 Thank you all again for staying with us. And I wanted to begin by introducing our panel on various poetry. I wanted to begin, actually, by saying that I'm very sorry to be here, primarily because the fact that I'm here is a result of the fact that Jennifer Irvin, who Robert Pinkstein was mentioning frequently in her work on these issues, was, unfortunately, unable to make it because of family illness. However, I am incredibly grateful to be here to be able to introduce this issue and our distinguished panel. So again, with Susan Tishi, who's the author of four books of poetry, who has recently gathered last and voted for Goda, she's currently at work on a mixed genre book of poetry and nonfiction collaged for more than 200 narratives, poems, and historical documents. She's been teaching at the Graduate Writing Program at George Winston University since 1988. We also have David Benza, who's the author of a book left-linked poem called The Interlude. He's also the executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. AWP is a national non-profit literary organization for teachers and writers. Amongst their many program areas, they also publish the Writers Chronicle, which, in addition to providing information about grants, fellowships, and conferences, and publishing, it also features critical essays and interviews and news on the literary scene. Casey Smith is the assistant professor of arts and humanities at the Corporate College of Art and Design. He's writing poetry and literary history. He's scholarly writing, and his poetry has appeared in various traditional and non-traditional media. And I think his current course deals with a lot of interactions between new technology and new forms of distribution and poetry as well. And finally, Peter Giozzi, who teaches domestic and international copyright by American University. He also teaches law and literature. Since 2005, he's been working with Pat Officer Heidi at American University's Center for Social Media, and projects designed to promote the understanding of fair use by documentary filmmakers and other producers of creative works, including, recently, as of last year, a code of best practices in fair use for poetry. So I think this topic came about, in part, when I saw Robert Kinsey speak on it last year, and in part because of the work that Peter and Jennifer have done in creating the code of fair use. And I also wanted to just point out, late last year in the fall, an article by David Orr, a poet and a critic who appeared in the New York Times. And he was basically lamenting a lack of attention to copyright and poetry, that we hear about controversies in music industry and movie industry about it. But when he produced a book on appreciating modern poetry, he had to pay $20,000 for clearance in licenses when he was describing and criticizing poems. And he talked about the uncertainty in fair use. So I think to lay out the background on some of these issues and sort of what the world of copyright might look like to a poet as a poet, as a critic, as a teacher, I thought we'd start off with Susan. Susan, yeah. Thanks, Sherman. And thanks to public knowledge for adding codes to the mix this year. I was told not to expect codes in the audience by the end of the year. All right. Yeah, okay. I sort of consider my role as actually talking about poems and what poets are doing. In a little while, I think we're gonna be talking about some poetic works that can test all of the categories for this town, authorship, ownership, ending in poetry. But I wanna start by talking about what is flourishing closer to the heart and to the center of contemporary poetry. For most of us, any challenge to fair use that arises in our work arises as a byproduct of a creative act. It's not a deliberate provocation. But even so, it's not detachable. Method and meaning are not separable and poems often create enough ambiguity and contradiction that it's hard to distinguish origins and it's hard to codify a legal nightmare, in other words. Leaving a slight illusion in quotation as we've always known them, I think you can sort of divide poetic remix and repurposing into two basic gestures. Incorporating fragments from a number of different sources whether literary or non-literary into a new work or the opposite gesture of in really intense communion with a single text. Poems that bring in fragments of various origins are perfect exemplars of Vashilar's famous metaphor comparing creative work to the way a bird builds a nest out of its environment. As opposed to something it might bring out from within itself. And those poems that do that collect such small bits of language that fair use is easy to assume as at least it's easy for poets to assume. We'll see what Peter says on his turn. Even when you're quoting from a poem. But as a reader, you can't always know when you're reading a poem like that. Typography is not consistent. Typography affects the pace and the texture of the poem, the tunnel register, how you read it aloud. So when poets are making decisions about how or if to mark, borrow, text, those decisions are not made solely along lines that the police, the lawyer, would need to please your college competition teacher. So I take my artwork over the last 10 years as an example. I've been writing about war and grief and I have quoted everything from traditional ballots to essays about how to grade to other poets. And there's a kind of mosaic effect in many of the poems. It's a texture that's meant to be there, it's meant to be palatable. But punctuating or italicizing, every one of those pieces would render the surface, if not unreadable, then certainly it's impossible to read or meaningfully. And things are muddied even further when the poem's syntax is designed to slip. In other words, providing multiple possibilities to where to draw boundaries between phrases. So in that kind of a poem, part of that was quoted where would you say the quotation stopped and something else began. Perception, deception, representation, re-representation around issues of war and grief. That's exactly what I've been writing about. So the method is part of the inquiry. And a much more radical project than mine is Noah Eli Gordon's recent book called The Source which is composed from