| Author | Message | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 7872 Registered: 11-1998 |
Dear Membership – Since taking on the administration of Wild Poetry Forum over a year ago, it is with a great deal of humility that I will tell you it’s one of the greatest jobs on the planet. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it is fulfilling, satisfying, and brings me an enormous amount of joy to work on behalf of Wild, its staff, and all of our members. But, as with everything in life, there is a difficult (at times agonizing) side to being the Administrator for our website. Today is one of those agonizing times. Let me state for the record at the outset, that I am NOT making this information public in order to embarrass or publicly hang the accused. Wild’s policy since our inception was to share information with our members, whether that information is positive or negative. Nothing is done here at Wild in the “backroom” away from our membership’s eyes and ears. This open-door policy has served us well over the years. In fact, it is the very backbone of Wild in some respects. Our membership can rest assured that they will be kept fully informed on all issues that affect Wild, both the joyful news and the sad. Wild belongs to all of you, not just to me, steve and the staff. It is with a very heavy heart and a great deal of regret that I must announce the banning of one of our members, Tammy Turner-Peaden. It came to my attention last week that a poem Ms. Turner-Peaden recently posted on Wild Poetry Forum, one entitled “Seasons,” had lifted many of its key elements, lines, structure, and order of presentation from two of the works of one of Wild’s own moderators, Lisa Janice Cohen, one entitled “Lilacs for One Hundred Springs,” (published in Stirring: A Literary Collection), the other entitled, “Mosaic.” While not a case of word-for-word plagiarism, what Ms. Turner-Peadon did comes as close to that as one can. I offer you copies of Ms. Turner-Peaden’s work along with Ms. Cohen’s so you can make comparisons and come to your own conclusions. Key passages from each author’s work have been color-coded in order to make side-by-side comparisons of the parts in question easier. Author: Tammy Turner-Peaden Title: Seasons This is not the season for dogwood; the naked branch frames a cold-footed sky. Spring rests, wary of southern frost, and I will find no flowers to oblige the jeroboam that has sat for years on your morning sill. I will come to you empty, the bowl of my hands a fretwork of promise spun like glass; loops and whorls that shatter on a breath, scatter in patterns only I have designed. Decades betray us in an unraveling of years. Voices catch in a rustle of limbs. Words skirl up, sharp on a shiftless gust; Red rover, red rover, call me over and over- I walk the border fence, drag a hand along rails as worn and rough as the day. Linch pins and turning points splinter off, burrow beneath calloused skin; stichlines of time. I do not fear the way your face blurs, dim in the wan of light, or how your body curls, turned the weight of leaves banked at winter trunks. Only the habit you've become keeps you from the drift. I sit, alone in this crowded room, and press glass strand by strand into brittle mosaics of memory. They break apart, strip my flesh to scattered bone. I will be here until the wounds bleed clean, until the dogwood dips laden arms against the pane. -END- ******************************* Author: Lisa Janice Cohen Title: Lilacs for One Hundred Springs (for Mama Essie) This is not the time of year for lilacs--spare branches frame an ambivalent sky. Spring remains wary of New England and I will have no flowers to brighten your room. I leave the tape recorder, a lifetime of questions packed away and come to you empty handed. The century has betrayed us; we believed in its promise of time, the unspooling of miracles. Death ends all stories, even the ones we tell ourselves when we are afraid. I do not fear the way your hands curl, turn the weight and color of dried leaves. Only the tender green keeps you from drifting away. -END- ********************** Author: Lisa Janice Cohen Title: Mosaic I Sunlight tickles my eyes. Dancing dust whirls around me wrapped in a blanket of ice blue sky. Glass beads pool in my hand like water. I spill them out, follow the sparkling flow. Cool to touch, they soothe my soul. I sort them in a pattern only I could know. II. Faces blur. I recognize a voice, a walk. Talcum and lavender breeze past. I rock forward and back, watch a gold star cast six-pointed shadows across my desk. III Words weave spells, spider webs strung across the