Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Watering Can Witch

for eighteen years she carried water
mixed vitamins with rain
                                   tested acid in her faith
the soil
             & adapted
                                always stirring
in the can that wasn't rusted
first time she cried to air

for eighteen years she held the rain
directed it by tilt
                                 she learned to love that way
an angle for a head
                                  that must mean more than flirt

for eighteen years she watered vines
that broke stone fences & opened
gates with shimmering leaves
                                                 they didn't need
                                                  her
she learned to love that way

for eighteen years
one day
               she knew the voices under leaves
the next
               too well
could see their faces
                                        over her
                                     over her choked no
could see the ivy choke the fir

she set down the watering can
still too polite to spill
she ran, she ran
for eighteen years
the rust turned into fire
                                       she would not be burned

Rain Forest Trialog

Trapped in the light, cedar spreads. I don’t know where my skin went, but it’s coming off in strips. If only you had eyes like you have scent, you’d see how snails without the homes that children and crafty adults collect

glisten up your sheddings. Potato bugs and mildew are more efficient rotters. I’m calling, cedar, for your remains to mix within—replenish me. A hundreds yards from here, you’re so full of iron clay, you’ve made the river blood. What do I have to do with life and vampires? As if my cells were trees, I can follow you deeper into the shade, but this is no horror flick.

There are no teeth in the dark, only sleep, rest, and maligned fruitbats.

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On Sunday, the New York Times published a story about how the Internet has led to hordes of university students who no longer understand the problem with plagiarism (which is in and of itself not an original idea). You can actually hear the author clutching pearls at the horror of an incident at DePaul University in which

the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

Clearly, if someone under twenty is that shameless about copying, it must be the Internet’s fault because plagiarism never ever ever happened before the World Wide Web. Certainly computers make copying easier but to blame lax attitudes about plagiarism on the Internet seems to require a fundamental failure to understand the nature of the Web.

Hypertext is, by its very nature, citational. The fundamental structure of the Web is citation. Social media generally has citation built into it: if you share a link on Facebook that one of your friends has put up, your post will include a “via” link to the poster you got it from, Tumblr creates “via” chains that often get quite long (though there is some argument about whether one needs to preserve these entirely), and Twitter uses RT (short for retweet) to signify a quotation from another user.

What about community standards? The “RT” retweet was actually originally a user innovation which Twitter picked up, though their recent changes to the retweet system have been controversial. Some of the biggest blog wars I’ve seen have been triggered by plagiarism (not only of exact passages but also of ideas). I’ve seen a number of arguments over attribution on Tumblr, particularly when someone has submitted artwork as their own to a subject-specific Tumblr. Don’t believe me? Make a Twitter or Tumblr (I don’t suggest using your own if you have one already) and start copying people without attribution. See what happens.

I suspect that part of the reason for the false impression that Internet use leads to a condoning of plagiarism has to do with a conflation of legal copyright with ethical authorship rights. Digital native and immigrant generations make a distinction between the two: they might be illegally downloading a song on Limewire while emailing a blog owner demanding that a copied post be taken down. One of the main alternatives to copyright in its restrictive form, the Creative Commons License, has as one of its options, allowing free use so long as credit is given; this is one of the limits I have placed on my blog content and on my Flickr images, for instance.

The Internet, rather than being blamed for plagiarism, should be used to explain the importance of citation. Talk to students about what happens in online communities when someone copies without credit. Discuss why it’s wrong. Note the differences between an academic paper and blog posts on the one hand and, on the other, genres in which remix and cut-and-paste are (arguably) more acceptable.

As for the students who copy from Wikipedia, the site is so commonly consulted that people need to be taught how to use it appropriately in research (i.e. if it’s a good article, use its references—appropriately cited, of course).

There are always have been and always will be individuals who try to cheat for whatever reason. Blaming the Internet for the current wave of plagiarists, however, is fundamentally wrongheaded.

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Apartment 4C

  rust & frost mix on the lock of our old walk-up
   where I pointed my toes to fit in the curve of your foot
   at the edge of the Murphy Bed        I feared would bend too far
   (I never  said . . . .
                            would crash onto scuffed greying boards
        that kept our feet from walking on our neighbors' heads

    if I broke this inner door like the glass out front
    that bled the hand I used to let myself inside
    would I still find the mirror
                            showed me where you broke my nose
                            and how I changed the color of our white
                          bathroom sink
● would it still be stained?
● would I need to see?
● would it have shattered      even without me?