For a few days now I’ve felt the current plagiarism scandal like a proverbial thorn in my side. Which is funny, because it has nothing to do with me directly. I haven’t been accused of plagiarism, my work has not (that I know of) been plagiarized, and I am not the editor of a journal or a contest judge put in a difficult position because a plagiarist has asked me to consider their ‘work’. Yet, perhaps like many in the poetry community (I use the term loosely to mean anyone actively writing, reading, submitting and editing poetry – we are all part of this superorganism) I take this as a personal affront. How dare you! I blurt, like an English matron clutching at her pearls. Is this an overreaction?

I don’t think so. Plagiarism strikes a blow at the very heart of what we hold sacred: that the words we write are ours, that when we sign our name to a piece of work and send it off into the world, we are acting as honest brokers. An editor or reader shouldn’t be tasked with feeding each line or image of our poems into a search engine in a neverending game of cat-and-mouse. What has happened here is even more diabolical, because the plagiarist changed just enough of the originals to elude easy detection. This is the work of a person who knows exactly what they are doing, and that it is wrong, and who doesn’t – or, perhaps, does – want to get caught. Compare the plagiarized work with the original, and see for yourself. Now, if this had happened only once, we might be able to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it has happened over and over, as editors who have been alerted to these shenanigans have spent much unremunerated time and energy rooting out this person’s dirty work. Did I mention that that poem won a $1000 prize?

Compare: a couple dozen magazine editors spend a week’s worth of time and energy on this person’s work in an attempt to rectify the wrongs perpetrated against them and their readers, and the plagiarist strolls to the bank, cash in hand. This is what I mean when I say that plagiarism is bad for everyone. Of course, the plagiarist’s name is now mud, and they will likely never – nor should they ever, unless serious and meaningful attempts at reparation are made – be taken seriously in our community again. But that’s a lot of damage done along the way, a lot of broken glass. And now these same editors will likely begin screening new work for signs of plagiarism, as if they didn’t already shovel hard enough in the slush, adding a completely unnecessary layer of busywork to their noble labor.

Poetry offers few rewards in any material sense. There is practically no money in it (unless you win that $1000 prize!), and even recognition comes slowly and haphazardly if at all. Most published books don’t sell enough to make anything on royalties. The great majority of us are in it for the poetry, for the sense of satisfaction at having puzzled together some disparate piece of the universe which bursts suddenly into existence the moment we click the right word into place. Our afternoons are passed in contemplation of a comma, a preposition, a tough call between two equally potent synonyms. Yeats wrote, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ It’s something our non-poet families, partners and friends look on with bemusement, as if to say, You poets are crazy.

Maybe we are. I can’t rule that out just yet. But poetry also keeps us sane, I’d argue. In any case, we have a right to practice it. We have a right to want to write it and read it and publish it in peace and not be hounded by those wishing to impinge on our hard-won place in this marginal world by stealing the only thing we actually own – our intellectual property. We have a right to write bad work, and get better over time, and read and learn from our peers and from our peers of the past, and let that learning simmer and boil and bubble up over time into something original, something we can rightly call our own. And not have someone who refuses to put in the work come along and steal our words and slap their own name on them and stroll to the bank with our money. Or appear alongside us in a journal or an anthology with stolen gems, perhaps our gems, on their fingers and wrists and around their neck, smiling the great fake smile of fraudulent beauty.