Defense

 Here's the typical defense of plagiarism. Those poor poets up at night, worrying whether Ira Lightman is going to discover some small, unintentional borrowing!  The article doesn't name Lightman, but makes a snide remark about how poetry doesn't need the plagiarism police.  

I would say we do need the plagiarism police if people are going to plagiarize.  In other words, we need detective work to discover the culprits.  

The problem is this: believing plagiarism is unethical, in the normal sense of plagiarism and the normal sense of ethical, does not commit one to a romantic view that poetry as some deep expression of one's individual soul. It's just saying that one cannot take a poem written by someone else, change a few words, and pass it off as one's own, or borrow whole stanzas at a time without attribution.  

What about parody?  Well, I think parody is parody, not plagiarism. For example, my false poems of Bronk are advertised as such, and do not contain Bronk's own, literal language. In other words, I wouldn't pass off a real poem by Bronk as a fake one by me.  In fact, parody is a kind of anti-plagiarism in this sense. If Spicer writes a poem and lets us be confused about whether it is his or a translation of Lorca, then we have that confusion, but this is virtually the opposite of Spicer translating and not telling us it is a translation. 

Likewise, other kinds of intertextuality don't belong in the same discussion.  Usually, these plagiarists aren't playing some cool postmodern game, but simply stealing.