[Issue #3, Spring & Summer, 1999]
Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist
By Neal Bowers
W.W. Norton and Co., 1997
Reviewed by Gay Davidson-Zielske
"Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something,
nothing;/'Twas mine,'tis his, and has been slave to thousands/ But he that
filches from me my good name/ Robs me of that which not enriches him/ And
makes me poor indeed." (Othello, III.iii.)
Though these lines are spoken by the villain Iago in Shakespeare's play,
Neal Bowers must feel their meaning every time he uncovers yet another forgery
of his poetry. Bowers, a well-published poet and professor of English at
Iowa State University, has suffered through one of a writer's worst nightmares.
He has endured the audacious theft of his poetry at the hands of a cunning
and calculating plagiarist who "between 1992 and 1994...had two of
[Bowers'] poems accepted as his own 20 times at 19 different literary magazines."
Words for the Taking recounts in chilling detail the real poet's
agonizing, though initially reluctant, search for the chameleon-like David
Jones, who has taken on pseudonyms ranging from David Sumner (his most common
choice) to a female persona, Diana Compton. Along the way, Bowers discovers
that while he was the favorite victim, poets as well-known as Sharon Olds
and Mark Strand had also had their work subjected to the plagiarist's "chop
shop" wherein he immediately sawed off the title and first lines (erasing
the poetic "serial numbers" to make them harder to trace in a
table of contents) and altered the lines of the stolen vehicle, such as
adding and substituting adornments -- similes and metaphors -- he fancied
were improvements. For example, in the lovely and crafted "Tenth-Year,
" a poem Bowers calls "a bittersweet bloom I planted on my father's
grave," the imposter inexplicably substitutes a simile for the hands
of the real poet's dead father ("his hands like Vice Grips") for
Bowers' original "his hands locked dead on the wheel." Besides
being a common noun requiring no capitalization, "vice grips"
is hyperbolic -- too much weaponry for a subtle poem. I'm not going to say
that if I were editing the journals receiving this forgery I would have
refused to publish it because of a single instance of overwriting, but I'm
satisfied that anyone knowing the true author's credentials would have wondered
about the eccentric capitalization had it gone under his true name.
As a poet, I'm sure that when I recovered my balance from the shock of seeing
my poem published under another's name, I would have been sent into another
fit of reeling when I saw such ham-handed tinkering with the language. In
a good poem, the right metaphors seem as inevitable to the poem as the right
ending to a novel. They are as inseparable from the poem's inspiration as
is the personality from the poet. While various editors, working for journals
from the well-known to the obscure, come in for deserved public "spanking"
in Bowers' book, at least one, Ruth Young at Primavera , while accepting
the plagiarized poem, expressed very gratifying "reservations"
about exactly the parts of the poem which had been tampered with. The plagiarist
was also so insensitive to the poems he stole that he once took everything
but the last two stanzas of another poet's work, leading Bowers to theorize
that the plagiarist "failed to turn the page" [of the journal
he lifted from].
One might think that such a bumbling thief would be easy to snare, but Bowers
writes the entire book to demonstrate that this is not so. For example,
the author also suspects, toward the end of his travail with the poetry
thief, that Jones is emerging in a new guise -- a fiction plagiarist posing
as researcher Paul G. Schmidt. ( One of my few quibbles with Bowers' strategy
in securing justice for himself is that he simply mentions the criminal's
name too often -- giving him more undeserved "press." While I
can understand how it would be difficult to discuss the search for him without
using his name, I think everything in me as a poet would recoil at reproducing
the plagiarist's slightly altered versions of the real work, with the crook's
name attached, in a book like this. As I delved into the pages, I soon learned
the name of the culprit, but had to glance back at the cover a few times
to remember the name of the offended party. For this reason, in this review,
I will endeavor not to mention the criminal's name again.)
Early in his explanation for the composition of Words for the Taking,
Bowers writes:
Mine is the tale of how a relentless plagiarist affected
the life of one poet and how his activities reverberated across the literary
and academic terrain,revealing fault lines. Among the people populating
this landscape are personal friends and relatives, an assortment of poets
and editors...various members of the legal profession...a private investigator...and
a sociopathic thief.
