The Accidental Plagiarist

Just for an exercise, compare these two poems: the one below mine, the one here,"Whether or Not There are Apples," by Robin Behn, which I read last year on Poetry Daily.

     Wearing the Sun

     His shirt comes off the line with heat
     still in it, cut flecks of grass, pollen, dust
     from the field they're tilling. He pulls it on while
     Vivian folds the diapers: soft white squares
     getting smaller, neat stacks for the drawer,
     everything straight and clean except that he's wearing
     all outdoors, and under that, a chill
     that's tight as skin, delicate as buttons.

Beyond a general similarity in tone (memory as heat, as residue), they have a strikingly similar first line: "His shirt comes off the line with heat / still in it ... " and " I like to take the dress off the line,/ the heat still in it."

This sort of accidental plagiarism (if there is such a thing) is one of the common pitfalls of poetry. I work to get a line that has a rightness to its sound, as the first phrase of "Wearing the Sun" does. I draw on my ear, my intuition, my technical knowledge, on everything I've got. But sometimes what the mind thinks sounds "right" simply sounds familiar, because memory has slipped in and given an easy answer. It's hard to tell the difference between a gift of memory and a gift of inspiration.

I imagine every poet has seen this happen once or twice. I can imagine Robert Frost thumbing the anthology of Romantics he read as a schoolboy, and finding this staring accusingly from Thomas Lovell Beddoes' "The Phantom Wooer':

     Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet;
     The earth will swing us, as she goes,
     Beneath our coverlid of snows ...

But common as it is, every time I see this happen, it makes me wince.

What do I do now? Well, I'm not embarrassed by the similarity in theme. Anyone who has read pieces of Ghost Maps knows that from the title on down the whole book is about the physicality of memory, memory in the bone. But that identical phrase has given me pause.

I do think my line works on its own. I like the tension of the line break; I like the harsh sound of the slant-rhymed hard stops (shirt / heat / it); I like the hypnotic effect of the iambic beat. The line works well, and I don't want to tinker with it. But I probably will add an "after Robin Behn" epigram, and write for her permission to use it, before the whole thing is published.

And in the meantime I'll just smack myself in the head. Picture the monks in the little cartoon from Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail? That's me.