14.1: Introduction

Christopher Leary

Rebecca Moore Howard defines “patchwriting” as a method of composing in which writers take the words of other authors and patch them together with few or no changes (233).* Although associated with plagiarism, it is an extremely useful writing strategy with a very long and noble tradition, and I hope that, by the end of this essay, you will be convinced that the opportunities (great writing) far outweigh the risks (accusations of dishonesty). With that as my goal, I’ll start by telling you the story of how I worked through my own fears and uncertainties about plagiarism and patchwriting.

Nowadays, I consider myself to be a frequent practitioner of patchwriting, especially early in my writing process. I also happen to really enjoy it—for one thing, it gets me past the stage of staring at a blank white page. Likewise, my students report that (in addition to being frustrating and time-consuming) patchwriting is “fun,” “confidence-building, ”and “extremely interesting.” I consider us to be the latest in a long-running line of writers 1 spanning centuries who view this type of work as crucial to their identities as writers.

Patchwriting was a mode I gravitated toward while studying for a degree in English at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Underemployed, single, without the kind of budget that would allow me to really partake in New York’s “nightlife,” without any cable TV or Internet access, I had, during much of this time, nothing to entertain myself in my bare apartment except for a bookshelf full of books.

During one notable phase of this period, I went one-by-one through each of my books, copying out short sentences until I had three or four pages worth of lines. Since the books were from different countries, times, genres, and personalities, I anticipated a sharp contrast in styles. “If I put tens of sentences from different times and eras and places all on the same page,” my thinking went, “I’ll be able to witness these eras bumping up against each other and rubbing elbows.” In much the same way I find it interesting to view, say, automobiles from different times and places all in the same room.

After copying them into one Microsoft Word document, I started moving the sentences around, hoping to find sentences that play weirdly against each other. I was looking for that jarring effect, not expecting the exercise to go any further than that.

But once these lines were in the same document, I found that some were attracted to each other and others repelled. I dragged some over here, and some over there, deleting a lot, pruning a lot. The lines grouped themselves into stanzas, puzzlingly falling into place. For the most part, intuition told me where to move them, how to group them together, and which ones to delete. Much to my surprise, the lines that I had copied from the books in my bookshelf started to take a shape resembling the shape of a poem. And out of the original mess of lines, a scenario or situation—if not a story—started to emerge. (If you are getting visions of Ouija boards, I don’t blame you.) I ended up spending a whole month on this project that was really meant to kill time one night.

Here is a small excerpt from the poem. I compiled it from work by Chinua Achebe, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a lost source, and Henry James respectively.

Then something had given way inside him.
What about the hero who keeps his mouth shut?
The intoxication of power began to break apart under the waves
of discomfort.
“I can’t help dreaming what I dream,” he thought.
Yet even as he afresh made this out, he felt how strange it all was.

This odd project got stickier when I decided I wanted to submit a few of the “poems” to my school’s literary magazine, Downtown Brooklyn. I was held back by a concern and a strong feeling of guilt about authorship. I had to really wrestle with the question, “Am I the author of these texts?” When I got to the stage where I wanted to submit them as my own and put my name as the author, something felt very wrong and even dastardly. It didn’t strike me as at all appropriate to put my own name as the author because I could not have written them “from scratch,” by any means. The phrasings and language outstrip my capabilities.

I felt like a cheater. I worried I’d be accused of plagiarism or academic dishonesty. Ungenerous readers could fairly accuse me of trying to pass myself off as a better writer than I really am by stealing the language of established greats. Worse, my classmates and teachers could dismiss me as a parasite who, being completely unable to write his own poems, leeches off the work of others instead. The Dane Cook of poetry, so to speak.

At the same time, I recognized that, even if I didn’t exactly write the things, I did sort of make them . . . and that ought to count for something.

My unshakeable moral dilemma propelled me to seek advice from a few knowledgeable poets whom I trust.

Conveniently, I shared a cubicle in the English Department during that time with someone I consider a “real” poet, a friend named Valerie. She’s always blunt and I knew she’d give it to me straight. As the submission deadline approached, I found her in our graduate assistant cubicle. She was deep in thought, responding to a pile of work submitted by her undergraduate students. I plunked my shady texts on the top of her pile and peppered her with my doubts.

“Are these poems?” I asked Valerie. “Can I call them mine? Does it seem at all ethical to submit them to Downtown Brooklyn?”

She started off by saying that she did not particularly like what I’d shown her. (“That’s not what I asked,” I replied.) Yet she affirmed, technically speaking, they are poems and there was no reason not to submit them. She explained that what I was doing has a name—“found poetry”—and that it is a pretty conventional poetic strategy. She even found an old quote from her notebook and read it aloud: “The spider’s web is no whit the better because it spins it from its own entrails; and my text no whit the worse because, as does the bee, I gather its components from other authors’ flowers.”

“Case closed,” she said, slapping the quotebook shut and returning to her work.

Still, I wanted a second opinion, so I visited a faculty member and resident poet at LIU, Professor Moss, to ask him whether the work could legitimately be called mine and submitted to Downtown Brooklyn under my name. He agreed with Valerie that, yes, the poem is not very strong, and that, yes, it is in the tradition of “found poetry.” He brought up another term, “the cento”: it is a method of constructing poems (or even prose) out of quotations that are displaced and relocated. It’s an ancient form that is still used today. One example my professor showed me was written by council members at the Academy of American Poets. They used lines from Charles Wright, Marie Ponsot, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Samuel Beckett, respectively, to compose the following:

In the Kingdom of the Past, the Brown-Eyed Man is King
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree
Day after day, I become of less use to myself,
The hours after you are gone are so leaden.

For a prose version, Professor Moss referred me to the essayist Walter Benjamin. Benjamin created a huge book, entitled The Arcades Project, consisting mostly of other people’s writing about malls in Paris. Paradoxically, the book is “by” Benjamin, but there is not that much of his own writing in it. It’s more like he just selects and arranges
the writing of others. Below is a selection from The Arcades Project, with Benjamin’s writing in bold, and other people’s writing in italics:

In reference to Hausmann’s success with the water
supply and the drainage of Paris: “The poets would
say that Hausmann was more inspired by the divinities
below than by the gods above.” Metro. “A great many
of the stations have been given absurd names. The worst
seems to belong to the one at the corner of the Rue Breguet
and the Rue Saint-Sabin, which ultimately joined
together, in the abbreviation ‘Breguet-Sabin,’ the name

of a watchmaker and the name of a saint.” June Insurrection.
“Most of the prisoners were transferred via the
quarries and subterranean passages which are located
under the forts of Paris and, which are so extensive that
most of half the population of the city could be contained
there. The cold in these underground corridors is so intense
that many had to run continually or move their
arms about to keep from freezing, and no one dared lie
down on the cold stones . . . The prisoners gave all the
passages names of Paris streets, and whenever they met
one another, they exchanged addresses.” (89)

Benjamin goes on like this—arranging the quotes of other writers—for around a thousand extraordinary pages.

In the end, after we look at these examples together, and as we wrap up our conversation, Professor Moss encouraged me in the exercises I was doing but pointedly stated: “you must also mine your own writing, not just other people’s, for language that you like.”

I point to my experience drafting and publishing those so-called poems in Downtown Brooklyn because it played a pretty big role in my own education in writing and language. One of the things you come to realize as a patchwriter is that the shifting boundaries between writing, editing, and cheating are not problems you need to resolve, but rather opportunities you can exploit.