individual words and short phrases from page 26 of almost 10,000 books in the Denver Public Library. In his words, a testament to the interconnectedness and the mutability of all writing as well as an exploration of the notion of origins, both textual and spiritual. That's a hell of a bird's nest. But when you start reading it, as my students were very quick to point out and I thought, you immediately know, you're reading a book, just as you know when you look at bird's nest, what species built the nest. But it does keep that newly made thing continuous with its environment and which makes it a kind of camouflage. Camouflage works by confusing categories, categories and and or. Is it mine? Is it yours? Is it both? And so this becomes a politics as well as a poetics or a poem that originates out of shared discourse from which its material identity, its actual language identity never completely separates. For obvious reasons, current law has the greatest impact on poetic works that interact with a single text. And Dick takes that most such books rely on sources in the public domain. I went through my shelves and I couldn't find any that were anyone trying to do this kind of work with something under copyright. So I found examples like Travis McDonald's book, The O Mission Repo, which is an enrager done from a 9-11 commission report. Norbese Phillips Song, which is a 182 page book made entirely from the language of an 18th century legal decision about the murder of Africans on a slave ship. Mark Nowak, a working class poet, goes documenting poetic, so he uses print sources and field ethnography. Dan Beachy Quick's book, Spell, does have a literary source, but it's Moby Dick. And the classic erasure text that sort of launched the whole concept of erasure and poetry was Ronald Johnson's book, Radios, which was created out of Paradise Lost. And from within it, using its own words, created an alternative spiritual vision, so it really couldn't exist in any other words. John Cage's practice, roughly contemporary with Johnson, of writing through a text was barely considered writing, let alone poetry, when he was doing it a few decades back. He used a mesastic form and some arcane numerological methods to pull text randomly out of the cantos and pinning it away at other iconic texts. But times have changed so much that in 2003 my student, Peter Streckfest, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize with a book whose longest poem was constructed using very similar methods. You can tell from the name Yale Younger Poets Prize, this is a mainstream poetry event. So this reflects my interest, the list I've just given you, but also the legal climate. And not even a poet could believe that he was gonna fly under the radar making a project like this out of a book that's under copyright. So, and you'll notice in my list that John Cage is the only one who dared to mess with something with poetry still under copyright. These are all stunning books. You should read every one of them. But what I really started wondering when I was preparing for today was what my shelves might look like if the law went different, if practice was different, it didn't have this severe hovering around the quotation of poetry. And I also wonder what might have been written already that hasn't been published. Thanks very much. I think, David, as somebody who works with young writers as well, as well as some of the authors yourself, I would love to hear sort of what you think and what you've been seeing and how you've seen young writers interact with this intersection between the law and the writer. A few years ago I was invited to a public college by G.G. Sohn and had a conversation with G.G. Bradford. And the concern was over broadening and deepening the intellectual comments, you know, what is in public domain. And a lot of the things seems like good ideas to me, limiting copyright for authors so that that work can be used by educators and have a much wider dissemination. And then I thought, well, I better see how my field actually feels about this. And so I just randomly polled about a dozen writers about how they felt about the extension of copyright. You know, should your children benefit from your work as a poet? Should your grandchildren benefit? Should your great-grandchildren benefit? And what I found was that people were very passionate about the issue, but they were also all over the map about the issue. And I tried to resolve for myself what was behind the divergent reactions to limiting copyright. Because the writers I talked to did not feel like Robert Pinsky and just one generation of support from my poetic output is a sufficient enough gift to my family. Some felt, well, it's my work and if I wanna take care of, you know, all of my spawn forever, you know, that should be my privilege to do that. And it seemed to me that there were four, four forces pushing these artists and educators in different directions. And I also found that there was a lot of chronic ambivalence in people because my association is an association of poets and writers who teach in higher education. So the educator and then felt one way and oftentimes the artist and then felt another way. And among the artists, there were diverging views still because some have the aesthetic of Susan Tishy and then others have more proprietary views of individual enterprise and art being a product of individual enterprise. So I sort of, and trying to find out why people had these different views, I tried to look at the forces pushing them and I came up with these four forces. One was the consolidation of publishing houses. Another was the inflexibility of literary estates. A third was the worldwide web's cataloging and indexing of everything which has really changed the literary environment and how you work within the literary environment. And the fourth was a kind of age old issue and that's the disdecession of the poor and the unincorporated. And of course, poems are extremely poor and unincorporated and proudly unincorporated. And the educators were very concerned about the first of these forces, the consolidation of publishing houses. What were formerly private family businesses like Fraar, Strauss and Drew and all the other great houses. There seemed