To the forgoing admirable, though curiously "detached" authorial
summary I would add that the nonfiction account contains many enticing elements
of good detective fiction. The characters emerge as generally good and generally
bad but also nicely complex, with depth and personality. Bowers and his
wife, both sensitive and professional teachers, want desparately to put
the best possible face on the faceless perpetrator who has invaded the private
fortress of the author's imagination, stolen the gold, and left careless
muddy footprints everywhere, daring to be discovered. At first, they find
comfort in imagining that he's not bright, not the perversely attractive
flamboyant Jesse James type. They also cringe to think they may be pursuing
someone who will turn out to be merely pathetic: "a down and out poet
manqué with a bad haircut and a quart of soured milk in the refridgerator."
But with the first chilling correspondance from the plagiarist, in which
the inexplicable is explained (sort of) and the unforgiveable is forgiven,
they can no longer keep these somewhat palatable images. The plagiarist
is not only not an innocent, but is guilty of much worse crime than Bowers
and his wife are ready for. (Following Bowers' lead, I will leave some suspense
for the reader about the "end" of the chase.)
At once a case study of the discovery and attempted rectification of the
crime and a meditation on the implications of plagiarism for writers and
publishers in general, the book appealed to me on a number of levels. Like
Bowers, I am a poet and teacher of English, as well as a volunteer editor
for a small cooperative press with a couple of anthologies to my credit.
Perhaps most disturbing to me, though, in connection to Bowers' tale, is
my role as faculty advisor to my university's student literary magazine
(University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's Muse ). While we do not solicit
manuscripts outside the university, as do some bigger and better-known university-based
magazines, I have had to deal with one student's plagiarism and publication
of another student's work. Knowing the agony that resulted in our case,
(we reprinted the poem with the real author's name attached and an explanation
in the next issue. I recommended that the plagiarist be proscecuted under
the university's academic misbehavior policy) I was shocked at the treatment
Bowers received under similar circumstances.
Cleveland State University's Whiskey Island Magazine had "a
copy of the plagiarism in hand in March 1992," but the "student
editors accepted the identical poem only ten days later. When [Bowers] discovered
it in print and protested to the magazine's faculty advisor [he] received
no response." Later, when a Cleveland Plain Dealer journalist
(once journalists finally took interest in the story, Bowers found his best
allies) investigated the matter, he learned that the student editor "felt
awful" but "might have taken the warning more seriously except
that it was a source of amusement among some of her professors and colleagues."
Perhaps professional poets can wink (wince?) at students' bad judgment,
but this callousness on the part of one's professional peers, who should
know better, must have been crushing for the poet. Indeed, many of Bowers'
acquaintances gave him advice which, when paraphrased, basically boils down
to "get over yourself" and, of course, "imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery." Putting myself in the author's place,
I don't think I could have persevered as long or as well as he did against
these odds. I'm glad that he did.
Besides being a useful cautionary tale, the book entirely engrossed me because
Bowers is a tremendously talented poet, his prose infused with illuminating
and many times grimly-hilarious metaphors so that the reader gets all the
facts but also feels in the marrow how this crime gnawed at the victim's
life in all aspects -- his professionalism as teacher and writer, his friendships
among the writerly and publishing community both locally and nationally,
and his relationship with his heroically dedicated wife. Marriages have
foundered under lesser stress than this all-consuming crisis of identity
theft, but this couple turn their energy toward the real enemy and triumph
in most important ways.
