How do we know this? Well, that was not defense offered by herself or her supporters. It would be exceedingly strange in any case to write wikipedia articles about things that you are going to treat in the highly personal modality of a memoir. Also, she would know that "Richard Cory" is a work from the 1890s, not the 1930s. In other words, she does not have even a wikipedia level knowledge of some of the texts she is treating.
Someone pointed out on Facebook that some of those defending her are teachers and probably would flunk a student doing what she did.
I was disheartened to see Rae Armantrout among the signatories of the letter in Bialoksy's defense. The others are more or less mainstream figures like Pinsky...
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Lots of people don't write their own work--they sketch out ideas and have someone else write them up (which always means also develop them, as you will surely realize). I know this because of trying to do an edited collection one time; what I discovered was jaw-dropping.
It is possible that the people who wrote this book for this person weren't very good at it and plagiarized Wikipedia.
That's always the most ridiculous excuse: "I didn't plagiarize. I didn't even the write book that has my name on it!"
I wonder if language poetry's somewhat complex relationship to academic criticism makes it easier for Armantrout to defend Bialosky. I've sometimes gotten the sense that language poets don't like academia very much, despite (or perhaps because) they are so embedded in it and dependent on it. In their minds, they are likely to dismiss a plagiarism accusation as merely a "property rights" claim and therefore just another boring "capitalist" browbeating. But that's because they don't think criticism is ever really sincere. Their own criticism, in my opinion, is often best read as kind of subversive satire of criticism, sometimes a direct frontal assault on it. The serious writing is the poetry, they think, not the criticism. Standards don't really apply there. So the poet, who has long benefited from the editor's support and promotion, feels no betrayal, only loyalty. (I'm saying this in general, of course; I have no idea what Armantrout was thinking or feeling. And I'm as disheartened as you, Jonathan.)
Armantrout though is the only language poet among these 72 friends of literature. I'm not seeing other language poets on my Facebook feed jump to the defense here. (I am friends with Watten, Silliman, Bernstein...).
She taught at UCSD for years too, didn't she, so isn't she an academic as much as any of them? (As you point out yourself many of them are embedded in academia.) I disagree a wee bit too with your premise, because I think the criticism of the language poets is quite substantial, with Hejinian, Bernstein, etc... Isn't it the mainstream "academic" poets who don't care for getting their hands dirty with literary theory and the like? They simply don't like thinking about poetry at all in any kind of rigorous way.
Plagiarism really isn't really about theft of property but about claims about authorship and authority. For example the claim that a work is in the public domain does not mean that you can claim you wrote it. It just means nobody can sue you for copyright infringement.
I think the idea that JB did not write her own memoir is fascinating. She had an idea for a commercial book about poetry but was too busy to write it herself. She came up quickly with a few anthology pieces and had an assistant do most of the work.
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