Calling a Spade a Spade

Post date: Oct 24, 2014 7:3:23 AM

By golly, another essay has just appeared on my Essays page. I wonder who did that? This new essay is “A Spade’s a Spade: Plagiarism and Déjà-ku,” originally published in 2013 on the New Zealand Poetry Society’s haiku website. It was written in response to an essay by Sandra Simpson that explored the issue of plagiarism presented on the same website the month before. Plagiarism and excess similarity are a sort of occupational hazard for the haiku poet, a complication of haiku’s extreme brevity and the likelihood of its practitioners writing in similar ways about similar subjects. Creativity and free expression call for some degree of balance with vigilance against plagiarism, even if accidental. Read more about this pressing subject, including a brief new postscript.