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The Plagiarising Poet

A young lad sat in class—geography—
Bored and in a peaceful reverie.
The school bell blared, the teach showed indignation,
“The bell does not free you!” she yelled in frustration.

“You’ve homework that I need you to complete:
Some verse on lands that host the parakeets;
The Amazon is what it’s on,” she said.
At last, some homework that won’t bore me dead!

He wrote an English sonnet with some rhymes
A fledgling far from his poetic prime.
Metaphors as bright as the macaw;
Yet, not quite as sharp as the jaguar’s claw.

He stood up in front of the class and spoke
Expressively and feelings were evoked.
The teacher, though, was in a nasty mood:
“Speak to me after class because you’re screwed!”

“This poem’s beauty, it’s overt to see,
Verily, I know it’s not of thee!
I’ve googled the lines, but not one could I find.”
He answered, “That’s because it’s of my mind.”

This didn’t assuage her, veins about to pop:
“This poem is not yours, your lies should stop!
Assertive now? The principal I’ll get;
This plagiarism, I’ll make sure you regret!”

Because he cared not for geography,
The teach thought him full of stupidity.
Assumptions can be dangerous, forsooth;
She’d underestimated this keen youth.

“Forgive me please, this class can be a bore:
The class on igneous rocks had made me snore!
My English teacher, really, you must ask,
If poems for me are an arduous task.”

A novel always grasped, he loved to read,
His English teacher sowed the nascent seed.
He wrote prose, verse, the teacher then critiqued;
His passion for all literature was piqued.

“I’m sorry” were her words so sweet: defeat!
“I met your teacher, and we had a speak…”
“A poem like this from Drilon? Of course.
You see, I taught him to write with such force.”

“For months, Drilon’s finesse has much improved;
I’m not surprised that poem had you moved.
A fool and dunce to many he may look,
But he’s quite smart, he’s not a thieving crook!”

.

.

Drilon Bajrami is a nascent poet who lives in the United Kingdom and is currently finishing up a dystopian novel he has been working on for a few years.

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11 Responses

  1. Joseph S. Salemi

    Formal poetic skill is so uncommon these days in young students that charges of “plagiarism” or “copying” will sometimes be thrown at the student who shows expertise in this area.

    Of course, plagiarism of free verse is unnecessary, since all the student would have to do is cobble together some random words and phrases and honestly call them his own creation.

    Reply
    • Drilon Bajrami

      To be honest, Joe, I doubt most English teachers today could even identify formal verse, minus the end rhymes being obvious enough. Formal poetry was not taught in my schooling, beyond saying “Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentametre” and reading some explanation from a textbook, not really understanding the concept. The blind leading the blind.

      The UK’s poet laureate is apparently a “professor” of poetry, yet writes mostly free verse dross. I find people like this to be charlatans, especially when compared to yourself, a real professor who writes real poetry, yet Armitage will outsell you and any formalist of today by leaps and bounds, just because of his position. When you look at the history of the position, it’s a shame what it has become.

      I’ve considered writing an essay on the failure of the school system in relation to formal poetry and how if “New Formalism” is to indeed succeed, we need the schools to pull their weight. I recall from my English classes, mostly unrhymed free verse was studied and we wonder and ask ourselves “Why does nobody read poetry anymore?”

      Even in Kosovo, where English is a secondary language, they study and read more formal poetry, from Lord Byron and Percy Shelley in middle and high school than we do in England or even in the U.S. (I assume it’s the same over there.) Maya Angelou might write some emotional poetry, forsooth, but when compared to Byron, Shelley or Willy himself it pales.

      To infuse beauty, meaning, metre and rhyme into an emotional piece takes skill and many won’t sit in a chair and bestir themselves over a single quatrain — or even line — for an hour or more. That’s too unecomonical when a free versist can whip up a whole poem during a 10 minute smoke break at work. I know for a fact the greats had many nights cogitating on a line or lines by the oil lamp.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        There’s been a complete collapse of literary studies in the United States, and it has been an ongoing thing since the 1960s. Naturally this has had a parallel effect on the teaching of poetry, from the lower grades right up to the university level.

