this is perhaps a cautionary tale. For all concerned, it’s really just sad.
You are being more graceful and discrete about this than I might have been, but I definitely concur about the cautionary tale taught here.
Posted about this here.
Thank you for talking about it, and ARGH FLAIL RAGE.
I am that editor from Liquid Imagination that Alexa mentioned. I find it more than sad that I must take text from poems submitted to us and paste it into a web search to ensure that the poem and the poet is what and who she says they are. I think it is despicable. Thinking back on my response to this so-called poet, I was too kind, but it caught me off guard. Remembering has raised my hackles again. I will not tolerate plagiarism in any of the publications I’m involved with.
Thank you, Alexa, for the chance to say my piece.
In light of these events, I’ve updated the Jabberwocky submission guidelines. I hate that such a paragraph is necessary, but apparently it is. This goes for every zine in which I am involved.
http://www.jabberwocky-magazine.com/submissions/
I just saw the plagiarist author’s “take” on this–she says she’s withdrawing all of her poems everywhere, including ones already accepted for publication. This strikes me like a literary version of running away from a police car with its sirens on: The other poems may not have been plagiarized, but it sure makes her look guilty.
Danny, yes – and the problem with what the author wrote is also in that she does not mention that she was caught doing the same thing with the _same_ poem in 2010.
Sad to see some stoop to this, but plagiarism nothing new. There’s a interesting book about a guy who regularly plagiarized poetry – mundane poetry – by Neal Bowers, title “Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist”, 1997, W.W. Norton & Co.