The Letters Page, Vol.2 is now available for purchase and we think you’ll be delighted with it. In fact, we’re a little bit in love with it ourselves. Published by Book Ex Machina, Vol.2 comes in its own vintage manila box with button and string tie fastening, and even boasts a duck egg blue LP stamp pattern inside the cover. Its design bears all the hallmarks of any worthy letter with its air mail stripes and inky stamps and its theme ‘Copy, Influence and Plagiarism’ is playfully reinforced by coloured ‘cut and paste’ collages on each title page. Vol.2 includes work by Joe Dunthorne, Darren Chetty, Nicole Flattery and others.
A flavour of the work inside includes Andrew McMillan’s ‘We’re All Plagiarists of Each Other’, a letter that explores with beauty the ways in which we become blueprints of our parents and identifies how language we use routinely has been laid down by others. Sarah Dale’s wry dispatch from France ‘No-one leaves this town dehydrated’ gives considered thought to Count John-Charles de Laizer’s kidney stones, UTI’s and all shades of yellow.
Copy, Influence and Plagiarism couldn’t be more topical in light of multiple cases of plagiarism which have outraged the poetry community in recent years. This week, The Guardian featured an interview with poet and academic, Ira Lightman who is renowned for his commitment and dogged research in to outing poets who ‘lift’ work in a bid to put a stop to it. The article reported that Canada’s former poet laureate, Pierre Des Ruisseaux, who died in January 2016 has been under speculation for plagiarising Maya Angelou’s work, and that after scrupulous investigation, Lightman had unearthed others too including lines from Tupac Shakur and Dylan Thomas’ poems.
Plagiarism has long been a murky issue of controversy in the creative landscape and perhaps unsurprisingly there has been some backlash to Lightman’s findings. Some claim intertextuality as a defence; that those he has exposed as plagiarists may have forgotten to attribute their sources or taken inadequate notes when adopting an intertextual approach. It’s an implausible argument though: intertextuality isn’t taking other people’s work and passing it off as your own. A writer’s work is an artefact in a long search to find an authentic voice and poet Helen Ivory summarised the essence of it really well when she said: ‘Poetry is not just words on a page, it is an outward manifestation of, and search for, self and how we feel about the world and everything in it.’ (The Guardian, Alison Flood, 22nd May, 2013)
The Letters Page, Vol. 2 will launch on October 5th 2017 so do save the date and venue details will follow. We hope you enjoy this edition and we’ll look forward to your feedback.
You can order The Letters Page, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 from Ex Book Machina here.