"If creativity is a field, copyright is the fence." ~John Oswald
I have written poems since I was nine. About six years ago I started sampling and remixing words, similar to audio sampling, I found on the Internet. This has brought about the most interesting works I’ve made, and I still find things that are several years old exciting. Maybe it’s because it feels like a conversation between me and the other writers, or that I feel inspired by the original purpose and intent of the words before changing them. I have used photo captions from news stories, headlines, other poetry, stories, database compilations, metadata, horoscopes, reviews, personals, web pages, musings and code to remake words into something entirely different from what they meant at origination of the phrase by the author. Even though more than 70% of the words are my own with the sampled text cited, and much of what I use is rewritten, the meanings transformed and the contexts remade, I do not feel it is work that can ever be published because it would be a gargantuan task to obtain a license permission for each sample, and it can be considered plagiarism in the strictest sense of passing off someone else’s work as my own, even if it’s only a couple of words sampled and cited. Each author would have to agree to my use. I believe the authors would recognize their own work, the two to four words put together in a particular way, yet it is my attraction to this particular arrangement that makes me want to use it, even if all the words around it and the context are different. It still seems as though under our current legal system’s understanding of copyright, not publishable unless I have permission.
This is disappointing to me, but at the same time, since poetry is not exactly a cash crop, I accept this reality as inevitable in our world where there are ever-greater attempts to clamp down on the personal use of digital, especially copyrighted works. So for now, those works, which I consider to be worth sharing, remain unpublished. I only share them one at a time with friends.