Ken:
I thoroughly agree with your analysis here. It is best to let students see context if possible of Okigbos borrowing. I thank Mwalimu ikhide from bringing this out. The twists and turns of Okigbo's remodelling these phrases are now clear for all to see. the sea from seaward to heavenward indeed trumps the original composition and we must give Okigbo credit for this as well as the introduction of an old star which accentuates the messianic register.
By the way ken I did not intend to dodge your question. If any one plagiarized up to fifty percent of my poem to write his poem. I would fee honored that he feels the poem is good enough to be the foundation of his poem. industrious critics like mwalimu Ikhide will point to the original source and my poetry would be more appreciated as giving birthe to a lovelier fragment. If on the other hand he merely copies my whole poem and appends his name to that, then I would invite him to mentorship in the art of writing poetry the like of which he cherished so much he approproated all without qualms.
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:36:04 -0400
From: harrow@msu.edu
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
there are issues and issues here, and i think the previous discusses have shed more light on what is at stake than what we could get by simply saying it is a plagiarism and dismissing it.
i am willing to say something is a plagiarism, and still say, nonetheless, it is a great poem. (i agree that the one below is less than great)
so, we have different issues: the plagiarism entails at least two things: honesty, and the law over property. but there is no law for aesthetic value, certainly none that is violated if someone plagiarized. some of okigbo's plagiarized verse is immortal, and i am fine with that. if i were to teach it, to be honest, i'd refer my students to the original, and then might well say, look what he did with that.
we do this all the time: if a text is based on a biblical story, we tell the students to read the original so they can understand what the author was doing with it. that is how i was educated, in the 1960s, and no one ever mentioned plagiarism. it is rather a question of sources, trying to become educated enough to recognizes sources as a partof becoming a literature major.
we don't do that anymore. we don't expect students to recognize anything, especially not biblical!! that went out about 25 years ago. on the other hand, we use turnitin to check on our students' papers, and fail them if they plagiarize.
the issues aren't the same
lastly, nobody invents a discourse. we all use what came before, and reshape it. authors are the same: they reshape the language, genres, styles, forms that they learned when reading, and give them their own special quality. we read a few sentences, now, and say, aha, that must be ikhide. and we might say, wow, i see traces of soyinkan irony in his prose. no one calls that plagiarism.
ken
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Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:36:04 -0400
From: harrow@msu.edu
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
there are issues and issues here, and i think the previous discusses have shed more light on what is at stake than what we could get by simply saying it is a plagiarism and dismissing it.
i am willing to say something is a plagiarism, and still say, nonetheless, it is a great poem. (i agree that the one below is less than great)
so, we have different issues: the plagiarism entails at least two things: honesty, and the law over property. but there is no law for aesthetic value, certainly none that is violated if someone plagiarized. some of okigbo's plagiarized verse is immortal, and i am fine with that. if i were to teach it, to be honest, i'd refer my students to the original, and then might well say, look what he did with that.
we do this all the time: if a text is based on a biblical story, we tell the students to read the original so they can understand what the author was doing with it. that is how i was educated, in the 1960s, and no one ever mentioned plagiarism. it is rather a question of sources, trying to become educated enough to recognizes sources as a partof becoming a literature major.
we don't do that anymore. we don't expect students to recognize anything, especially not biblical!! that went out about 25 years ago. on the other hand, we use turnitin to check on our students' papers, and fail them if they plagiarize.
the issues aren't the same
lastly, nobody invents a discourse. we all use what came before, and reshape it. authors are the same: they reshape the language, genres, styles, forms that they learned when reading, and give them their own special quality. we read a few sentences, now, and say, aha, that must be ikhide. and we might say, wow, i see traces of soyinkan irony in his prose. no one calls that plagiarism.
ken
On 3/12/13 2:42 PM, Ikhide wrote:
--Obi,
Anyone not familiar with Chris Okigbo's body of work would be startled by this, as I stated in my essay, Christopher Okigbo's voice:
Here are lines from Alberto Quintero Alvarez: "What departs leaves on the shore/Gazing seawards at the star foreseen;/What arrives announces its farewell/Before a coming-and going that goes on for ever.
