Covert and Overt Plagiarism: On Poetry and Theft - ASPRO Sarah Holland-Batt and Dr Ella Jeffery

Описание: Copyright Law and the Creative Industries
QUT Faculty of Law
Thursday, 29 October 2020
10:00am to 3:00pm

Session 1. Copyright Law and Creative Arts

Covert and Overt Plagiarism: On Poetry and Theft
Associate Professor Sarah Holland-Batt
Dr Ella Jeffery

Abstract

In 1920, T.S. Eliot delivered an axiomatic pronouncement which has shaped how most poets have thought about poetry and originality for the last century: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” he wrote in The Sacred Wood, “bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” A hundred years on, this paper returns to Eliot’s dictum to evaluate current thinking about poetry and theft in the literary field, focussing on recent case studies of “uncreative writing”—wherein theft is overt and central to the poet’s creative enterprise, as in forms including the cento, found poem, erasure poem, remix or the readymade—as well as recent poetry plagiarism scandals, wherein theft is covert and concealed. In doing so, we seek to define and make explicit the often tacit conventions in contemporary literary practice relating to appropriation and plagiarism from the perspective of the poet-practitioner. We will argue that disclosure and documentation—through epigraphs, notes and other means of acknowledgement—are central to the so-called “cento defence,” allowing the poet to present the work of others as their own, whereas alterations, especially minor substitutions, and the absence of disclosure, are central to a poetic conception of plagiarism.


Biographies


Associate Professor Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor and critic whose most recent book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her honours include fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, a Chateau de Lavigny Fellowship in Switzerland, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among others. In 2016 she was the first poet to be awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, which recognises “outstanding talent and exceptional artistic courage.” Among many leadership roles in the literary sector, she has served as a judge of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and is presently Chair of Australian Book Review. In 2020, supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Copyright Agency, she was appointed to write a weekly poetry column, Poet’s Voice, for The Australian.


Dr Ella Jeffery is a poet, editor and academic. Her debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and was published by the press in 2020. In 2019 she received the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award, and the Mick Dark Fellowship for Environmental Writing. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Griffith Review and Southerly. She co-edits Stilts Journal, a triannual digital poetry journal publishing poets from around Australia, and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.