Poetry and plagiarism update

The whole Christian Ward furore has been rumbling on for the last few days - he has now made an apology, of sorts, but it's far from being full or uniequivocal, and his use of the phrase "ended up submitting a draft that wasn't entirely my own work" is understatement on a massive scale. I think he's probably only made things worse for himself, because his statement reads like the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from a politician, or the press office of a corporation caught pumping toxic waste onto a crowded tourist beach.

Tom Chivers has some very interesting things to say about it here, and I find myself agreeing with much of his post. But I still keep coming back to two things - surely if you're going to work with someone else's text (and I've read plenty of poetry that does that successfully), it's common courtesy to (i) credit the original source, and (ii) inform the original author of what you're doing. Even if you take Christian Ward's statement at face value, he failed to do that.