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Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist

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I was fascinated by this book, especially since I worked with Bowers in his quest to catch up with his plagiarist, a quest detailed by this book. Although the editor before me published the poem, I was the editor of a small poetry magazine which had printed a plagiarized version of one of Bowers' poems. Both in our brief correspondence and in this book, Bowers' impressed me as a brave soul. Plagiarists, on the other hand, are not the pranksters they imagine themselves to be; they are the cowards of the literary world. "Words for the Taking" is a tale of courage, both in the story it tells of the tracking of a criminal, and in the example it sets of one man believing in his writing. There are many lazy, slack-off writers out there. "Words for the Taking" shows us more than any writing course could that putting effort into and believing in your writing is one of the bravest acts possible.

Neal Bowers made an interesting discovery one day - one of his poems was published under someone else's name.

With this minor irritation (one never gets rich from poetry, one's own or others), Bowers began the trek down a bizarre path to try to find out who was plagiarising his work, and why. Bowers discovered a man going by the name of David Sumner, aka David Jones, who had a habit of copying the poetry from others (not only Bowers), changing the title and a first line or two, and submitting these to poetry journals, magazines and other media outlets as his own. Exactly why was unclear - any pieces of note would undoubtedly be discovered, and few publishing successes came with any kind of monetary compensation attached.

Bowers never intended to become a detective, but the trail just kept on going. Bowers actually made contact with the person, threatened legal action, abandoned because, after all, there was no money in it beyond Sumner/Jones sent to Bowers (some $600 or so that he managed to make from the poems), copies of journals from which he'd lifted poems, a marked book that showed his submission patterns - each step of the way, Sumner/Jones claimed to be operating in good faith, but there was inevitably more to be found.

What was going on?

The more Bowers dug, the more surreal the situation became. Sumner/Jones had been a teacher in Illinois and Oregon, dismissed under terrible circumstances (molestation of children from his second-grade classrooms), jailed for the actions, and strangely, focussed his plagiarism on poetry that dealt with family issues and loss. Bowers was not the only poet plagiarised - as it turned out, Sumner/Jones was successful enough to have many publishing successes, and even had poetry readings arranged.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this is near the end, the attitudes of various persons towards Bowers and his quest for some sort of justice. Journalists by and large were sympathetic, not liking the idea of someone stealing the words (the stock-in-trade of their profession) and getting away with it. But there were those in the media, including poetry journal editors, who seemed to think that Bowers was the 'bad guy' for making such a fuss. Because of the attentions of journalists, others who felt they'd been wronged (not only in plagiarism, but in other realms, too) assumed Bowers would be a kindred spirit and naturally willing to help them - Bowers' mail quadrupled, with all manner of bizarre requests.

Bowers even discovered plagiarism from his friends - one friend, a calligrapher, set some of Bowers' poems in her art, and even produced her own hand-drawn book of his poems (offered at a very high price) without permission, and perhaps more surprisingly, without any recognition that what she was doing was in any way wrong - words were hers for the taking.

In the end, the story ends the way it began - Jones/Sumner still sending out plagiarised work, now having 'graduated' to short stories. But one assumes that Bowers will let others continue the pursuit. Sumner/Jones, in finding Bowers to be a reasonable, even nice, person generally, may have focussed upon him more directly because of this. No good deed goes unpunished!

A fascinating and unexpected tale.

This is a fascinating and scary book.

WORDS FOR THE TAKING is by the poet Neal Bowers, who stumbled on one of his poems that appeared under another writer's name. After some detective work, he found out that the plagiarist, David Sumner/David Jones, had ripped off several other of his poems, and had also stolen from poets as well known as Mark Strand and Sharon Olds. Further investigation located the man, and it turned out he was also guilty of child molestation -- a second-grade teacher who was convicted of molesting 7-year-old girls left in his care.

I wonder if you have to be a writer yourself, to understand how violated the author felt. (And how terrifying it must have been to find out how completely bereft of morals the violator turned out to be).

The first instance Bowers found was "Tenth -Year Elegy," a very personal remembrance of his father. Most of the other poems stolen were about family relations, which in context is sinister.