to be more discernment and even shrugs about the use of some of the poems for subsequently. But with the consolidation of publishing houses and rights being granted from one central office of lawyers that did the work for all the publishing houses, the requests for permissions were harder to fulfill and getting exceedingly more expensive. The writer Francis Mays who many of you know from the movie about Tuscany based on her book about her life in Tuscany, before she had that fame and fortune she was an educator and an anthologist. And when she tried to make her anthology discovering poetry, the estate of T.S. Eliot wanted $1,200. This was in the 1980s for the love song of J.A. Alfred Krufrock. And they wanted roughly $4,000 for the wasteland. As a result of these high demands, those poems fell out of anthologies. They fell out of the classrooms. How is that representing the good interests of T.S. Eliot? And how are we as educators to disseminate our love for poetry when we can't teach the poetry we love most? So the educators and people thought, yeah, limited copyright, that's a good idea. We need to get these poems back into the classroom, back into the public domain where they belong. Rita Dove just published a penguin anthology of 20th century American poetry. Book just came up this year, same problem. Sylvia Platt's poem, Daddy, does not appear in the anthology as much as Rita would have loved to have at home in the anthology. And how, by Allen Ginsberg, does not appear in the anthology because the rights were just too extensive. And oftentimes, someone editing an anthology has a limited budget of $10,000 to secure permissions. If you have a budget of $10,000 and they're asking for $4,000 for the wasteland, you can readily see the problem over there. So, David, I don't need to cut you off. I hope we can come back to your main points of discussion. But I think that's a great segue on to Casey, who's actually who, in teaching his class, is addressing a lot of these issues about anthologizing distribution and also new technologies. Thank you, Sir. Thanks for everybody for coming and public knowledge. And what a treat it is to talk about poetry in a room full of people who aren't poets. I don't know if this ever happened to you. I guess it's really great. For me, making poetry or constructing poetry, it might be worth spending the writing for my practice, which in some ways it's like Susan's, in some ways probably further extreme. And teaching are pretty congruent. It might be because I teach at an art college, and I teach at the Corcoran, where an art college is different in fundamental ways from most universities because kind of everything is permitted. And then you kind of wait and see after that. We hear questions from students all the time in photography and video about appropriation. Can I do this? Will Disney come after me? And our faculty is of a widely divergent response. Most of them are saying, yeah, see if you can get Disney to come after you. That would be good for your career. And what's the harm? When it comes to poetry, I teach a course that's called Poetics Off the Page. That's the third iteration of it. Just yesterday we had an event called Letter Fest, which is a celebration of words and sounds and letter forms, kind of poetry that comes off of the Gertrude Stein kind of, and not the Robert Frost of American Poetics. And in this course, I challenge my students to open up their minds to what poetry might be. But they have in mind kind of a church basement or what the grandmother's favorite poem or something like that. But to see language as an alive, what is poetry? It's just still a great question. A question that I think is still unsettled. We've learned that it's not about lyric subjectivity alone. It's not the poet. In one of my poems, I use a first person pronoun. A lot of people might be confused thinking that it's autobiographical, whereas that I in the poem is an authoritative construct. And so a lot of my poems and a lot of what I teach my students in the hope that they can, except for or not, a lot of them are very skeptical. We'll probably find room to talk about the work of Ted Goldsmith. He's the originator of Uguweb and some people's minds, he's the arch tyrant. He's the one who's taking everything. He's got this position is that, and one that I find very compelling is that I don't know those poets who are making lots of money off their poetry. I guess they are out there. They're not in my equating circuit. And Ken's position is that once you get the work out there and that's what's foremost. He does get the cease and desist and the take my notices. And he will comply reluctantly, but he will comply. But the important thing I think, and again I stress this to my students, this to see poetry as a field of possibility, not as a field of limitation. And so if they can think that a poem might be constructed out of a shopping catalog from Sears, might be constructed out of studying adjacencies and some kind of database. I've done some poems based on classic, and so-called classics of literature, Jane Austen novels and stuff like that. And just by doing very simple kind of search and find processes, you know, study adjacencies. How did Jane Austen, what words came after the word a wall in Pride and Prejudice? Let me make a list. Let me see what I can do with that. It might be nothing really. But I'll wait and see. My bird's nest is a crazy bird's nest. It comes from all over the place. I think that right now in 2012, it's a brilliant time to get a poet. I think that the world is pulsing with possibility. Peter, the document is so useful and helpful. I've shared it with my students. I made a joke earlier that I hope it's under fair use. I kind of came against the code of best practices to fit on one sheet of paper. But students are, you know, they're willing to understand, they want to understand the law, what's right and what's wrong. They're not going into it with just kind of wild eyes. But they're also concerned in the making and not so much about what happens after it's made. So I think that's also a healthy position for any creative person to be honest. Maybe that's a good start. Thanks, and I think finally for initial presentations, let's turn to Peter, I think, if