Early in the discovery of the extent of his loss to the "tape-worm"
plagiarist, the poet begins to encounter what could only have seemed bizarre
reactions from his colleagues and friends. He endures suspicion of his motives
for pursuing the criminal and blundering "it-could-be-worse" consolation
of the type evoked in the old saw "I wept because I had no shoes until
I met a man who had no legs." And Bowers admits that plagiarism is
not a capital offense, but rather "probably doesn't hold its own alongside
the lesser felonies, as...anyone who has had his life savings stolen by
a con artist will attest." But for a man who wakes up one morning with
neither legs nor shoes, who doesn't even realize that the theft has taken
place until a kind stranger alerts him that he has fallen out of bed, another's
worse condition is, understandably, pretty thin soup. Bowers' own comparison
of his plight to that of a "mark" in a con game is apt in other
ways too. Rather than be involved in the messy, painful, inconvenient and
downright embarassing task of setting things right, a shocking number of
editors displayed both callousness and cruelty. The editor of Poetry
Forum, Gunvor Skogsholm at the time, is quoted scolding Bowers for his
lack of immodesty: "It's my strongly felt opinion that a good poet
by nature ought to possess humbleness and that he or she ought not to think
to [sic] highly of him -- or herself....those have always been the personal
traits associated with a POET" [capitalization is apparently Skogsholm's].
As a poet who has received some less than courteous treatment from a couple
of editors, I cannot even fathom how outraged Bowers must have felt at this
rude and insulting lecturing.
Hoping to do a good deed for another poet and maybe gain a little consolation
from a fellow sufferer, Bowers writes to Mark Strand to alert him of the
theft of one of Strand's poems. This ex-Poet Laureate shrugs off the fact
of his own victimhood, saying "I heard from some magazine about [the
thief's] plagiarism...I really didn't care....It is, however too bad --
and very sad. I don't think he can build much of a career with plagiarized
poems." Bowers is totally perplexed at this seeming nonchalance, but
the "scam victim" mentality is very well documented. People who
have been bilked are often very loathe to admit that it could happen to
them. Good cons rely on that reluctance.
Like a good detective-fiction writer, Bowers withholds some of the most
dramatic results of his search until nearly the end of the book. I was reading
selected very funny and very shocking passages of the book aloud to my husband
as I breathlessly rushed ahead to see not "whodunnit?" but "howdidhedunnit
forsolong and tosomany?" My husband asked the same questions as the
ones which hover over the book, dragging the reader on: "Who WAS the
guy, really?" and "How does it turn out?" I was truly frightened
along with the author and his wife as they determine that justice demands
that they continue in their pursuit of the slippery villain, even though
they think many times that they and their lawyer and a private detective
have flushed him, captured him, and extracted the signing of a statement
of culpability. The author makes five simple and reasonable demands (though
the plagiarist keeps teasing them with diabolical groveling fawning, and
pitiable letters -- and small amounts of cash) which it appears for a while
are being met. Yet, as the net begins to descend, the Bowers feel themselves
becoming entangled psychologically to an extent they thought impossible
at the onset of their search.
Bowers worries (and who wouldn't?) if there is something about his own very
personal poems concerning the poet's ambiguous relationship with his now-deceased
father which caused the thief to single Bowers out as his favorite "mark"
to plagiarize. Trained in literary analysis, he and his wife drive themselves
nearly to distraction trying to figure motives. It is a common failing among
English teacher types -- after all, we ply this symbol-hunting trade for
a living. Only the intercession of a wise psychologist friend awakens them
somewhat. She points out that one cannot approach abnormal personalities
on the basis of what sane people do and think.
I felt an array of emotions at the conclusion of Words for the Taking
: fear, since there is no way to safeguard one's work from theft; sorrow,
that an innocent person had to endure such emotional and financial damages
just to restore partial justice (the attorney's bill alone was over $4,000);
and gratitude, that Bowers has expended this much of his time and talent
to recount what can only be a demoralizing nightmare when he, like most
poets, probably just wants to be left alone to write poetry. Perhaps it
will be some consolation that there are some of us who think that poetry
is extremely important, who "demand on the one hand/ the raw material
of poetry in/ all its rawness and/ that which is on the other hand/ genuine..."
(Marianne Moore, "Poetry")
[Order Words
for the Taking from Amazon.com.]
_____________________________
Gay Davidson-Zielske, a poet and editor, teaches creative writing at the
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
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