Here is Okigbo: "An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore/Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;/The new star appears, foreshadows its going/Before a going and coming that goes on forever…"
There is no sugarcoating it, if this is not plagiarism, then nothing else will be. And by the way, there is nothing particularly brilliant about this, just cheesy blatant copying od someone's work.
I think what many of us readers are saying to important scholars like you, Ken Harrow and Professor Olayinka Agbetuyi is that addressing this important part of Okigbo's work does not diminish him. Ironically, what diminishes him is the relentless dismissal of the plagiarism issue by African scholars. Your responses have been less than compelling in the face of overwhelming evidence of unacknowledged "overt influences." You all need to start from a plausible place and then give context and a defense of what happened.
Okigbo is not the first writer to be accused of plagiarism. There will be more. Take Teju Cole's book, Open City. There have been discussions about the influence of W.G. Sebald's novels, most especially Rings of Saturn on Cole's book. I did a long analysis here in Teju Cole, palimpsests, and Sebald's ghost. The influence is considerable, some would say heavy. I think in Cole's case, charges of plagiarism are overblown, but people are not crazy to wonder about it.
I respect your expertise and look to you and those I have mentioned here to educate laymen enthusiasts like myself. But ultimately, as the consumers, we are the jurors. It is your job as professionals to convince us. Right now, I am not feeling any of you. Just saying. Be well, man.
- IkhideStalk my blog at www.xokigbo.comFollow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 1:09 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
--
Serumaga: Chris, is 'Lament of the Drums' a poem you wrote?
Okigbo: Well, I really don't think I can claim to have written it. All I did was create the drums, and they said what they liked. Personally I don't believe I'm capable of saying what the drums have said in that first part: it's only the long funerary drums that are capable of saying it and they are capable of saying it only at that moment when they talk; then they've said it... So I don't think I can cliam to have written the poems; all I did was cover the drums; and to create the situation in which the drums spoke what they spoke.
- Interview with Robert Serumaga, Translation Center, Dover Street London, during the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival; published in African Writers Talking, ed. Denis Dureden et al.
The above is Okigbo making a statement about his poetic craft. It is a brilliant take on the question of poetic authority. Conceptually Okigbo's Afro-modernist practices are linked to the general principle of high modernism. Okigbo makes clear his notion of the autonomy of the poetic language and claims the modernist refuge in "allusion" This tendency towards the allusive is what many, uninformed about his poetic praxis, tend to call "plagiarism." But Okigbo was a master of the form, and his debts to Eliot, (see "Tradition and the Individual Talent.") is undeniable. Perhaps even more relevant is the fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson recognizes the fount of genius as reflected in a self-aware link to a usable past. "Genius" Emerson writes, "borrows nobly." In his seminal work on "Originality and Quotation" Emerson makes very clear the ways by which a creative process naturally decomposes the original in order to renew it; allusion is an intentional trope, and what Okigbo does in gathering an assemblage of sometimes disparate metaphors from various sources and creating the drums "to say what they liked," is the meaning of genius.
Obi Nwakanma
From: yagbetuyi@hotmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:13:13 +0000
Obi:
Your response is indeed very refreshing. I had wanted to expand more to the areas such as Manet artistic movements, but time did not permit; need we emphasize that without 'plagiarism' in the broadest sense, period artististic movements such as impressionism would never have taken place?'
Olayinka Agbetuyi
From: rexmarinus@hotmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:11:59 +0000
To start with, I post here, a piece by Richard Posner published in the Atlantic Monthly, April 2002; Volume 289, No. 4; 23. That should throw a bit more insight on the question. Creators of art have over millenia "stolen" from others; melding the arc of one languae, one form, one twist of the stroke of a line; one memorable fragment or harmony into something more than its original. And as the poet of St. Lucia would say, himself who riffled a little through Robert Lowell, "all the stories of the world belong to one place." I dare to say, I have "stolen" that phrase myself and put it in some form in a sequence of poems on which I'm currently working; but those words no longer belong to Walcott, they now belong to "Hermes the African" on his journey through America. So, Ikhide, shoot me now!