you could, you know, I may put a legal frame on some of the issues that our panelists have raised, and also talk about the documents. Okay, I'll try to do a little of these, thank you. And in case you let me repeat my challenge, I think it's great to get it on the one page, but next we need the wallet card. So, we, we, we poets know your rights. We can, yeah, we can collaborate on the wallet card. I mean, broadly speaking, in this, in this domain of practices, in many, many others, fair use is probably the one right spot and otherwise pretty dismal copyright landscape, in which stuff gets protected more and more for longer and longer. And with no natural and in sight. And so this escaped valve in the copyright system, which is a picture that got built into our law very early, although it didn't actually get incorporated into the statute until the 1970s. Copyright Act has just gotten more and more important in the last few years. And unfortunately, the courts have taken off that theme in the Ferryman's jurisprudence, the case law decisions of the last 20 years, and they've really changed in a very, very profound, and for all kinds of cultural practitioners, very important way, the basic analytic group that we're thinking about, Ferry, because it used to be that when you did it, was to, you know, buy the numbers. Section 107, there are the four factors. C, it's all very confusing, very vague, and hard to predict, you know, the open-ended artist is good, right? Even though all the confusing stuff one could do without. And then, as I say, starting 20 or so years ago, courts looked at this picture and said, well, we probably can do better. We can probably provide a clearer algorithm or a rubric for thinking about this stuff. And what's happened over those couple of decades is in effect, now Ferry's reasoning is different in cases of value-added practice in the circuit we're talking about here. Now what really courts do is they ask two questions. They say, is this use a transformative use in that it adds value to the material that was assimilated and that it represents that material in a new way, for a new purpose, or to a new audience? And then they ask, is the amount that got taken appropriate to the transformative purpose? And if the answer to those two questions turns out to be in each case, yes, then I enlarge. The inquiry is over in the use of fair, which means, incidentally, not just that it's allowed, but that it is being non-infringed. Fair use is something you get away with. Fair use is all right, and a fair use is a non-infringed use, not an infringement that's somehow been forgiven or privileged. So that's really important. And that shift in the way courts talk about and think about fair use is one of the two main pillars of the project that my colleagues and I have been working on with different practice communities, including happily the poetry community over the last six or seven years. The other pillar is a very important scottily insight attributable to a guy named Mike Madison who teaches copyright at the University of Pittsburgh, who was one of the first scholars to read all of those various decisions from the earliest times to the present day to distill some generalizations from them, including the generalization that when courts, who after all have the last word on these questions, when courts ask is something a fair use or not, especially in an area that they're not familiar with, they look to the field for information about what's considered appropriate, about what's considered good practice, what's considered important to the fulfillment of whatever mission that field is devoted to accomplishing. In other words, what practitioners think, and especially what practitioners can say about fair consensus values around fair use is actually important. It actually is constituent of law, as well as simply reflecting and understanding of law. By the way, I'm putting this of course is that fair use is one of those branches of law that's too important to be left entirely to the lawyers. So with these twin insights of the law is changing and that professional consensus matters, we've gone about this series of exercises, facilitate a process in which professional communities come together, identify recurrent situations in which the question is this fair use or is it that comes up again and again in practice and help them, and I stress help them, those communities to develop sort of center of gravity positions around those issues. I say center of gravity position because no group of representatives of our community and we often talk to, always talk to many dozens and sometimes several hundred of the representative practitioners in the field in coming to one of these statements of the best practices. No group of that size is always going to agree about everything, but often there is going to be a substantial middle ground of agreement and that's what these statements of best practices try to document. They're especially powerful when the people who come together from the field to create them are already, as both Susan and David have pointed out, on both sides of the issue, and that is obviously the case and was the case with the poets who had after High Day Jennifer Irwin and Kate Coles and I helped to work together to create a statement of best practices. Why? Because poets are original voices and they're also engaged in a wide range of assimilative practices and have been for a very long and also most working poets are also working something else's, teachers, critics, journalists, archivists, the list goes on. And often they have perspectives from their other, from under their second hats, so to speak, which are, which compliment, I don't want to say in Polish, but compliment their poetic perspectives. So we went through this exercise as we've done before. The document exists and can be found in various places. The place you can always get a free download of this document is Center for Social Media dot org. If you, the Fair Use tab, if you go to the Poetry Foundation website, which deserves consideration since the Poetry Foundation funded and helped to make this possible, the AWP was a big help too, it has to be said. Unfortunately if you go to the Poetry Foundation website you get all sort