rafters of my mind. Stories stuck to sticky threads fill my head with worlds of wonder. I inhale books, breathe their soft spicy scent. Flip smooth pages back and forth across my face. IV Red rover red rover don't call me over and over I walk along the playground fence, slap my hand against cold metal links. Only this chain unbroken. V I press glass shards together bit by bit into a mosaic of memories. Fingers raw, I bleed the wounds clean. -END- I direct you to the first stanzas in the poems by Ms. Turner-Peaden and “Lilacs for One Hundred Springs” by Ms. Cohen. Many words are the same: “This is not,” “branches,” “frame, “Spring,” “no flowers.” While other key words are different, the words Ms. Turner-Peaden has chosen are related in meaning to Ms. Cohen’s words: “season” for “time,” “dogwood” for “lilacs,” “naked” for “spare,” “cold-footed” for “ambivalent,” “southern” for “New England,” “I will find no flowers” for “I will have no flowers.” Though the words are different, the sentence structure of the lines and the order in which the information is presented are identical. This mirroring is sustained by Ms. Turner-Peaden through six lines of Ms. Cohen’s work in the first verse. Yes, this kind of technique is used by poets in the learning process. We often “copy” the work of the masters by mimicking structure, form, words, lines, and even entire sections. However, it is expected that most of these “copies” will remain in our own filing cabinet drawers as experiments. What is unacceptable is to take these experiments, pass them off as our own, and post them in public or send them in as submissions. When a poet does post or submit these works, it is with the understanding that the original poet and work will be credited by the new author. It is also standard practice, when the work is this closely tied to the original, for the mimicking poet to contact the original poet (if still alive) to inform him/her of this new work and the borrowing that has taken place. Ms. Turner-Peadon did neither. She did not credit the original poet/poems nor did she inform the author of this. Ms. Turner-Peaden was contacted by the Administration of Wild immediately upon my notification of this issue. Ms. Turner-Peaden did respond to me; out of respect for her privacy, I will not post her letters in public because she gave me no permission to do so. However, I will paraphrase Ms. Turner-Peaden and let you know that in her defense, she maintains her innocence. While she admits that her work is too close to the original, she also maintains that this “borrowing” was unconscious and there was no malice of forethought. In essence, she states that she reads many things on the net and that Ms. Cohen’s material worked its way into her poem without her knowledge or intent. I forwarded all the relevant material (copies of all the poems) along with Ms. Turner-Peaden’s letters to me onto my staff. I don’t regard this as an infringement of Ms. Turner-Peaden’s rights to privacy as my staff must be in possession of all the information so that they might make informed decisions. I told my staff that while I would stand as judge in this matter, I could not also inhabit the persona of jury. I informed them that Ms. Turner-Peaden’s outcome in this case rested in their hands. I have heard back from my staff. All of them concurred that this borrowing was too significant to be a simple matter of unconscious mimicking. Everyone on staff (Administration included) felt that for a poem to have this much borrowed material (13 affected lines out of a total of 26 – that’s 50% of the poem’s total content, not to mention that the material in Ms. Turner-Peadon’s piece came from TWO different sources by the SAME author), it was highly unlikely that this borrowing was accidental. A line or two from the same poem? Yes, that might be accidental. This much invasion taken from two different pieces by the same author? It then becomes harder to swallow a totally innocent defense. They all felt that Ms. Turner-Peaden was fully aware of her activities. The votes from the jury were as follows: 2 in favor of outright banning, 1 in favor of suspension for a six-month period, 1 in favor of unlimited suspension until, in the staff member’s words, Ms. Turner-Peaden proves herself “worthy” of a reinstatement of membership. I have contemplated this issue at length, since the time I was informed last Sunday, July 3, 2006 until now. Yes, even before the jury deliberated and returned their verdicts, I have been thinking about what I should do. Every day, I have been turning this over in my mind, agonizing over it, being affected emotionally by the pain of