Obi Nwakanma
_____________________
On Plagiarism
In the wake of recent scandals some distinctions are in order
by Richard A. Posner
.....
ecently two popular historians were discovered to have lifted passages from other historians' books. They identified the sources in footnotes, but they failed to place quotation marks around the purloined passages. Both historians were quickly buried under an avalanche of criticism. The scandal will soon be forgotten, but it leaves in its wake the questions What is "plagiarism"? and Why is it reprobated? These are important questions. The label "plagiarist" can ruin a writer, destroy a scholarly career, blast a politician's chances for election, and cause the expulsion of a student from a college or university. New computer search programs, though they may in the long run deter plagiarism, will in the short run lead to the discovery of more cases of it.
We must distinguish in the first place between a plagiarist and a copyright infringer. They are both copycats, but the latter is trying to appropriate revenues generated by property that belongs to someone else—namely, the holder of the copyright on the work that the infringer has copied. A pirated edition of a current best seller is a good example of copyright infringement. There is no copyright infringement, however, if the "stolen" intellectual property is in the public domain (in which case it is not property at all), or if the purpose is not appropriation of the copyright holder's revenue. The doctrine of "fair use" permits brief passages from a book to be quoted in a book review or a critical essay; and the parodist of a copyrighted work is permitted to copy as much of that work as is necessary to enable readers to recognize the new work as a parody. A writer may, for that matter, quote a passage from another writer just to liven up the narrative; but to do so without quotation marks—to pass off another writer's writing as one's own—is more like fraud than like fair use.
"Plagiarism," in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work—for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I'm using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch's life of Mark Antony: "on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her" becomes "on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool." (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot "stole" the famous opening of Shakespeare's barge passage, "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water" becoming "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble."
Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s "quote" extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment.
If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism. They show that not all unacknowledged copying is "plagiarism" in the pejorative sense. Although there is no formal acknowledgment of copying in my examples, neither is there any likelihood of deception. And the copier has added value to the original—this is not slavish copying. Plagiarism is also innocent when no value is attached to originality; so judges, who try to conceal originality and pretend that their decisions are foreordained, "steal" freely from one another without attribution or any ill will.
But all that can be said in defense of a writer who, merely to spice up his work, incorporates passages from another writer without acknowledgment is that the readability of his work might be impaired if he had to interrupt a fast-paced narrative to confess that "a predecessor of mine, ___, has said what I want to say next better than I can, so rather than paraphrase him, I give you the following passage, indented and in quotation marks, from his book ___." And not even that much can be said in defense of the writer who plagiarizes out of sheer laziness or forgetfulness, the latter being the standard defense when one is confronted with proof of one's plagiarism.
Because a footnote does not signal verbatim incorporation of material from the source footnoted, all that can be said in defense of the historians with whom I began is that they made it easier for their plagiarism to be discovered. This is relevant to how severely they should be criticized, because one of the reasons academic plagiarism is so strongly reprobated is that it is normally very difficult to detect. (In contrast, Eliot and Manet wanted their audience to recognize their borrowings.) This is true of the student's plagiarized term paper, and to a lesser extent of the professor's plagiarized scholarly article. These are particularly grave forms of fraud, because they may lead the reader to take steps, such as giving the student a good grade or voting to promote the professor, that he would not take if he knew the truth. But readers of popular histories are not professional historians, and most don't care a straw how original the historian is. The public wants a good read, a good show, and the fact that a book or a play may be the work of many hands—as, in truth, most art and entertainment are—is of no consequence to it. The harm is not to the reader but to those writers whose work does not glitter with stolen gold.
From: yagbetuyi@hotmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:33:28 +0000
CAO:
We had this debate before and my position then was to refer forumiites to a Barthesian,contra Anglo-French critical perrspective summed up in Barthe's S/Z: Collective ownership of language by all of humanity both the departed and the present from which each individual use is a borrowing. Barthes notion of 'voices off stage' that influences discourses. I suppose this was what WS was getting at in the piece quoted by Biko. Another useful way to look at it is to compare such verbal art to the practices of the collage artists- a form of experimentation in verbal collage if you may. Okigbo was well aware of these movements during his life, and hence hiis inclusion of Picasso's Guernica in his poetry. We may see Okigbo, in this light as one of the foremost scholars in Africa on the interrelationship of the arts.
