Nice Poem; I’ll Take It
By SANDRA BEASLEY
Looking through Ward’s publications over the last few years, I recognize the hopscotch. We both have been published in journals small and big, online and in print. We are both in our early 30s. He has an M.A. in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. I have an M.F.A. in creative writing from American University. We list some of the same inspirations — Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. He published in the literary journal Diagram the year after I did. One bio note proclaims: “He hates sport, things which are trendy and people who refuse to be themselves.”
How I wish he’d stuck to being himself. Instead, he chose to be me. In 2011, he entered the text of my poem “August” as his own in a contest. I was skeptical when I received the tip from a friend of a friend on Facebook. Then I saw the Web site for the University of Derby’s Buxton Poetry Competition. In the portfolio of winners, I found “July,” by Christian Ward, which received a citation in the “open category”:
Sooner or later, whatever you cherish most will beg
to be burned.
Trust me, the phoenix says, I’m immortal. Watch
your childhood
home — how the wires fray, how the floorboards
splinter to tinder.
The poems are identical in line and stanza, except for a few strategic word changes. The title rotates by one summer calendar month. “The man you love” becomes “the woman you love;” my “baseboards” become “floorboards.” Instead of a sister who thickens “gasoline with jelly, collects canisters” with the intent of making Molotov cocktails, Ward creates a brother, a milder criminal who “shoplifts canisters of petrol from the BP service station.”
When your work is posted and reposted online, and when publishing is as much an act of community-building as a means of income, you develop a flexible definition of intellectual property. I have enthusiastically blurbed poets who used my work for structural inspiration. I have walked into a high school classroom to discover that a teacher has assigned his students to “write into” my poem, inserting their nouns into my free-verse form. I have volleyed e-mails with translators, accepting the control lost when your metaphors enter a language you do not speak. I can admire conceptual poets like Kenneth Goldsmith, whose pieces are often a transparent pastiche of borrowed texts. This is none of that.
“I have begun to examine my published poems to make sure there are no similar mistakes,” Ward said in a formal statement to The Western Morning News of Cornwall after his use of Helen Mort’s work came to light. “I want to be as honest as I can with the poetry community, and I know it will take some time to regain their trust.”
“Published,” it seems to me, suggests Ward is far less concerned about the core transgression than he is about the consequences of being caught. “Mistakes” suggests he still thinks of this as some errant drafting exercise, as if our poems are Mad Libs waiting for completion at his hand. And being truly “honest” dictates reaching out not only to the poets involved in your publicized thefts but to the rest of us whom you know to be waiting in the wings.
I am not the only American victim of Ward’s plagiarism, instances of which have steadily continued to emerge since the Mort revelation. He recycled Paisley Rekdal’s “Bats” in Anon Magazine, whose editors later caught the violation and contacted Rekdal. She posted a fiery letter to Ward on her blog, describing feeling “a heady mix of anger, resentment, amusement and bewilderment, even a touch of embarrassment.”
At least Rekdal and I can speak for ourselves. In 2006, Sarah Hannah’s poem “At Last, Fire Seen as a Psychotic Break” appeared online. It was later collected in “Inflorescence,” her intensely personal second book, which wrestles with the death of Hannah’s mother, an artist who struggled with mental illness. The collection was published posthumously. Hannah took her own life in 2007 at the age of 40.
Fast-forward to 2009, when the Poetry Salzburg review in Austria published “Fire as a Metaphor for Psychosis,” attributed to Christian Ward. Line after line is copied from Hannah’s poem, including the closing stanza lifted whole with only the loss of a single line break. Her poem reads: “What if you’d stood nightly by the wall, / Felt around for the heat, / Drawn a cold, wet cloth across the surface, / And, speaking soft words, / Held it?”
Ward adds the epigraph “After SH.” He lists this credit in his bio note for Diagram, which includes the coyly reflexive observation that Ward “recently crossed the Mojave and can now understand the definition of hell. Thought he saw Dante asking for a lift somewhere along the route.”
Where would Dante send a plagiarist? The Eighth Circle of Hell is reserved for the fraudulent and requires a descent down a cliff on the back of Geryon, within waving distance of Mordred and Count Ugolino in their pit of treachery. That seems a tad excessive. I want to step back, to take pity on Ward. But I also want to be clear: these appropriations matter. If the poets don’t assert the value of their words, who will?
The editors who inadvertently abetted Ward’s thefts have responded in a variety of ways. The Buxton Poetry Competition organizers took “July” down and reformatted their PDF of the winning submissions as if the poem had never existed. The Web site of The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine now reads, “The poems previously published on this page were submitted by and attributed to Christian Ward, but were actually the work of award-winning poet and novelist Owen Sheers.”
Valley Press is supposed to publish Ward’s first collection, “The Moth House,” later this year. Is “July” in the table of contents? Is “Fire as a Metaphor for Psychosis”? I assume plagiarized work would be culled, but it’s more likely that it was never in there to begin with, that our poems were useful only as steppingstones.
“August” holds a special place in my own career; it closes my collection “Theories of Falling,” which won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. It was a hard poem, the kind that rips you wide. I wrote it in August of 2006 and push-pinned it to the wall with the rest of what I did not yet know would be my big break. I’d open the door to my studio each day, and the breeze would riffle the pages.
“The only thing I can say,” my mother told me, “is he truly loved your work — and that’s where the sadness is.” I want to believe that. With every draft I read aloud, I tasted the words in my mouth. Salty, sweet, fatty, lean, velvet, metallic, mean. Mine. What does it feel like, tasting words you’ve stolen? Like sand, I suspect. Sand that a man dying of dehydration drinks in the desert, never slaking his thirst.
Sandra Beasley is the author of the poetry collections “I Was the Jukebox” and “Theories of Falling,” and the memoir “Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life.”
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