Poetry Scandal Highlights Prevalent Problem of Plagiarism

Debut poetry author Allie O'Toole has been discovered plagiarizing poems from prolific poets such as Rachael McKibbens and Brenna Twohy. Most interestingly, this is not the first time plagiarism in the poetry community has occurred.

Debut author Allie O’Toole had her Pushcart prize nomination cancelled after allegations of plagiarism from several established poets arose on Twitter.

Debut author Allie O’Toole had her Pushcart prize nomination cancelled after allegations of plagiarism from several established poets arose on Twitter. Rachel McKibbens, writer of the poetry collection “blud,” accused O’Toole of stealing lines from her poem “three strikes,” for use in O’Toole’s poem “Gun Metal.”

“Gun Metal” was nominated for a Pushcart prize, which honors the best poetry or short fiction published in small press companies in the previous year. In response to O’Toole’s nomination, McKibbens tweeted, “A poem that plagiarizes me was nominated for a Pushcart. I hope we win!”

After posting this tweet, Mckibbens stated that O’Toole contacted her to say that she paraphrased a stanza from “three strikes” in “Gun Metal.” In the email, O’Toole stated that “…the origin of the stanza slipped my mind...I did lift that image from you and paraphrased too closely for comfort.” O’Toole hoped “to put our poems in conversation with each other...I am deeply ashamed of the mistake I made.”

For reference, McKibbens’ poem reads “Hell-spangled girl / spitting teeth into the sink, / I’d trace the broken / landscape of my body / & find God / within myself.” It is important to note that those specific lines draw upon her own childhood trauma that she experienced, where Mckibbens spit teeth into the sink at age seven after her father knocked them out. In contrast, O’Toole’s poem reads “Ramshackle / girl spitting teeth / in the sink. I trace the / foreign topography of / my body, find God / in my skin.”

In an interview with The Rumpus, O’Toole stated that the poem “Gun Metal” was the “best representation of my collection as a whole.” O’Toole got the first six words tattooed on her arm, and she stated that those words are “in honor of who I was, who I am, [and] who I’ve yet to become,” on a Twitter account that has since been deleted.

Mckibbens declined to accept the apology after discovering that O’Toole paraphrased the entirety of Mckibbens’ other poem, “letter from my heart to my brain,” which also appeared in the poetry collection “blud.” O’Toole’s poem, “Coping Mechanisms,” is akin to McKibbens’ poem, in which both have the same structural elements and a similar amount of stanzas. Before the poem was taken down, O’Toole wrote “After ‘letter from my heart to my brain’ by Rachel McKibbens” underneath the title, but McKibbens claims that O’Toole never told her about her plagiarism of this specific poem in their email correspondence.

It was discovered that O’Toole was stealing lines from other established poets as well, such as Wanda Deglane, Brenna Twohy, and Heiu Minh Nguyen, among others. Nguyen tweeted that O’Toole stole lines from three of his poems in the fourth and fifth stanzas of “Gun Metal.” Deglane accused O’Toole of plagiarizing from two different manuscripts, in which O’Toole took multiple stylistic elements from Deglane’s poems. Twohy also posted pictures of her own poem, where O’Toole copied the exact words “Look into my mouth. / This endless, angry thing. / You have no idea how much I can consume,” for use in “Gun Metal.”

O’Toole’s publisher, Rhythm & Bones Press, cancelled her first poetry collection “Grief, and What Comes After.” In a statement to The Guardian, O’Toole stated that she “understood the importance of the written word… That is why I sent the apology note to Rachel McKibbens, to let her know how truly sorry I am for having borrowed her lines. It was a mistake, and I have learned a lot from having made it.” As of December 3, McKibbens tweeted that the number of people who O’Toole plagiarized from is at 11 people.

This scandal is not the only plagiarism scandal to hit the poetry or literature world. The same month as the O’Toole allegations, poet Claudia Cortese tweeted that poet Lisa Low stole her poem format of letters to a character named “Lucy,” where in Low’s case it was a series of letters to a character named “Ruby.” Both poems have a similar usage of metaphors and theme of girlhood, and Low admitted that she was studying Cortese’s poems. Cortese tweeted that she found six of her poems similar to Low’s, including all of Low’s “Ruby” poems. Similar to McKibbens, Cortese tweeted that Low “not only plagiarized my words, my images, lines – but even worse – she stole my voice, my trauma...and it is not okay.”

According to Vulture, “to steal the words of another poet isn’t just theft, but violation.” In a closing tweet, McKibbens stated, “I survived my own vanishing. I arrive in my art. That is where I map my forgiveness, my sorrow, my joys. Let it be mine.” After the ordeal, Corese tweeted that she has been “triggered for months, but I did what I always do - buried the pain, told myself it was okay that Low was plagiarizing my poems, that I am not allowed to be angry.” The lived experiences of McKibbens and Cortese, which O’Toole and Low used for their own poetry without understanding the context, is proof that their plagiarism took away pieces of McKibbens’ and Corese’s individuality.

As the recent scandal shows, there is a fine balance between stealing exact stanzas and styling structural elements from an admired poet.

Low and O’Toole’s plagiarism of personal experiences highlights a prevalent issue in poetry: What is the difference between plagiarism and intertextuality? According to The Guardian, “intertextuality” is the act of taking “someone else’s poem and use its structure, mood or language as a foundation for something new.”

The director of Creative Writing in the English Department and published poet, Dr. Eugene Riche, states that O’Toole’s “so-called paraphrasing is much different from the strategy in contemporary poetry that uses erasure of random words and phrases in someone else's text [in order to] to highlight elements of a text or draw from chosen texts.” Although poets have been influencing one another for centuries, poetry that does not add anything new to original style is considered plagiarism, whether it is unintentional or not. Instead of stealing lines and stanzas, Riche suggests using Cento, “a classic poetry form that borrows individual lines to make a patchwork poem, from lines made up of other writers' words or other poets' lines.”

As the recent scandal shows, there is a fine balance between stealing exact stanzas and styling structural elements from an admired poet. “You might use intertextuality to comment on the original poem… or alter it in such a way that it moves into your own lived experience,” stated The Guardian.

It is possible that O’Toole and Low believed they were using the poetry of McKibbens and Cortese to reflect similar traumatic events, but it seems they went too far by stealing entire lines without understanding the significance.