Another way of viewing the creative practice of Okigbo in this regard and Yambo Ouloguem (both of whom I have read and taught, although I have not read, I confess, Beyala to include her,but if those who have read her think, think there is a strong parallel with the earlier two can exculpate her in that regard) is to interpret their creative style as the art of the bricolleur. Bticollage was popularized by Benjamininian followers and the Frankfurt school of literary criticism.
To suggest that Okigbo actually intended to 'fraudulently' deceive the reader by scurrilously inserting segments which he thought readers and learned literary contemporaries like J.P. Clark, WS, and Achebe would not discover is to insult his intelligence and memory. I am suggesting that the insertions were deliberately placed there so that learned critical scholars can discover them and reflect on the creative possibilities such artistic techniques can open up.
I was listening to an interview of Dionne Warwick just before Xmas, which showed that musicians are not really perturbed about this plagiarism business which purveyors of ossified words on pages are so concerned about. She decribed how several musicians would sing exactly the same song after it had been sung by others before and take ownership of the song and nobody says O! thats Michael Jacksons song she is singing. I listened to another talk by Donny Osmond in which he said the song 'one Bad Apple' which was sung by MJ was originally written for him and another song originally written for MJ shot him (Donny) into prominence. Dusty Springfield's 'Son of a Preacher Man' was first sung by another artist before it was popularized and owned by Dusty. Do I need to include 'And I would Always Love You' by Dolly Parton and .Whitney.. Who of the two is the rightful owner of the song? Jet Flight? One could go on and on...Did these artistes write by-liners on the albums to show who first sang them to defend them against charges of plagiarism? The point bears restative: art is not an essay, or book of critical essays; of course, conversely, discourses can be artistic!
On the final note of lawyers, If lawyers will not invite artistes to define how law should be practised, why should lawyers or publishers dictate to artistes what art is and what should be included and excluded?
Olayinka Agbetuyi
> Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 06:23:10 -0700
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
> From: chidi.opara@gmail.com
> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
>
> "One regrets to have missed this debate since Im currently working on
> Okigbo right now as I have off and on for three decades. i like the
> phrase weaving the material into new product which requires talent.
> That was precisely what Okigbo did in all his 'liftings' from the Timi
> of Ede's royal chant to other global iftings. Again I say it is not
> plagiarism since it is not anessay and since he did not simply copy
> the whole works (or most of it -lawyers and publishing houses will
> have a different view) and merely stamped his name on the cover.
> Phrases are re-inserted in different narrative contexts to
> demonstrates, perhaps that the ultimate meanings in communicative
> peaces are not always necessarily self-evident. the same phrase or
> sentence can mean different things in different contexts. Therein
> lies the Okigbo genius".
> -------Olayinka Agbetuyi
>
> Olayinka,
> The weaved material must have a uniqueness that would make rewards for
> and the protection of the talent of the weaver not only a legal but
> also a moral imperative.
>
> The weaved material may however, influence the weaving of a similar
> material, but with its own uniqueness. In plagiarism(Okigbo's case),
> that uniqueness is lacking and the rewards for the talent of the
> supposed weaver are obtained fraudulently.
>
> You made reference to lawyers. My opinion on that is that Literature
> should not operate in a state of lawlessness. By the way, what is the
> point in producing a literary work that would not reach and continue
> to reach the consumers because the law would not let it?
>
> CAO.
>
>
>
> On Mar 10, 10:10 pm, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbet...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > One regrets to have missed this debate since Im currently working on Okigbo right now as I have off and on for three decades. i like the phrase weaving the material into new product which requires talent. That was precisely what Okigbo did in all his 'liftings' from the Timi of Ede's royal chant to other global iftings. Again I say it is not plagiarism since it is not anessay and since he did not simply copy the whole works (or most of it -lawyers and publishing houses will have a different view)and merely stamped his name on the cover. phrases are re-inserted in different narrative contexts to demonstrates, perhaps that the ultimate meanings in communicative peaces are not always necessarily self-evident. the same phrase or sentence can mean different things in different contexts. Therein lies the Okigbo genius.
