Poesiscenen is not exactly known for bloody feuds and furious intrigue. It happens of course, because people are involved, but the rows tend to be the reverse, and is rarely sufficient by itself to reach out into the wider bearings.
But last Saturday hettade it to seriously. The american poet Rachel McKibbens drämde to on Twitter with a short and sweet greeting to the american unglyriska the world. The subject was the nominations for the Pushcart prize, which honoured new talent published by smaller, independent publishers and magazines. A poem with the title ”Gun metal” had been nominated and McKibbens wrote on Twitter:
plagierar me has been nominated for the Pushcart. I HOPE WE WIN”.
And so come the questions, and the deal quickly developed. The young poet behind the poem ”Gun metal” had quite obviously stolen from the McKibbens poem ”three strikes”, which are included in the autobiographically motivated the collection ”Blud”.
Compare for yourself. McKibbens writes in his poem:
Hell-spangled girl
spitting teeth into the sink,
I’d trace the broken
landscape of my body
& find Good
within myself.
The prisnominerade plagiatören writes:
Ramshackle
girl spitting teeth
in the sink. In the trace the
foreign topography of my body, find Good
out my skin.
not this would be enough to have plagiatören posted a picture on Twitter, where she proudly demonstrates her new tattoo: the poem’s first two lines with the striking image of the teeth in the sink over the entire forearm. She comments that it is a line from her poem ”to the glory of who I was, who I am and who I will become”. She announces that she is happy that she finally got his words tattooed.
of course, furious. Rachel McKibbens received the unanimous support, people stödköpte her book, the publisher and the journals announced that they have immediately stopped all handling of plagiatörens works and person. In addition, several aggrieved poets. In a week, the number of poets who had their work partly stolen by the plagiatören risen to eleven.
Plagiatören itself has failed to explain itself. Interviews she has previously done, where she claims that these ”her” two lines sums up ”who she is”, has not directly supported her declaration that she must have forgotten that she read McKibbens original, or that – the next attempt – she wanted to go in dialogue with the specimen.
Already a few hours after the bomb turned out plagiatören their account on Twitter.
You can brood around a lot of the aspects surrounding this lyrical vendetta. The most noticeable is the how the social media is a great fit for turning up the temperature, even in the alternative poesivärlden.
is probably how the special litteraturgenre that depict autobiographical sufferings has become fiercely competitive. So many of the sufferings, so get the metaphors, and so many that are trying to create an identity of its own among so many others.
the other night I watched the movie ”Cam” (Netflix), which is about a self-employment digitalsexshow-workers who get their account, and their whole identity hijacked by someone unknown when she starts to become popular among the snuskhumrarna. In the film, she is not alone to suffer this, and in prekariatets era, identity is even brand and födkrok.
Something similar seems to have happened in the case of Rachel McKibben and her plagiatör. It is not so much a couple of diktrader that have been stolen here, without a whole livsförklaring. McKibbens tweets are just as angry as gripping, as she talks about all the years it has taken for her to come up with just the words, and how she suffered post-traumatic stress when she saw her words stolen and förfuskade of any lousy pretendent.
is the great and righteous when she writes that she refuses to let anyone else use her words, ”what are we if not our words?”. The most angry she seems to get rid of plagiatörens tattoo, and she addressed her directly and tell her that she was the youngest patient in the U.S. who got braces in the 1980s. The dentist was amazed that she lost all of its mjölktänder already at the age of seven.
My dad helped me with it, she writes to plagiatören. And so the quote she a series that never came with in the finished poem: ”Tandfén will not to the one who got his teeth knocked down throat”. The you can get, she writes ambiguous to plagiatören.
the Whole of this twittertråd is a staggering entrance to the current version of the självterapeutisk centrallyrik. Eventually pops including the aspects of ethnicity, class and clinical diagnoses up as an argument against plagiatören, who is a white woman with no children and any known pathological effect. Battle begins, switch the theme from plagiarism to who has the right to write poetry at all.
but the amusing feature of the debate is reached when someone reports that the tattoo artist has gotten wind of it all, has been wronged and now want to ”demand justice”.
Rachel McKibbens poetry is in any case out of print, so something good has still been her.
Read more texts by Jonas Thente , for example, if Fredagstacon as a cultural world heritage site.
