… and it’s been clear for years to UD that she needs – like some highlight/copy/paste Draculetta – regular infusions of the stuff.

After following academic and artistic plagiarism over the course of a decade, UD knows that a new high-profile p-story pops up on average every twelve days. But sometimes – lately – things dry up. No politician has been found to have lifted her dissertation from Wikipedia. No fancy schmancy pundit has been found to have plagiarized his columns. No law professor has been found to have plagiarized his books. No wunderkind has been found to have copied his neuroscience best sellers. Etc.

BIG etc. You can just count on plagiarism.

So maybe it’s spring fever… a certain lassitude among the paste-chasers as the summer begins… But I could swear it’s been at least a month since a really solid case of word theft.

Keep in mind that we’re not counting, here, the high school principal (heartfelt commencement speech) or the man of God (sermons). Although they always bring a sparkle to UD‘s eyes, these cases are too measly to be worth noticing.

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Award-winning poets who have stolen their intensely personal ruminations on suffering and passion – that’s good.

The poetry community is now asking itself just how widespread plagiarism is.

Yes, and that’s because there’s now a second case within just a few months of a poet having transferred his palpitations directly from the palpitations of others.

Many others. As you know if you follow this blog, UD has seen confirmed again and again the reality that almost all plagiarists plagiarize promiscuously and obsessively. Whenever, wherever, whoever. Once people start looking in a particular plagiarist’s direction, they almost always find a solid wall of stolen words.

This is heartening to plagiarism-buffs like UD, since extensive theft extends each story. But eventually the thrill is gone. You can only enjoy the revelation that a particular person is a sneaky unscrupulous creep for so long. You begin to seek fresh blood.

So here is David R. Morgan, whose “Monkey Stops Whistling” is his raw sardonic hard-bitten Dylan Thomasesque lament about the

dark glass we look through darkly when we
want to see the ghosts of our former selves

dear God the booze and how it’s undone me … dear… uh… oh, dear Colin Morton. That’s Colin Morton’s scotch-soaked mulling…

Okay so the rule is: Every tormented poet gets to be an alcoholic. Alcoholism is community property. But every poet has to render his drunken despair in his own words.