> > Olayinka Agbetuyi
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2013 00:23:00 -0800
> > > Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
> > > From: chidi.op...@gmail.com
> > > To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> >
> > > "Bro Chidi,
> >
> > > What Baba Castro was saying in the 1960s is that the so-called
> > > royalties to authors are too meager to worth the lives of real human
> > > beings. If given the choice of being constrained by copyrights and the
> > > duplication of books for the training of barefoot doctors, what would
> > > you choose? Human lives all the time. In the case of Baba Soyinka, we
> > > are being reminded that stories belong to the commons and so anyone
> > > who claims the copyright over the tales of the wise tortoise would be
> > > laughed off the village square. When the Japanese copied Harleys and
> > > called them Hondas and when South Koreans plagiarized same and called
> > > them Hundais, there was no suit in court. So what is holding back the
> > > descendants of the scientists that amazed the world with Ojukwu
> > > buckets but without giving a rat's nyass about royalties? Na you sabi.
> >
> > > ----Biko"
> >
> > > Biko,
> > > Excuse my motor park mentality again(and bad grammar). The "barefoot
> > > doctors" situation would be an exception not the rule. The tales may
> > > belong to the tortoise, but the weaving of the tales into what can be
> > > called Literature requires talent, it is the talent that must be
> > > rewarded and protected from plagiarism. What is the meaning of
> > > plagiarism by the way? Can your hunda and hundais examples be defined
> > > as plagiarism? I ask because, I no go school too much.
> >
> > > CAO.
> >
> > > On 5 Mar, 04:34, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:
> > > > pius
> > > > it's a bit complicated for me. i know about beyala because i was writing
> > > > a book about feminism and african women writers. she was one of my key
> > > > figures, and her early fiction was subversive, which worked well with
> > > > fem theory of the time, esp since i was working through french
> > > > feminists. but with Le PEtit prince de Belleville, a certain cutsy
> > > > description of parisian africans crept into the style, and eventually it
> > > > emerged she had plagiarized from howard buten's When I was Five I Killed
> > > > myself. I actually got the buten book in french and english, and tracked
> > > > down all the plagiarisms. it became a big affair, and when i read her
> > > > next novels, i then noticed more, and read about more. her attitude was
> > > > what struck me, and i was trying to figure out how to understand the
> > > > whole issue within a feminist perspective, to work on disrupting
> > > > phallocentric--logocentric readings, including those of plagiarism.
> > > > her denials made the whole issue pertinent in terms of dominant social
> > > > values--in terms of irigaray, primarily, who was looking for a feminist
> > > > way to disrupt phallogocentrism. beyala more and more adhered to those
> > > > values, comforted her reader where previously she was the bad girl.
> >
> > > > with okigbo, i only quoted ikhide who wrote a whole piece on it. he put
> > > > the texts side by side, and i can say it is quite fascinating what
> > > > okigbo does with it. i certainly have no trouble with someone taking a
> > > > text and playing with it. it is the dissemblances that disturb, and i
> > > > have no idea whether he tried to get away with stealing, or was open
> > > > about, or even what the culture of publication was at that time. i only
> > > > have ouologuem to hold up as a kind of model.
> > > > comparing this with t.s. eliot or joyce, for example, would be wrong. at
> > > > that time, we, the readers, were expected to recognize all their
> > > > references: they weren't hiding anything, they were doing the modernist
> > > > intertextual thing. but i don't think okigbo was doing that. he was
> > > > playing a kind of magical riff on the poems, and who knows, maybe he
> > > > thought that was within the ethic of publishing in his day. it would
> > > > take someone who was really researching this thing to figure it out, and
> > > > maybe rex already has it sorted out when he stated that okigbo
> > > > acknowledged his sources.
> >
> > > > if someone did this with art or music, we would have no trouble. if they
> > > > broke copyright law by selling the albums without getting permission,
> > > > that would be different. again, i have no idea what okigbo, and his
> > > > publisher, had worked out over this, or what the law was at that time
> > > > ken
> >
> > > > On 3/4/13 7:19 PM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:
> >
> > > > > Ken, Deopka Ikhide:
> >
> > > > > I'm curious. Why are you calling Beyala's spade a spade and Okigbo's
> > > > > an undefined digging object? Ken, how does what you are condemning in
> > > > > Beyala become "delicate sensibility" in Okigbo? Deux poids, deux
> > > > > mesures? I also wrote extensively about the Beyala case at the time.