it all. Many of you are new members, and hence, have not had the opportunity to see me in action through all different sorts of situations. For your benefit, I would like to state that I do NOT take the issue of banning members (long- or short-term) lightly. When I was a moderator here and not in charge of Wild, I was often the lone dissenter when it came to the issue of banning. I’ve fought for a few members' rights over the years. I have listened to them as objectively as possible, considered their arguments in their own defense, and in some cases, supported them as valiantly as possible in face of Administration’s wrath. Though doubts about their innocence were swirling around in the back of my mind, if I decided to support them, I supported them 100%. It is with a great deal of sadness that I must tell you that Ms. Turner-Peaden was one of those people. Many years ago, this same charge was leveled against her. Yes, she has been accused of plagiarism in the past. And I defended her. When Sis wanted to ban her, I convinced Administration that a strong warning would be in order. That the evidence was not air-tight, that there was some doubt and we must give her the benefit of that doubt. And then yesterday, we located this. It was found on a blog owned and maintained by Ms. Turner-Peaden. To offer you some background, when she first came onboard with us at Wild, she was known as Heartstarter. When she returned, it was as Blue Tattoo, and when she signed on for membership, it was as Tammy Turner-Peaden with a username of heartstarter. In Ms. Turner-Peaden’s own words, an excerpt from her blog (which is an entry in the public domain) dated November 10, 2004: “I have an alter-ego here at Blogger called Blue Tattoo. Now, Blue Tattoo is a poet, maybe a decent one, more probably not. Now, the Blue Tattoo used to be Heartstarter, and Heartstarter did a really dumb thing; posting a poem that wasn't hers and saying it was....just for shits and giggles and to see if anyone would notice. Well, notice everyone did, so after being labled (sic) a plagerist (sic) of the highest order, Heartstarter cashed in her chips and reincarnated as Blue Tattoo. Blue Tattoo is not trying to hide anything, and everyone knows that Blue is really Heart and all is well with the world. There's a poetry board on another planet where the ruling goddess has taken it upon herself to destroy everything that was Heart...and it's cool, Heart probably deserved it. But being human, Blue likes to check in at the old planet daily just to see what the moon goddess is spewing these days.” So, in light of the fact that this is a second offense, and given Ms. Turner-Peaden’s own words regarding her guilt in the past, I have decided to place my vote with the two staff supporters of the strongest action and ban her. After reading that entire blog entry (which does get significantly more insulting, by the way), I find her claims of innocence now very hard to believe. Personally, I am devastated by this entire situation. Devastated at the injury done to Ms. Cohen, devastated that the trust and second chance that I placed in Ms. Turner-Peaden’s hands was, by all accounts, misplaced, and seemingly unwarranted and abused. It is horribly agonizing to me to have to take action of this kind against anyone. I was unjustly banned myself from another board, so I am fully aware of the emotional and intellectual impact of this kind of action. Banning and suspensions at Wild have been very limited over the years as a result – I could count them on the fingers of one hand. Please, everyone. For my sake, if not your own, do not paint me into these types of corners, do not force me into the role of heavy-handed Administrator. It is not a part of this job that I enjoy in any way, shape, or form. However, these are duties that come with the title. I send prayers into the universe that this level of responsibility will always be handled by me with objectivity, understanding, empathy, and dignity. And that these types of actions will remain the exception here at Wild as they have mercifully been over the past seven and a half years. I have closed this thread to any new additions because, as I stated from the beginning, I do not wish this issue to turn into a circus or a public hanging of Ms. Turner-Peaden, aka Heartstarter, aka Blue Tattoo. If anyone has any questions, comments, or concerns about any aspect of this situation, I encourage you to contact me at adminwpf@wildpoetryforum.com. I would be happy to discuss this with you privately whether you are in agreement with or in dissention of our decisions. With Sincerest Regrets, M (Administrator) |