of tangled up with scribe D and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Center for Social Media dot org is a nice place to get a clean free download of this document and I urge you to do so because I can't begin to talk about all of the details, although I'm happy to discuss some of them later if there are questions, but there is one thing I want to address actually to that came up in Susan's remarks, first, without regard to the code but just as a matter of sort of general law, speaking back to that issue of transformative misanalysis in Fair Use, I don't think there's any reason to suppose that a poem that incorporates large numbers of quotations needs to mark or italicize those quotations in order for them to be considered Fair Use. To the contrary, I might make the argument that the poem in which those quotations are assimilated more fully rather than marked off as being something else and from another source is actually a more transformative exercise for that reason. Likewise, the practice that we're, now what I want to talk about a little bit is that the single author of response, your wonderful word was intimate encounter between a poet of now and a single work of the past. That's one where I think poets now need to pull up their socks and recognize the rights that they have, the rights that they won't actually be able to claim until they exercise them. Why? Because there's, oh I'm sorry, I thought you were really interesting. And Susan, if you would respond to it to be your question. Did I just say a couple of things that I want to say to the conclusion and then I'd love to hear from Susan because I just have about a minute, minute more to say. And one of the things I want to say is that there is nothing in the, the off-the-shelf jurisprudence of Fairviews that suggests that a new poem that is a response to a single work would be treated any less favorable in Fairviews analysis than a bird's nest poem. The other thing for what it's worth is that principle number two of this document clearly and explicitly covers that case and contains no reservations whatsoever with respect to the number of kind of sources. The greatest misunderstanding that poets and others naive misunderstand, that poets and others have about Fairviews is that somebody is out there counting orders. And that everything turns on extreme brevity of quotation, nothing. In the case law, certainly nothing in this document supports that conclusion and the discourse. Where did the 10% come from? The urban full form of copyright, ain't it great? I mean, I could go on, but one answer is that the 10% has many parents but one of the less respectable of those parents is a document called the Guidelines on Classroom Photocopying that was issued in conjunction with the legislative history of the 1976 Copyright Act and represented in effect a failed effort to bring publishers and teachers together to agree on a safe harbor for classroom fair use. It does have a 10% number in it. Now, I could go on and on. The next 25 minutes I could do on why one shouldn't pay very much attention to the 1976 Classroom Guidelines in the original context for which they were suggested and certainly beyond that context. But I'll restrain myself except to say that in the context that we're talking about, the context of poetic practice, the context of critical practice, it has no bearing whatsoever on the blocker outcome. Now that said, there are still issues. There were things that the poets got together to create this document couldn't agree on. And one of those was the practice of making anthologies. So there is no principle that addresses anthologies although there's some text in the document that helps to explain the pros and cons of that argument. Does the fact that anthologies aren't represented in the document mean that it was anyone's consensus and conclusion that very use isn't an available basis for creating an anthology? No, it simply means that there wasn't a clear and not clear consensus on that point. So I'm gonna be able to throw it open just for some back and forth between our panelists and just to throw out a couple of things. You mentioned Ken Goldsmith and I'm sure that there's a fascinating discussion you had there. And also the question of nobody's counting words. I know David in our emails is back and forth. I think you mentioned the fact there were, if not judges and if not poets, but certainly some people were trolling as plaintiffs. So any of all of these topics there again? Poets can assimilate other poets poems without penalty because there's usually no penalties when the poor steal from the poor. Now if a poet were to assimilate a chorus of a popular song, even if it's a bad chorus, like I'm just a minor for a heart of gold, a bad extended metaphor based on a cliche. That poet would probably find himself or herself in trouble because now that the web is here and that that poet were to publish that work on the web where if somebody were to type up a poem and publish the poem in a blog and the estate of Neil Young were to look for protecting that work, they would be in trouble. And the music industry does look for violations. And I have a point still less than this thing. I must say about this call because you're absolutely right. There is trolling going on all the time. Cease and desist letters are cheap. In fact, there's even an argument that if you're a lawyer working for a copyright owner you ought to write a cease and desist letter that it's a part of your ethical commitment to zealous advocacy to do so. And cease and desist letters are typically a last word, ever word from the copyright owner if the user has the information base, the strength of will and the support network necessary to stand up. Well, the information base is here. The strength of will we have to produce for ourselves. The support network is an employee worker. I could name for you Tim Lawyers who would take that ill young case for granted. They would beat one another off with snakes in order to be able to represent the whole of you described. There is no shortage of support. Both I run a clinic in a law school. There are dozens of these intellectual property and cyber law clinics going around the country. Hungry, hungry for cases to break. There