        I recall the manifestation of this in graduate school — in some literature classes, the only thing that interested professors and students was WHAT THE POEM MEANT, and whether it was RELEVANT to contemporary sociopolitical concerns, Questions of rhetoric, meter, form, genre, diction, and style were summarily dismissed as unimportant. If you even dared to bring up such questions, you were ignored as a “bellettristic” throwback who was hopelessly out of touch.

        “Belles lettres” — literature as an aesthetic practice rooted in inherited techniques and an appreciation of the beauty of language itself — was actually hated and ridiculed.

        I was once teaching a course in Victorian poetry, and there was a female student who was annoyed by the work of Henley and his poems about London. She said “Why isn’t he mentioning anything about the poverty in the East End, or about the need for slum clearance?” I stifled the impulse to laugh in her face, and just said that poets make their own choices about subject matter.

        There’s a member of another poetry website whose critique of the poems posted by others often contains this kind of complaint: “Did this poem really HAVE to be written? Was there any crying NEED for it to appear? Where is the PRESSING URGENCY behind this poem?”

        That’s the kind of totalistic, politicized thinking that governs much literary activity today. Unless a poem helps end the war in Gaza, or aids some Certified Victim Group, there’s no reason for it to exist.

    • Drilon Bajrami

      It is a sad state of affairs, indeed. And I agree with your points on poetry having an intrinsically aesthetic value, maybe the free versers lack this in their poems because their unrestrained drivel has no natural rhythm or enchanting rhymes — that makes it much easier to not appreciate it.

      I also think it’s laughable that poetry should focus on “contemporary sociopolitical concerns”, as the greatest poets in any canon are known for writing TIMELESS poetry. People still read Homer over 2000 years later and there’s a reason for that. Same for Shakespeare. If they wrote about contemporary issues, they wouldn’t be read today because it wouldn’t be relevant.

      Lastly, I do think there is a place for poetry and poems to have meaning. Not in the sense of these literary ethopaths, but real and timeless meaning. This is part of the reason why those timeless greats became timeless greats.

      Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Dr. Salemi made a great point about free verse. I would add that even worse is using artificial intelligence.

    Reply
    • Drilon Bajrami

      Joe does tend to make great points about poetry in general, I find, Roy. I agree with your comment on the use of AI too. I’ve experimented myself with ChatGPT and asking it to write poetry to see what it’s capable of and while it technically can write poetry, it’s missing the soul that is found in poetry written by humans. Maybe one day it may even surpass us but if in 1000 years time RoboPoet3000 Mark II is the greatest poet on Earth, they’re at least a formalist.

      Reply
  3. Paul A. Freeman

    There’s an excellent film called ‘Finding Forrester’, with Sean Connery where a gifted boy gets accused of plagiarism by a jealous teacher.

    Unfortunately, there are people recommending you write a piece of half-baked verse or prose, then pass it through AI to make it ‘enhanced writing’, and claim the result is legitimate.

    I enjoyed your poem, Drilon, reminding us that raw talent does exist.

    Reply
    • Drilon Bajrami

      The result may seem legitimate but it’s merely a imitation, even if it’s a good one that might be hard to tell. For example, a teenager writing an essay and using a thesaurus for every fourth or fifth word may pass it off as good writing but they fail to realise that synonym means “similar” not “exact” and their writing loses meaning through not understanding the nuance of vocabulary. Even if someone like this reinforces their writing by looking up words in a dictionary in conjuction with using a thesaurus, you can tell by speaking to them for a short time when they don’t articulate well and have a layman vocabulary, that they’re not as literary as they portrayed, when they can’t put everything through their AI or word book filter.

      And thank you for the compliment, I think raw talent is replete, humans in general are becoming smarter and smarter but when formalism is abnegated and philistines (free versers who spit at formalists) are celebrated, how can we hope to foster that talent?

      The only reason I write formal verse is because of finding the SCP and knowing that it isn’t a completely dead art form. The SCP fostered that within me when I never knew I had it. How many budding poets are out there that will never realise what they can create and what power words have?