(One must quote, for fun, the response that he got from the editor of _Poetry Forum_, with an unlikely name, Gunvor Skogsholm, the burden of which seems to have driven him to reinvent the history of poetry in his own eloquent terms: "It's my strongly felt opinion that a good poet by nature ought to possess humbleness and that he or she ought not to think to [sic] highly of him- or herself. Throughout history, those have always been the personal traits associated with a POET. If you have read any of the literary histories associated with the great names in the art of poetry, you will know this is so.")

It's a very well written book on a fascinating subject. Bowers understands that merely ordinary people might see his concern and the steps he was driven to as being excessive, and I think in that light, both he and the publisher, W.W. Norton, are to be commended for keeping a proper perspective.

Neal Bowers is a poet. He's also a professor of English at Iowa State. And he's been plagiarized.

I loved Neal Bowers' writing in Words for the Taking. He describes the feelings that pour into poetry, the not-quite-sure-what-it-means but it's mine, the pieces of self that hide between the lines. He even gives an example of one of his poems, except the credited author is someone else. The first lines are changed. The line-breaks aren't quite the same. But on the next page is Neal Bowers' poem, and this isn't just an accidental similarity. The words, almost a page of words, are almost all identical.

As a mathematician I wonder when I read online complaints about plagiarism. Sometimes it's just a sentence, even a six-word sentence, that someone's claiming has been plagiarized. I wonder if the author was taking a challenge - include these words in your story perhaps, or write what this sentence inspires. I try to imagine how the statistics would look, and how easy it would be to find some sentences that look alike.

As a writer I'm sometimes afraid to publish what I've written. What if I've accidentally plagiarized a thought, some distantly remembered reading resurfacing in my mind, masquerading as my own.

But a whole poem?

Neal Bowers' poem was most certainly plagiarized, and he writes how it felt to imagine someone else laying claim to his thoughts, violating his memories, insinuating himself into his secret feelings. Women responded to the news with threats of violence; how they would break the kneecaps of the plagiarist if they found him. Men were more likely to say, well, no one got hurt, and you can always write another poem. I wonder why, as does the author.

Soon the author is following clues, finding more poems, more false identities, all tied to the same thief of words who, it seems, must have lived not so many miles from me. There's the lawyer with dollar signs suddenly waking in his eyes, the private detective, doggedly persistent, refusing to be fobbed off. There's boxes of papers, fake apologies, cheap tricks and cheap checks, until the story, still fact, not fiction, takes its darker turn, and I still can't stop reading.

Words for the Taking is beautifully written, fascinating for a wannabe writer, a reader of poetry, a lover of mysteries, or just a student of human nature. I really enjoyed it.

You may be wondering what's a psychopath got to do with plagiarism. Well, read this book and you'll find out. But I have to warn you: read it when you've got enough time to finish it, because you won't want to put it down once you start it. It seems odd that a book about writing and the "minor crime" of plagiarism could be as gripping as Words for the Taking turns out to be. Bowers makes it that kind of a book by his own careful reconstruction of the crime. I had just finished reading his collection of poems, Out of the South, when I picked this book up, so I was freshly familiar with the poems he spoke of - the ones "stolen" by the real-life villain, David Jones/Sumner. One would think a person who "stole words" would be a Wally Cox kinda harmless, bookish sort. Not so with Jones/Sumner. Jones/Sumner is a conniving, crafty criminal who spreads his nastiness from Oregon to Iowa, Japan and Germany and countless points everywhere else, as he steals words not just from Bowers, but from poets and writers nationwide. What Bowers uncovers about this man with the help of a good private investigator (and a rather useless lawyer) will literally make your skin crawl. It had the same effect on Bowers and his wife. What was perhaps even worse, however, was the way it robbed Neal Bowers of his ability to write poetry and also the way this seemingly innocuous theft of his poems insinuated itself into the very fabric of his life, of his memories of his father and family. I mean, this is literally one of the creepiest (there's that word again, the same one that Neal's wife uses) true-life tales I have read in years. Interestingly enough, this book was written more than a dozen years ago and was just reprinted. It STILL makes your skin crawl. If you love books and you like a good suspense/thriller, read this book. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Reed City Boy trilogy

I think this book was good and interersting and to me It was a good book.This author is my only uncle and I think he is a great poet/author!!!!!!