are a lot of equally hungry young lawyers who are looking for ways of making their names and there are plenty of old lawyers who still have some principles and who have time on their hands and wanna do good in the world. So I tell you, you're absolutely right. There will be cease and desist letters. But more than that, I don't know because the last thing that any copyright owner wants to do is to test the dubious claim of rights against a strong fair use defense. Why? Because if they lose, they're in a much, much, much worse position than when they began their case. So it seems that actually, when we were discussing some of these issues earlier, you were commenting on the code and saying that you were concerned that, or as it seemed like there was certainly consensus amongst the writing community on these things. You weren't so sure that this would extend to the publishers? Well, yeah, I was saying that, but that's just my ignorance and I'm just really happy to be sitting next to Peter and hearing these things. Can I speak to that? Because it's such an important point. In the past, efforts have been made to get, to do these sort of wonderful all-party negotiations in which every, you know, land-in-line negotiate over the nature of fair use in a particular field. And they are, without exception, from the 1976 classroom guidelines that I mentioned earlier to the kung fu debacle of recent years, dismal, tragic failures. Why? Because as a practical matter, the rights holders have no impetus, no motivation to negotiate good faith in those situations, period. So we can't now begin to think of the way in which creative practitioners inform themselves as being somehow based on all-party consensus. The Madison insight on the basis of which this document and others like it are premised is that you don't need to have everybody to make what you need is a good balance and cross-sectional representation of the field itself. And that's what's here. So I think that's what's really interesting about what that document does and how we can take these ideas, as we've seen in other panels, where you have maybe a normative framework, an ethical framework that isn't necessarily reflected in the law, is where you can fair use provide the needs to sort of import that framework into copyright form. But since Casey, you brought up Ken Goldsmith, he has a website, uluwad.com, and he will take in copyright but out of print works and throw them up on his website. And he says that the minute he hears that that they're in print and that they're available to people, even if they're in print, he says that they're available at some exorbitant price that somebody with thousands of dollars actually buy one, he'll take it down. So I was wondering if you could comment, and then actually everyone could comment on sort of, how do you feel about how uluwad works? Do they agree with the ethical framework that Goldsmith says he's working on here? Do you think that that's ethical? Do you think it's legal? Do you think it should be either or both? I'll just say something briefly. I can only comment on a sobriety, but I think it's completely up and called. I teach it, I teach with it, I use it, I recommend that people find something that they like, they try to cat-care before it gets taken down. But the kind of work that, especially what he is doing, he is not up there trying to find more readers for Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. He is specifically promoting work that is extremely hard to find otherwise. If it was published in print, it's usually very ephemeral, because out of print quickly, not many copies are hard to find. Some of it is sound poetry that really you need to hear it. And so he has a very specific niche and he is making things available that are just not available otherwise. It was a revolutionized teaching for me when that website went up. It must have been about two years ago we had kind of Goldsmith come as a visiting artist and did a lecture at the Corcoran. And just by happenstance that afternoon, as I was giving him a tour of some of the studios, we came into one of the classrooms. There's a classroom talked by a galaist here in Thailand, Janie McClell, who, and she had a guest that day, an intellectual property lawyer to come in and talk to the students about what is fair and what is not. And here we have kind of Goldsmith in the back of the room. Put his hand, he's a, let's just say, irascible. And it was one of those brilliant moments of genuine educational discourse where his idea came right up against this attorney. The attorney was like, well, we got X, Y, and Z. And Ken was like, well, yes, however, we're all artists here, we are creators. I mean, this is a great book, Adrian John's Piracy, The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. After you finish it, you can use it as a doorstop. This is not a new discourse. This is as old as recorded history. It's ideas of what's fair and what's not. And the writers and the artists that always push back. You can make an argument that writing, as Ken Goldsmith does, it's about 50 years behind. In visual art, Marcel Duchamp and Jérémie. Somehow, for writers, there's this thing that makes it more difficult in writing. He kind of thinks that, and I agree that it's the equivalent of, I think it's Bruce Andrews' quote. It's a great movie. It's on the web called Sucking on Words. Difficult to watch, about an hour long. But it kind of shows Goldsmith's ideas in such a poetry itself. It kind of walks you through some of these different moves. One of his major, kind of most famous projects, probably, was called Day. In Day, what he does, he talks about language as a sculptor, Ken Goldsmith, at risk. He moved into literary practice. So he really thinks of language as material that can be moved and flow into different forms and reframing work. He took the edition, I think it's September 1, 2000, New York Times Metro edition. OCR did it and took up all the informational hierarchies. And so, every word was the same value. The headlines the same as the small print and the classifiers and the last stuff and made a book out of it called Day. So it's nothing, it's a lot of people, the traditional sculptor said, Mr. Goldsmith, that's not a poem. And he'd