Words for the Taking

Stephanie Zacharek

Words for the Taking is a book about stolen goods ù or maybe more specifically, about pages ripped from a writer's life. In January 1992, Neal Bowers, a poet and professor of English at Iowa State, received a phone call from a fellow poet on the West Coast, alerting him to a poem she'd seen published under the name David Sumner. The poem had so many of the earmarks of Bowers' style that she couldn't believe it wasn't his. Sure enough, the poem was one of Bowers', originally published in Poetry magazine. The plagiarist had made a few minor changes (making the work more clunky and pedestrian) before submitting the poem under his own name to another small journal.

That discovery was only the beginning of Bowers' odyssey, outlined with skill and mordancy in Words for the Taking. "Sumner" had plagiarized several other poems by Bowers, and many by other poets as well. Outraged, Bowers enlisted the help of a lawyer and a private investigator to root out the thief. "Words for the Taking" is partly a detective story and partly a rumination on the weight and worth of poetry ù a worth that's hard to measure in dollars, since even the most prestigious literary journals might pay as little as two dollars per line for a poem. Bowers wants to be reasonable ù he spends an admirable portion of the book examining whether he's making too much out of nothing ù but in the end, thank God, his passion, his sense of fairness and his understandable anger win out. Bowers writes of the violation he felt over Sumner's theft of a poem he had written about his late father: "The poem was a bittersweet bloom I planted on my father's grave. The thief dug it up, pruned it to his liking, and damaged the roots in the process. Worse, he replanted it in the soil mounded over my father and pretended the loss was his."

Bowers finds his plagiarist, though he never meets him face-to-face. But what's really fulfilling about Words for the Taking is the way Bowers, almost without trying, affirms poetry as valuable work, forged more out of sweat than of divine inspiration, and deserving of fierce protection. Too often we think of poetry as a "soft" thing, written by gentle, sensitive souls. Bowers shows us its hard side ù and reminds us that, even at an estimated retail value of two bucks a line, it's worth drawing your sword for. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1991 Bowers, an obscure poet, discovers that someone is stealing his work from the pages of Poetry magazine and republishing it in smaller journals across the country. Terrified that posterity will confuse him with the thief, he writes letters to dozens of poetry journal editors, retains a lawyer, even hires a private eye. After a long search, the detective identifies the plagiarist, an ex-con and one-time school teacher from Oregon, who strikes up a correspondence with the poet, even writes a letter to Bowers's wife. Bowers finds himself lifted out of obscurity, when the New York Times reprints his American Scholar essay on the ordeal. By the finale of this book he's famous-because of a plagiarist he never met and a few stolen poems that few will likely ever read. Imagine Pale Fire as written by Kinbote, or The Trial written by K., and you'll have a sense of Bowers's weakness as a narrator: he's too aggrieved to see his story's irony. And he never explains why he is bitter at what others consider a kooky kind of flattery. Bowers's tendency to cast himself as the guardian of the Text seems misguided. In the end it's the sheer bathos of the narrator's obsession-not his (quite competent) poems or (less competent) reflections on the state of American scholarship-that lends the book its chief interest and charm. (Jan.)

Library Journal

This is a very different detective story. After discovering that a published poem of his had been plagiarized, Bowers, a poet and an English professor at Iowa State University, spent two years tracking down the mysterious word thief who "had two of my poems accepted as his own 20 times at 19 different literary magazines." With the aid of a sympathetic female detective, Bowers soon identified the plagiarist as a former Oregon schoolteacher with a criminal past. But more appalling to Bowers was the indifference of his academic colleagues to plagiarism's devastating effect. "Focusing on the poem as property with little value, they become the plagiarist's accomplices..., robbing the victim of his sense of worth." In contrast to fictional mysteries, the villain has not been punished and is now apparently plagiarizing short stories. An unsettling tale for those who care about the creative process.-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

Bowers's enthralling manhunt for a pseudonymous poem-thief is a multifaceted investigation into art and originality.

Although the New York Times, the Times of London, and other media have publicized Bowers's battle with an unknown plagiarist, his own account taps both the personal experience of literary theft and the cultural questions it poses. The hunt begins in January 1992, when a fellow poet notifies Bowers (English/Iowa State Univ.) that one of his poems, with minor alterations, has appeared in the Mankato Poetry Review but is attributed to a "David Sumner." Bowers and his wife investigate and eventually discover that poems by Mark Strand, Sharon Olds, Marcia Hurlow, and Robert Gibb are among 57 works printed under Sumner's alias in 46 publications. Sumner has repeatedly used two of Bowers's poems (they have appeared 20 times in 19 different literary magazines). Both poems are deeply intimate, drawn from Bowers's own life, and he is as wounded by their mangled appropriation as he is baffled by his campus colleagues' indifference. The initial inquiry does not turn up much more than embarrassed and often uncooperative editors and the name David Jones, a.k.a. David Sumner, with an address in Oregon. Assisted by a slightly bemused lawyer and a meticulously diligent private detective, Bowers and his wife at first attempt only to stop Jones's submissions and force him to admit guilt, but Jones proves to be a cunningly evasive and ultimately sinister character. Even though Bowers can never pin down Jones or his antisocial motives, he discovers that an alarming but revealing incident of child-molesting ended his nemesis's teaching career. Bowers finishes with a final, creepy twist: Someone with David Sumner's m.o. but calling himself "Paul G. Schmidt" has been trying to submit plagiarized short stories to literary magazines.

Partly a page-turning detective story, partly a modern defense of poetry, Bowers's brief book does poetic justice to a literary crime.