Contributions to my Work

I have had, and continue to have, periods in my life when I become very focused for a time on a certain activity:  reading in a certain genre; doing house maintenance or renovation; working on and enjoying my golf game; trying to organize the unorganized; learning a new skill, etc. 

One of those focal changes has recently occurred with my renewed interest in poetry.  I say ‘renewed’ because my journals remind me that I have had at least two former periods of my life, decades apart, when I read much poetry and tried my hand at this method of expression.   Having posted a couple of my poems recently is witness to that renewal.  

A problem that I have grappled with, though, is that some poets inspire me so much with their content or style or specific word usage and combinations that I sometimes use them as a model or impetus for my own expression and I worry that perhaps I should give credit where it may not even be necessary. This occasionally presents a problem because my thoughts are also often stimulated from things I hear on the news or in lectures, sermons, etc., or see on television, or read from my voluminous notes or acquire from other sundry sources. 

Having a son who is a lawyer by training I have heard him use the term ‘intellectual property’ as something that should be respected and not violated. The problem for me is that by constant reading or rereading the work of others some of their work is internalized by me and becomes, in effect, my thoughts, my ideas, my work—to support, expand, take as a guide or sometimes refute.  Hence the quotation by Sir Isaac Newton that accompanies every Omnium-Gatherum posting about standing on the shoulders of giants.  It can be seen that the ‘Gatherum’ portion of my title obviously has reference to the material that was gathered from many contributory  sources. 

A reading from one of my intellectual ‘giants,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, resolved my quandary: “The inventor knows only how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect…. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus.  Be it so.  Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.  And this grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution.”  I initially addressed this disclaimer in my second posting, on June 24, 2010, “Our Thoughts.”

An example of what I trust to be an appropriate use of another’s work was posted by me as “The Captain of Thy Soul” where I took the last line of Orson F. Whitney’s poem “The Soul’s Captain” for the title of my January 19, 2013  posting.  Whitney, in like manner, took on the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley and rebutted it by his derivative work .

Legal support for such ‘transformative use’ of another’s earlier intellectual product was explained as appropriate by legal scholar Judge Pierre N. Leval in the Harvard Law Review, "Toward a Fair Use Standard", which the Court quoted and cited extensively in its Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., legal opinion. In his article, Judge Leval explained the social importance of transformative use of another's work and what justifies such a taking:

       “I believe the answer to the question of justification turns primarily on whether, and to what extent, the challenged use is transformative. The use must be productive and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original. . . . [If] the secondary  use adds value to the original--if the quoted matter is used as raw material, transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings--this is the very type of activity that the fair use doctrine intends to protect for the enrichment of society.”

All this preamble is to justify what may be my ‘transformative use’ of another author’s creation of poetry or thoughts that have influenced me, (as was Whitney’s cited rebuttal to Henley’s poem). Having said all this I will submit in the next couple of postings a few recent poems, of my own creation, which have been influenced in structure, style or content by others in their poetry. I thank them for their contribution to my education and for your consideration.