      Reply
  4. C.B. Anderson

    This is a delightful poem, if only for the fact that it makes us think and make choices. Those who would silence our voices should be struck dumb, and they are already deaf, it appears. What if, instead of chanting, “Free the prisoners!” we chanted, “Free Verse!”

    Reply
  5. Margaret Coats

    Your poem, Drilon, is an amusing, well-told tale about poetry in school. It features a lot of fun and linguistic serendipity. Quite a laugh to hear the geography teacher slip into earlier English and accuse a student of plagiarism: “Verily, I know it’s not of thee!” The colloquialisms (like “teach” for “teacher” or “a speak” for “a talk”) fit the speaker’s voice. There are some places where you could, with a little work, avoid bumps in the meter and make the whole read better. For example, “You see, I taught him how to write with force” takes away accents seeming to fall too strongly on “to” and “with.” That’s not a big deal, but worth more effort because you have the ability within you. I marvel at the metric perfection of the seventh quatrain including the six-syllable word “underestimated.”

    You are correct that formal poetry needs more of a place in the lives of schoolchildren. In the United States, more than elsewhere in English-speaking countries, many benefit from recently founded or re-founded private schools, and from homeschooling. These alternatives came about for other reasons: to avoid leftist progressive instruction usually found in government schools. But parents and teachers immediately adopted tried-and-true material and techniques, including classic poetry and memorization. There is no point in memorizing free verse, but my son at age five could easily stand up and recite Tennyson’s “The Eagle.” He enjoyed it so much that it became a performance. The rhyme and rhythm of formal poetry naturally appeal to young children, and if the taste is encouraged, older ones become the readers desired by those who may become writers. The breakdown of literary studies is real and widespread, but there are bright spots, even among government teachers who consign junk books to the closet, and use what they know is better. Glad you found an encouraging English teacher, and I’m more surprised at the geography teacher in the poem who made an assignment in verse, and could recognize good results.

    Reply
  6. Drilon Bajrami

    Thank you for your wonderful and inspiring comment, Margaret. You’re correct about the bumps in metre and definitely I need to grow more as a poet, I was thinking if most of the stresses (3/5) align then it’s acceptable, as long as the vast majority of the rest of the lines were formally metrical. While it’s not the worst thing to do, it does show I’m still a nascent poet (I’ve only published a handful of poems here on the SCP) that hopefully has a high ceiling for growth. I sometimes also need to know when to break the metre to make something sound more natural and not so forced, as the greats have allowed themselves that luxury. Hopefully all of my future lines will be as metrical as those 7th quatrain lines. I’m excited to see what I’ll be writing in decades to come, since I’m still under the age of 30.

    I agree with everything you’ve said on your 2nd paragraph, especially with how much easier it is to foster a love for poetry if we were to use formal verse for children. Nursery rhymes are formal verse, as is Dr. Seuss and there’s a reason kids love poetry like that and why it will endure for centuries to come. I was reading ” The Destruction of Sennacherib” by Lord Byron, the other day and the perfection of the anapestic metre and the couplet rhymes brought joy to my ears. I’ve memorised it by my sheer love for reciting it to myself. I was trying to get back into poetry about two years ago and if it wasn’t for the SCP, I would have binned it because all I could find online was freeverse dross. I even recall seeing one online journal state in submissions: “If you are a cis-female, a minority or a person of colour please mention this in the submission and there will be extra consideration.” I’M SORRY WHAT?!

    I know modern day poetry is far from a meritocracy but that’s incredulous, though very real. Like the joy I had reading Byron or like the joy your son experienced when reciting “The Eagle”, if children are educated and read formal poetry from a young age, there is a high chance they will keep that passion for the rest of their lives and as you say, the readers one day become the writers. I plan to be a teacher but a science teacher alas, though I’ll mention to the English department about my published poetry (hopefully a published novel soon too) and I’ll try to hijack some classses and bless the youth.

    One issue with getting into formal poetry, I found initally, was “hearing” the metre so to speak. It does take a bit of time for the ear to train to hear it and even now, I sometimes struggle to clearly hear anapests and dactlys, though I’m getting better at those now, too. This is why it’s important to recite formal verse from a young age.

    Reply

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