'All art is plagiarism or revolution' so wrote Paul Gaugin.
A recent post on one of the boards threw up an interesting point about which I as a newbie am rather interested. What happens when you write a line or a complete haiku that closely resembles a previously published or unpublished work?
Haiku are by their brevity susceptible to accidental similarities. The advice to newbie poets is to read as many haiku as possible. That is sage advice. It is also a problem. Good lines are taken in by the subconscious and one can find oneself having a line pop up sometime later which you think is a moment of inspiration but is in fact the forgotten line from a previously read work.
I have had great delight in reading back issues of notable haiku magazines. In one such issue there was a raging debate between a reviewer and a well known haiku poet who was accused by the reviewer of publishing a poem closely resembling a previous work. Was there a need to include a note of the previous work or not? It was mooted but never decided.
Is there a need to include a note when the poem is modelled on a previous work? It seems many of the Japanese haiku masters regularly took inspiration or whole lines from previous works. Did they make such acknowledgments? I can't find any reference to them doing so.
I have seen advice to newbie poets to rework previous haiku to get a feeling for content and form. In such cases it is undoubtedly just an exercise and not an invitation to publish works such as 'slightly old/rather old/ really old/extremely old pond, frog/dog/aardvark jumps in, the sound of the water'.
This problem may also account for some poets choosing to become ever more revolutionary in their writing as intimidated by Mons Gaugin. It can lead to what to my novice mind are completely impenetrable haiku that seem to make no sense at all. This in an effort to either get away from the problem or simply explore new forms.
Is there in fact anyway to check one's work for originality? Is this an accepted issue with haiku? What do people do?
I gather that in olden days haiku were written largely for the enjoyment of small social groups where the issue of copyright and accusations of plagiarism were unlikely. Now however (with the evidence of at least one vehement debate in a noted haiku publication albeit rather old) with people more alive to the value of their original work and the EU ever ramping up the matter of copyright what is a struggling poet to do?
I have not perhaps for lack of looking seen this debate much vented on the net. Perhaps it is the elephant/frog in the room/pond.
Any guidance would be much appreciated. As a newbie I accept that I may not have much that is original to say and if someone has said it before and better then what is to be done?
Regards
Carl
A recent post on one of the boards threw up an interesting point about which I as a newbie am rather interested. What happens when you write a line or a complete haiku that closely resembles a previously published or unpublished work?
Haiku are by their brevity susceptible to accidental similarities. The advice to newbie poets is to read as many haiku as possible. That is sage advice. It is also a problem. Good lines are taken in by the subconscious and one can find oneself having a line pop up sometime later which you think is a moment of inspiration but is in fact the forgotten line from a previously read work.
I have had great delight in reading back issues of notable haiku magazines. In one such issue there was a raging debate between a reviewer and a well known haiku poet who was accused by the reviewer of publishing a poem closely resembling a previous work. Was there a need to include a note of the previous work or not? It was mooted but never decided.
Is there a need to include a note when the poem is modelled on a previous work? It seems many of the Japanese haiku masters regularly took inspiration or whole lines from previous works. Did they make such acknowledgments? I can't find any reference to them doing so.
I have seen advice to newbie poets to rework previous haiku to get a feeling for content and form. In such cases it is undoubtedly just an exercise and not an invitation to publish works such as 'slightly old/rather old/ really old/extremely old pond, frog/dog/aardvark jumps in, the sound of the water'.
This problem may also account for some poets choosing to become ever more revolutionary in their writing as intimidated by Mons Gaugin. It can lead to what to my novice mind are completely impenetrable haiku that seem to make no sense at all. This in an effort to either get away from the problem or simply explore new forms.
Is there in fact anyway to check one's work for originality? Is this an accepted issue with haiku? What do people do?
I gather that in olden days haiku were written largely for the enjoyment of small social groups where the issue of copyright and accusations of plagiarism were unlikely. Now however (with the evidence of at least one vehement debate in a noted haiku publication albeit rather old) with people more alive to the value of their original work and the EU ever ramping up the matter of copyright what is a struggling poet to do?
I have not perhaps for lack of looking seen this debate much vented on the net. Perhaps it is the elephant/frog in the room/pond.
Any guidance would be much appreciated. As a newbie I accept that I may not have much that is original to say and if someone has said it before and better then what is to be done?
Regards
Carl