say, well, yeah, let's go. Let's have this discussion about what poetry is. The actual book is not, he doesn't think that poetry is necessarily there to be read, thought about. So if you get the idea, you don't have to read the 900 page transcription of Day to kind of know what's going on in that poem. And it's pretty revolutionary, really. Again, it's a widening of practice that I think is so helpful. And not thinking that poetry is this one thing that has to fit into a compartment, but a sense of language being alive. There's something really bizarre and kind of pernicious and weird thinking about language being owned by somebody. And I just, in preparation for this panel, I remember I'm a basketball fan and I remember that John Calipari had trademarked the phrase, refuse to lose. And Pat Riley, the word three people. There's a hilarious Wikipedia article about three people. I was actually in this Robert Burns poem and Pat Riley couldn't have been first down. It reminded me a lot of the discussion we had about fashion earlier today. With language, we've been there. We share these 26 little marks in English and about half a dozen marks of punctuation. Those are ours in a way. That's how I go about it. So I don't, again, as I said earlier, thinking about possibility and not limitation for poetry is exciting. I think the digital world has brought all of this new work, this new potentiality to poets. And so again, it's just a really, really exciting time. I met with the poet, Wyn Cooper, last night. And Wyn had the good fortune of writing a poem that was used in a Sheryl Crow song. All I wanna do is have some fun to game the Sheryl Crow song. Wyn has been living off the royalties on that song for 15 years now. And with the free time that that afforded him, he was able to write some sort of books. He was able to organize the Brattleboro Literary Festival. And so the protection of intellectual property, in that case, was hugely, hugely beneficial. So I think that the key to Ken Goldsmith's site is that it's material that is not readily available, whereas Wyn Cooper's poem and song is readily available. And I think the artist should have the benefits of that property. So I wanna encourage anyone in the audience to ask any questions. Could I just say two words about Uhua and Weath? A few more than two, it's wonderful. And you can get lost there. But the two words I wanted to say were Principal Seven, look it up. Because the poets, as we made the Code of Best Practices, had a very, very strong and very affirmative shared view of the status, the appropriate status of the points of reference such as Uhua Weath. By contrast, I should say no one thought that a popular song setting, let alone an advertising use of poetic material, ought to be treated as a transformative theory, as you won't find back in the document anyway. So again, I want to encourage questions, but in the meantime, a couple of times, I think the phrase benign neglect or the idea that nobody cares when the poor sills and the poor has come up. Do you see this changing, not just in terms of the searchability of poems that appear on the web, but also just the availability? I mean, is it a silver lining that there are forms of distribution that aren't small university presses in college now? One of the things I wonder about and thinking about the fees that literary estates charge and that publishing houses charge is what's the proper fee in the age of a web for something that can be distributed globally but has a limited audience as poetry does? You know, if the fee is based on the size of the audience, it should be a very nominal fee, but if the fee is based on the fact that the distribution is potentially global, the fee for that should be astronomical. And I don't know the answer to that question. That's why we have public knowledge and this good man here who can help us figure these things out. I also say one thing in response to your question, and I think it helps a lot. I think that the multiplicity of channels that new technology opens up for the circulation of biology in general and poetry in particular make a big difference in terms of the practicalities of this field, but there are places where that still, where the rhythm of the internet does not run, let us say. And the most important example of that is, of course, publishing, book publishing. Every critic and many poets have had the experience of encountering publishers who are highly risk-averse and who insist, and we've heard these stories in the context of anthologies, but the same stories exist in the context of critical studies of poetic work. We heard again and again the price tags in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars which may attach to the unnecessary clearances which have to be sought, not because the law requires it, but because the publishers require it. So there is really a lot, I agree that the channels in the internet are great, but the structure of poetic culture still regards the book as something important in its own right, and there is work to be done in clearing away some of the impediments to publishing the kind of valuable poetic and critical work that is now being blocked as a result of either over cautious legal interpretation or simply profound misunderstanding of the doctrine of their use. Speaking about profound misunderstanding of fair use, there's a famous case of Paul Ducosti, the literary heir of Louis Ducosti, and of course, no, this story, yeah. I brought the letter, it's right on the top of, it's comedy in some ways, but I guess it's kind of horrifying too. Despite this, this is Paul Ducosti in 2009, despite what you may have been told, you may not use LZ, Louis Ducosti's words as you see fit as if you own them while you hide behind the rubric of fair use. Fair use is a very broadly defined doctrine of which I take a very narrow interpretation and I expect my views to be respected. It goes on to these horrible threats and this kind of mania condensed in this kind of good letter. But a very real kind of chilling effect and he actually has really blocked the support of his father's work. His father's work is now harder to read. A lot of the work is totally out of print and here's Paul Ducosti saying, and he's very upfront like, this is economic. My father did this, he set up the estate for me to make money, tough shit, that's how we're rolling. But at the very end, finally, when all of this fails and you remain held onto quoting Louis Ducosti, but you really, really, really do not want to deal with me or even stupidly advised to try to start to vent me. Remind yourself again and again and yet once more what Mendon Baines Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover. I'd rather have an inside attempt pissing out than outside pissing in. