Tags
art, Arts, creativity, plagiarism, poetry, Writing
Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
~Mark Twain, letter to Helen Keller
The poem is the shaping of time, it is shaping by language (words plus silence plus intonation) our experience of time. So the poem is a score, a language mise-en-page for the reader as performer. The reader as performer. A peak shared by unlikely mountaineers: O’Hara, Blackburn, Mac Low-all demanded an alert performing of the page from the reader, otherwise nothing would make sense. That score idea has diminished in recent years-you need it for O’Hara, but not for Ashbery. You need it for Blackburn but not for Creeley, who has a different sense of compelling music. Or maybe just a simpler music, more simply scored.
I am vindicated! 
