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| Poetic injustice for Andrew Motion | John Sutherland The literary lynch mob is in a blind fury over Andrew Motion's 'found poem' – but it isn't plagiarismThere is no easier way of whipping up a literary lynch mob than shouting: "Plagiarism!" Andrew Motion is currently under fire for his Remembrance Day poem, An Equal Voice, published in Saturday's Guardian.As Motion's prologue makes clear, this is a "found poem" – the literary equivalent of the objet trouvĂ© (did Damien Hirst "make" that sheep he dunked in formaldehyde? Did he hell). Scrupulously, Motion cites his sources – quotations (not the author's own words) from Ben Shephard's A War of Nerves, along with quotations from the war poet Siegfried Sassoon (whose literary remains Motion, it is reported, has been successful in saving for the nation).Pointy-headed academics will know (Motion, recall, is a London university professor as well as a "Sir") that his (borrowed) title, An Equal Voice, alludes obliquely to the work recently voted the nation's favourite, The Waste Land.Eliot's poem – composed in the emotional carnage of the post-second world war period – was originally entitled (borrowing, shamelessly, from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend), He Do the Police in Different Voices. That discarded title pointed to the collage method Eliot used. He picked it up from his mentor ("il miglior fabbro"), Ezra Pound. Whole tracts of Pound's Cantos are "found" passages lifted verbatim from secondary sources. So too Eliot's poem is a whispering gallery of voices not Eliot's own.There is then, as Motion insists, an ultra-respectable literary pedigree for his found poem. One might call An Equal Voice "He do the Army in Different Voices". And, of course, Motion scrupulously indicated where he found the bits and pieces for his found poem.Nonetheless, Ben Shephard has exploded into some very quotable fury. What Motion has done is "shameless burglary". Of the poem's eight stanzas, Shephard calculates, "five consist entirely of material from A War of Nerves very slightly rejigged. There's a word for this. It begins with 'p' and it isn't 'poetry'."Motion retorts that his poem has brought Shephard's out-of-print book (pre-owned copies are currently languishing around millionth on Amazon's bestseller list) back into the limelight. Shephard should be grateful. He isn't. It could be bayonets at dawn.Motion might, perhaps, have got in touch with Shephard before publishing the poem. But what he's done is not plagiarism, and certainly not burglary.There's a good and a bad side to this spat. The good is that both Motion's poem and Shephard's book will be revisited. The bad is that accusations of plagiarism linger, like bad smells, fouling writers' reputations. The gunsmoke has long since lifted but the whiff of plagiarism is, alas, what will be dimly remembered about Motion's Remembrance Day poem. It's a pity.Andrew MotionRemembrance DayPoetryJohn Sutherlandguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Five great memoirs, according to author Ben Yagoda "We live in an age of memoir," says Ben Yagoda, who traces their development in his new book, Memoir: A History. Yagoda names ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Crime: Hollywood Knights Detective novels by Joseph Wambaugh, Charles Finch and Stan Jones, and essays from P. D. James. feeds.nytimes.com |
Battle Scars An Ethiopian-born novelist recreates her homeland during and after the reign of Haile Selassie. feeds.nytimes.com |
Madeleine L'Engle returns to Newbery medal, thanks to A Wrinkle in Time Hero of this year's winning book is reading children's classic, which itself won the 1963 prizeAlmost 50 years after Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's book A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery medal, the prestigious American prize was taken today by a novel in which L'Engle's much-loved story plays an important role.Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me tells the story of sixth-grade New Yorker Miranda, caught up in reading L'Engle's time-and-space-travelling tale, who begins to receive notes that she believes are from the future and which could help prevent a tragic death. Newbery judges, announcing her win today, praised its "brilliantly constructed" plot.America's highest honour for children's books, the Newbery medal was established in 1922 and claims to be the first children's book prize in the world. It is selected by children's librarians and is awarded for the "most outstanding contribution to children's literature". L'Engle won in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time, the story of Meg and her little brother Charles Wallace's search through time and space for their missing father, who has been captured by an evil power. Stead, who lives in Manhattan with her family, said in an interview with Amazon.com that although she loved A Wrinkle in Time as a child, she hadn't originally intended to include it in her own prize-winning novel. "It started out as a small detail in Miranda's story, a sort of talisman, and one I thought I would eventually jettison, because you can't just toss A Wrinkle in Time in there casually," she said. "But as my story went deeper, I saw that I didn't want to let the book go. I talked about it with my editor, Wendy Lamb, and to others close to the story. And what we decided was that if we were going to bring L'Engle's story in, we needed to make the book's relationship to Miranda's story stronger. So I went back to A Wrinkle in Time and read it again and again, trying to see it as different characters in my own story might (sounds crazy, but it's possible). And those readings led to new connections." As a child, Stead met the late L'Engle at a bookshop and remembers "just staring at her as if she were a magical person". "What I love about L'Engle's book now is how it deals with so much fragile inner-human stuff at the same time that it takes on life's big questions. There's something fearless about this book," she said.Stead joins a roster of fellow Newbery medallists that includes Hugh Lofting in 1923 for The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, The High King by Lloyd Alexander in 1969 and Susan Cooper for The Grey King in 1976. Last year's award was won by Neil Gaiman, for the much-garlanded The Graveyard Book.Children and teenagersAwards and prizesAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |