on plagiarism
kind of
When I was twenty-five, my mind was soft and wet. I liked to go on long walks from my office all the way east down Delancey to the Williamsburg Bridge, holding an Arizona Iced Tea bottle filled with wine. At my job, instead of working, I’d type poems into google docs. Then I’d text the screenshots to a person with whom I was in love. He was a poet, and I was copying him.
He’d do the same—send poems he’d written to me. Sometimes he’d post them elsewhere, and I’d go looking for them, which was almost as fun.
My poems were brief. That was their main virtue. Their purpose was to convince this guy that he should be in love with me instead of with the girlfriend he’d had for seven years. This aspect of the story is familiar, and I will not linger on it. I’m interested, instead, in how he stole a poem of mine, the last he’d ever publish, a poem I only found once he was dead.
So twenty-five-year-old me spent a summer sending him my short, bad poems, inviting myself over to his apartment, watching him do karaoke at a dim bar across the street from his building. He slept in a child’s bed, and when I stayed the night he let me have it. In his lofted bedroom was a worn pleather swivel chair and a box of white T shirts. He painted his name on these and handed them around. He was a hesitant person with a soft voice, tall, full of self-pity. I loved him.
(His girlfriend didn’t live with him? you might ask. Not after seven years? In a city this expensive? No, she did not. She lived alone in an apartment she’d inherited. This fact gave me hope. And maybe there was hope, but not, as Kafka said about God and human beings, for me.)
Summer progressed into fall. My condition worsened. I told him, in a birthday card, that I loved him. This is not, if you are wondering, the way to do it.
Yet he let me keep hanging around, and I chose to do so.
If it wasn’t clear from context clues, one of the reasons we got along was that we were both drunk all the time. Drunk, and sending these poems back and forth. Over time, we did more drinking, and less poem-writing. Or I did, anyway.
One important thing to know about this person is that he was a practicing Scientologist. He described for me, but did not demonstrate, how he could open drawers using only his mind. I lay on his bed and said, OK. I said, How interesting.
That wasn’t enough to get me to go. He had to try much harder. But eventually I did.
After I stopped talking to him, I did some more drinking, and no writing, and then no more drinking, and, in the fullness of time, a little bit more writing. Poems, again. I was incapable of anything longer. Not to say that poetry is easier, that isn’t what I mean. Lying on my side on the couch, squinting, I typed these poems into my notes app. I’d start from a couple of words encountered elsewhere, and then riff. They were as bad as you might expect from the conditions of their composition. I will not reproduce them here.
And a few months into this new era, this new bad-poetry era, I learned that this person I had been in love with, my poet, had died. He was thirty-four.
He died of a cancer that’s treatable if you find it early. If you avoid the doctor, your prognosis worsens. By the time his cancer was diagnosed, it had spread to his liver.
(I found all this out later, by reading things that weren’t meant for me. We hadn’t been in touch in years.)
Because he was a Scientologist, chemotherapy presented a problem. I am sympathetic to the desire not to add the suffering of treatment atop the suffering of dying, if dying is imminent. I am less sympathetic to treating cancer by heating your internal organs to 108º Fahrenheit. But they weren’t my internal organs, after all. I didn’t even love them anymore.
I sent money to a GoFundMe to support this experimental treatment. Then I complained about it to everyone I knew. And a few weeks later he was dead.
I started searching for his poetry. I’d stopped looking for it once I no longer loved him, because love had been the only thing that had made him interesting to me. But now death served a similar function, if briefer, less intense, and more nauseating.
There were a couple of new poems. Several were repurposed and nearly identical to ones I’d read before; he liked to submit slight revisions to different places. But one was not exactly new.
It began like this:
I memorized this poem that
I found today. Would you
like to hear it? Okay.
What followed was the entirety of a poem that I’d sent to him four years earlier.
Like Bacchus in the river,
the Greek name exchanged for syllabic
rightness. The drive feels Apollinian, though,
more so, to me, here. It's a directed want.
It's unpreserved, so maybe not: the latter
is the golder one, a—not a keepsake, but
a crown.
Did they plant the parts of him, the women,
for the harvest, or to preserve beneath a ground?
The world had just three seasons then. I knew it
from a book, I did, like the only way
I know only things. People, who knows.
Not I.
Nor I.
And it ended like this:
So there’s that,
anonymity on my own terms,
a shade without a name.
Rereading this poem, mine sandwiched in his, knowing that he was dead and I couldn’t get mad at him, I felt all the standard bodily reactions. Elevated heart rate, sweating, a curtain closing in the mind. A shade without a name, I thought, that was nice. But I didn’t agree with the word own. My own terms. His name was on the poem, after all. It was my anonymity, on his terms.
My poem was kind of about Orpheus and Dionysus. (In some interpretations, Orpheus is Dionysus’s priest; in some, Dionysus kills him; in some, they’re the same.) I was thinking about the backward look over the shoulder and the cult of wine. Lack of trust, lack of ability to live in the world without chemical alteration. The way Orpheus dies, in one version of the story, is this: women rip him limb from limb and throw his head into the river, where it goes on singing.
But that’s a kind of anonymity. A lack of self-disclosure, at least. The fact that I was sending it only to him. The fact that I was only saying very obliquely that I felt divided against myself, the part that loved him and the part that knew that I was just making up a person to love inside my head. I thought these were very unique feelings, funnily enough.
You can’t search for that poem anymore, by the way. It’s been taken down.
I did, however, put the poem and the plagiarism1 into a draft of a novel, a few years back. The novel wasn’t very good.
I hadn’t waited long enough, was the problem. However long you think you need to wait, you’re wrong. That’s what I learned. Me typing this, right now—it’s still not long enough.
Obviously it’s not actually plagiarism. I just wanted a sensational-sounding title.