According to The Guardian (UK) former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, has been accused of plagiarism by a military historian for a poem published in The Guardian.
Ben Shephard who produced the television series The World at War complained the poet had been ‘extracting sexy soundbites’ from the historian’s painstaking work on the psychiatric impact of war on soldiers. “Shameless burgalry’ Shephard called Motion’s Remembrance Day poem explaining that five of the eight stanzas were lifted directly from his book A War of Nerves.
Do poets have this right to use others words as they see fit? The found poem is, indeed, a literary tradition but when does borrowing become ripping off? You decide. Here is a ‘borrowed’ extract from the pome, An Equal Voice, compiled by Andrew Motion for Remembrance Day 2009 as a tribute to those who fought in World War I. You’’ll find the full text of An Equal Voice on The Guardian Website.
An Equal Voice
…………….Everyone called it
shell-shock, meaning concussion, but shell-
shock is rare. What 90% get is justifiable funk
due to the collapse of the helm of our self-control.
You understand what you see but you cannot think.
Your head is in agony and you want relief for that.
The more you struggle, the more madness creeps
over you. The brain cannot think of anything at all.
From An Equal Voice by Andrew Motion
You will find another poem by Andrew Motion, The Five Acts of Harry Patch, on The Telegraph website.
Poppy Pic Bas Kerr’s Photostream
Geoff Lemon is a busy kid. He’s been running the Wordplay gigs since the start of 2007, and founded Wordplay Collective with Steve Smart in 2008. He’s currently Poetry Editor of Australia’s prettiest literary mag, harvest; and works as a music journalist for MTV, Beat magazine, Citysearch, and Wireless Bollinger. His poems and stories have been published in Best AustralianStories, Blue Dog, and Going Down Swinging, and broadcast a number of times on ABC radio.
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