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. A couple lines under that, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So seeing of quoting and something that came up earlier, I'm curious because something in a shape between Peter and Susan, we're talking about the idea that removing the italics and removing the quotes actually does seem to, does, you know, it will more transform the quotation and more build it into something new. At the same time, I think one of the things that came up in the journalism panel was the idea that a lot of times people aren't upset about copyright laws so much as they are upset about credit, how do those two things work together? Yeah, that's a really good question because I couldn't find the book, but I know I've seen more than one book where a poet actually made a similar joke, like you'd look at a book and it'd be like this much calm and then the rest of the footnotes, only the footnotes would sort of be funny and strange and it really became more than half the book. You know, poets can sort of get in the face of the law with this too because we're such control for extending them the way we do attribution becomes part of the gesture of the pro-addicts, sometimes not doing it at all. I tend to do things like if a poem just relies heavily on one or two sources, I will admit that in the back and then otherwise I just have this inculomirate list of what I used and what I relied on and I don't say, you know, on page 32 or in all such and such, I quote it so and so and I've never been quote-routed as a costume. But yeah, the question of attribution comes up and it comes up a lot with teaching, my students have all of these questions and it's very confusing for students because the first thing they learn about these issues is don't plagiarize. So the first thing they have to figure out when they're sampling when they're plagiarizing and we always give them the rule of thumb is if you want people to know it came from somewhere else it's sampling and if you want us to think you wrote it it's plagiarism and then we kind of go from there. And another issue that comes up is whether or not what you are drawing from has been published and this will come up in communities of writers that have low publication rates like students or certain kinds of quite a practice where publication as we normally think of it isn't the norm. And what I always say to them is imagine, you know, Casey wrote a poem and I heard it and I really liked it so as an homage to Casey I had a couple lines that in my poem, but then my poem got published first and his poem comes out and I think yeah, Casey Stull is Lentz and Susan. So there's a lot of that kind of issue that goes on among contemporaries that makes attribution difficult and we try to pose it as a kind of conversation. One of the things that's a conversation among the poets who are quoting each other maybe going back and forth by each other's poems. One of the deepest ironies about Paul Zuckowski's position is that the objective of the poets of whom Zuckowski was the leader, probably the defining person. They had such a sense of community and a sense of cohesiveness and a sense of supporting and sort of kiddling with each other all the time. It just could not be more ironic for one of those poets to be withdrawn by the sun from that kind of conversation. So I think we're running up our time on it so I'd like to ask each of the panelists in turn to close out with a couple of final thoughts and yeah, I'll go first. I'm just really happy to have heard Peter's really strong stance about fair use and what we can do and I can't wait to spread the word. And I'll add that I really appreciate what Susan just said about attribution as a conversation because when you, I hope it's a lamp, read this document. You'll see that there is a conversation about attribution going on throughout the document wound in and out of all of the principles. One might sum it up, the central graphic position by saying the poets felt that attribution was extremely important when it made sense to attribute and that an obligation to attribute which is of course not addressed anywhere in the law as such and it couldn't extend to situations in which attribution would literally undermine the meaning of purpose of the work. But the conversation is here and it's complex when I heard you look at it it's a great phrase as is potential rather than possibility rather than strength about to steal. Good. Permanently. Unfortunately, a lot of students are not as lucky as Susan's students to be introduced to fair use in a classroom like that. A lot of students, especially grad students, are learning about fair use from their librarians right now because the thesis and the dissertation has become a digital document that's going to be published on the web and again there's a kind of chilling effect because universities are very shy about being sued by big corporations. So again, a poet can steal from another poet and it's not going to be flagged by the thesis maybe reconsider the work. Thanks so much for them. As far as last words, I'd just like to encourage people to realize especially those who live in Washington, DC were in the midst of a really vibrant poetry community that deals with these issues and the work that we make and the work that we perform. We're lucky that we have probably, for my money, the best poetry bookshop in maybe North America at Bridge Street Books curated by Rob Smith where they'll find all kinds of stuff that we're talking about. We have a poet coming, Barrett Watten, one of the fathers of language poetry reading this Tuesday and so read more poetry, buy more poetry books. Thank you so much. So I'd like to thank the panel, thank you.