> > > > > If you are convinced that they look alike, why are you and Deopka
> > > > > Ikhide dancing kpalongo around your conviction? Because somebody is
> > > > > wielding misapplied postmodernist fioritura all over the place? I
> > > > > haven't placed Okigbo's intertexts side by side his work to make a
> > > > > pronouncement but you and Deopka Ikhide have and I don't understand
> > > > > this hedging if your conclusion is that he pulled a Beyala. If I did
> > > > > and arrived at that conclusion, I would say it as it is.
> >
> > > > > Pius
> >
> > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > > *From:* kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
> > > > > *To:* Ikhide <xoki...@yahoo.com>
> > > > > *Cc:* "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com"
> > > > > <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
> > > > > *Sent:* Monday, 4 March 2013, 10:09
> > > > > *Subject:* Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker &
> > > > > towncrier at Heavensgate
> >
> > > > > let's talk examples.
> > > > > for instance:
> > > > > A while back on Next, the poet Chimalum Nwankwo offered evidence that
> > > > > Okigbo had plagiarized some of his poems. He quoted Carl Sandberg�s
> > > > > poem, For You: /�The peace of great doors be for you./Wait at the
> > > > > knobs, at the panel oblongs./Wait for the great hinges.//The peace of
> > > > > great churches be for you./Where the players of loft pipe
> > > > > organs/Practice old lovely fragments, alone//The peace of great books
> > > > > be for you,/Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,/Bleach of the
> > > > > light of years held in leather.//The peace of great prairies be for
> > > > > you./Listen among windplayers in cornfields./The wind learning over
> > > > > its oldest music.�/
> > > > > He contrasted it with Okigbo�s The Passage: /�O Anna at the knobs of
> > > > > the panel oblong,/Hear us at the crossroads at the great hinges/Where
> > > > > the players of loft pipe organs/Rehearse old lovely fragments,
> > > > > alone-//Strains of pressed orange leaves on pages/Bleach of the light
> > > > > of years held in leather://For we are listening in cornfields/Among
> > > > > the windplayers,/Listening to the wind leaning over/Its loveliest
> > > > > fragment�.�
> > > > > /
> > > > > this is an instance in which...i plagiarized ikhide. he did the heavy
> > > > > lifting, and i just copied.
> > > > > which he did from nwankwo.
> > > > > ken
> > > > > p.s.(go read the whole thing if you want the argument, at
> > > > >http://xokigbo.wordpress.com/tag/okigbo/)
> > > > > pps. i always found sandberg boring; now he comes alive!
> >
> > > > > On 3/4/13 9:47 AM, Ikhide wrote:
> > > > >> "From a critical point, and having studied Okigbo's work quite
> > > > >> closely, I'm generally amused by those who keep talking about
> > > > >> Okigbo's "plagiarism." Plagiarismn occurs when you do not acknowledge
> > > > >> your sources. What Okigbo does is radical/misprision/, to sometimes
> > > > >> upturn, decontextualize and recontextualize an extant poetic line or
> > > > >> imagery, and in refashioning it give a newer more authentic feel to
> > > > >> sometimes flat or obscure lines. Okigbo was a bold experimentalist,
> > > > >> far ahead of his time in his form of intertextual integration. It was
> > > > >> a poetic practice and method based on the notion later noted by
> > > > >> postmodernist theorists which Okigbo put into practice by a system of
> > > > >> collages, revisisons, reproductions, and re-interpretaions, of the
> > > > >> boundedness of language; or as Derrida would put it: "Il n'y a pas de
> > > > >> hors-texte." Okigbo, I think, is to modern poetry, what Picasso is to
> > > > >> the Arts."
> >
> > > > >> Obi,
> >
> > > > >> Thanks for sharing. These conversations generally devolve into
> > > > >> defensiveness, etc. I think that charges of plagiarism re Okigbo are
> > > > >> not lightly dismissed. I have a copy of the book and in my view
> > > > >> influences are to be distinguished from outright copying. Okigbo does
> > > > >> not address what he was trying to do by basically using other folks'
> > > > >> works and passing them on as his. The lifting is not a line or two,
> > > > >> but pretty extensive. He should have more specifically acknowledged
> > > > >> the authors and the works. Today, if a student came before you with
> > > > >> works so blatantly lifted, I would hope that you would give the
> > > > >> student a zero and
> >
> > ...
> >
> > read more »
>
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