The Plagiarist Poetry Series

Introduction

I am always looking for inspiration and things to write about. Sometimes it is people and sometimes it is events and experiences. I have written about the cats that I meet and the places that I have been to and lots about my writing on Vocal and I suppose this falls into the latter category.

I usually like the Vocal Challenges because they usually provide me with a prompt to create a story. There was a new one last night which was a microfiction piece and that gave me an idea for a short piece of twisted prose, then a friend of mine posted that she had graduated as a nurse, I am so happy for her, so promised to write her a poem to celebrate her auspicious occasion. I shared it with her close to my midnight last night, but she is in New York so it was early evening for her.

Anyway, a few days ago I had an idea .....

The Plagiaristic Poet

When I work, and when I write I usually have music playing. I listen to BBC Radio 6 but also have a large collection of CDs and vinyl.

I then got the mad idea. Could I write a poem based on the titles of a random selection of my CDs? I wondered which format I could use. Villanelle and Chain Verse aren't really appropriate because of the required repeated lines, but I thought a sonnet would allow a lot of room to play.

So I chose fourteen CDs one for each line of the sonnet and produced this poem.

I called it a stolen poem because the start of every line was a title taken from the pens of the artists who created those albums. I don't think that it is actually plagiarism or theft because it was simply a case of using the Bowie / Warhol cut-and-paste technique that they did with newspapers, but I can sort of do it digitally.

The thing is, it gave me inspiration and enabled me to produce a sonnet, the challenge being attempting to make something readable and entertaining despite the fixed nature of the source material.

Given the reactions to it, I do believe that I succeeded. Not only that, I probably have somewhere between three and five thousand albums in my collection so even if I repeated this exercise a few times my source is effectively eternal for me.

But Then .......

The Literary Plagiarist

We have a very large library in our mansion, we have twenty bookcases and piles of books by the bed, so then I thought:

"If I could do it with albums, could I do it with books, you know, the title of the first chapter?"

So I gathered fourteen random books and selected the first chapter titles and the only issue was a couple fo books just had numbers or very generic chapter titles, but most didn't and I managed to put together a similar type of sonnet here.

Again I thought that this worked and started to feel I was on to something here. Just choose something that has a natural grouping or collectiveness and identify something that you can take from it to create a poem.

And then...

The Shakespearean Plagiarist

I then thought could I do a poem based on the titles of the first acts of plays by the Bard of Stratford, William Shakespeare? Then just to make it more difficult I thought to merge it with the acrostic format so I could enter it into the Vocal "Dancing With Distraction" Challenge. That should be easy, shouldn't it?

NO!!!

Lots of the First Acts have very generic or repeated titles, so I then had the extend it to the names of all the Acts in the Plays. But that still wasn't enough, so many acts are called "the same" or the name of a location like "Londo" or "France".

I may have missed something but I could only find one chapter beginning with the letter "I" so had to amend the Act name for the first "I" to make it fit.

Overall, again I believe it worked and you can read it here.

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed this and would love to see some of you try this. As you may have guessed, I now have an unlimited supply of inspiration for my poetry, as well as all the other things that give me ideas.

I included "Guitar And Pen" by The Who because they are two things that I use to create things.