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About a month ago, I spent an hour or two reading about Anthony Hecht, a prominent American poet who passed away on Oct 20 at the age of 81. Brad Leithauser's tribute to Hecht in the New York Review of Books was the occasion for me. I probably would not have looked closely at the article if Laura had not already mentioned Hecht's name to me a few months previously. Moreover, my burgeoning passion for contemporary poetry, specifically that of Czeslaw Milosz, convinced me to stop long enough to pay attention to Hecht.
One or two hours with Hecht was not enough for me to get me past the learn-a-few-cool-things stage of engagement. I was still glad to find out what a sestina was, specifically Hecht's most famous. As Leithauser wrote:
Prosody was a lifelong interest of Tony's and many of our discussions turned on minute issues of meter and rhyme. He took quiet but deep satisfaction in knowing that he'd written a matchless sestina, "The Book of Yolek." One of the most strict and elaborate of all poetic forms, whose pattern of six end-words marches inflexibly and repetitively from start to finish, sestinas are all but impossible to write. Hecht's is the most moving sestina I've ever read—more so even than Elizabeth Bishop's or W.H. Auden's. If I could keep only one Hecht poem, it might be this one.
After reading such a compelling introduction to "The Book of Yolek," I wanted to read it for myself. I turned to the Web, hopeful but uncertain of finding the poem there. Kenneth Sherman's The Necessity of Poetry: Anthony Hecht's "The Book of Yolek" quickly came up, and to my surprise -- it contained the complete poem. I was delighted as much by the instant gratification of finding the poem as by the art and craft of "The Book of Yolek."
Now I can write more about Hecht's poetry, but I have more to say about the impact of the Web on poetry than the poetry per se. (The observations I make here are by no means original.) If it were not for the Web, I would not have walked to the library to dig up "The Book of Yolek." So it's clear that at least from my point of view, I have experienced an educational benefit of the Web: the easy access to a wonderful poem, one that was effectively inaccessible to me (and to many) without the Web.
I would not have been surprised if someone working without any institutional affiliation had typed up the poem, deposited it on his own website or some discussion forum. But I was surprised to see "The Book of Yolek" quoted in full by a reputable journal and published to the public Web. I have heard from friends that it is a huge expense and hassle to publish more than the one or two lines of any given poem, a commonly understood free allotment allowed under fair use. The Partisan Review had secured the rights to publish the poem in print form, but had The Review explicitly obtained the rights to publish the poem online? Since there is a widespread understanding that placing a work on the public Web is tantamount to relinquishing all control to that work, I'd be surprised that the publisher Alfred A. Knopf would have released the poem on the Web.
Regardless of how the poem ended up on the Web, I can exploit its availability on the Web. At the most basic level, I can now link to the review containing to the poem, if not the poem directly (without some fancy footwork). Such linking is adequate for some purposes. However, I would like to reuse and repurpose the poem in various ways:
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quote the poem in full if I were to write my own review of the poem, which I publish on my weblog
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intersperse various lines of the poem throughout a review of the poem, again which I publish on my weblog
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include the poem in part or in whole in an online reader I create for a seminar on poetry
It is not technically difficult to "reuse" the poem in any of these ways -- but do I have permission to do so? And frankly, even if don't explictly have legal sanction for such activities, do I need to worry practically about possible violations of copyright , espcially if the legal issues are murky? And what should I do if I want to write online about poems that have not yet found their way to the public Web? As I continue to live with Milosz's poetry, I will naturally want to write about his poems on my weblogs or wiki. What should if I want to quote a poem at length? Decide that I will have to forgo such quotations because of copyright restrictions? Contact the publisher to get permission? Reproduce the poem on the sly, waging that I can do so, either through some interpretation of the fair use doctrine or through the fact that I'd be a small fish/below-the-radar copyright violator? Submit the poem to Plagiarist.com Plagiarist.com and hope that it secures permission to archive it?
As an amateur reviewer, reader, educator, or popularizer of poetry, I'm very curious what professional literary critics and reviewers are doing in the Web world? Maybe they stick to the traditional print world and eschew the world of bloggers? (I've not done the research to know which is the case.)
Posted by Raymond Yee on 12/20/04; 7:01:07 PM
from the Unclassified dept.
Discuss
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Monday, December 20, 2004