Anis Mojgani is one of the world's leading Spoken Word artists... quite frankly.. he's incredible and a master of our time... watch how its done.
incredible right?
now let me show you how it's not done... I've seen biters before... but rarely as blunt as this..
Push (2009)
wow!
This made me think about a story someone told me about what happened to North-Essex based poet 'Luke Wright'.
At a open mic, some guy gets up and blows everyone away with a poem... a poem that he'd heard Luke Wright perform and he'd wrote it down and tried to pass it off as his own work... HOWEVER, in the audience a friend of Luke Wright JUST so happened to be there and gave Luke a call... Luke then drives down to the venue and makes the guy get on stage and admit he's a big phoney...
poetic justice. :-)
I am blessed or cursed with a good memory for lines, lyrics and poems so as an organiser and a teacher I'm regularly hearing and reading stuff that has been misappropriated. As I've read and heard a lot of poetry perhaps I am spotting more cheating going on than most people.
ReplyDeleteWhen any writer starts out I think he or she should soak up all that's good out there by reading and going out and seeing readings/performance, good, indifferent and bad. It's better to have pastiche and imitation of excellence if it eventually leads to original good work. Homage work and copies have always been part of the art world and this has not always been properly credited.
But now sampling is the norm in music, photos, whole essays and pieces of writing can be cut and pasted off a page on the computer, without giving credit to the originator or the work. A lot of work becomes about untalented people stealing, recycling and reassembling the work of creative people. It’s very obvious that a lot of people who copy have no understanding of the processes and structure that created what they are ripping off.
Is this plagiarism or just modern culture? If people were more knowledgeable about their poetry, would so many fakes be so blatant? Has the tag for poetry of `spoken word' just encouraged the kind of dumbing down that makes these kinds of episodes more likely? And isn’t it worse that we have people claiming on places like Facebook to be poets who’ve never studied or read poetry or photographers who have never taken their cameras off automatic mode?
John Paul