Thursday, December 27, 2012

Anarchist12 at Fanstory

Fanstory appears to have another plagiarist, or maybe one has already come and gone. More on the "come and gone" part of that later.

First the evidence. On December 18, 2012, Anarchist12 posted a poem called "winterscape".  Here is the poem with the line breaks omitted (emphasis is mine):
"draped in monochrome as far as spying eye black knives of fir thrust deep into the sky  white snow lapping at roots when the first sun slid through the woods jumping leaping from tree to tree rock to rock like a spreading flame  icy air and fathomless quiet  the landscape surged into magic endless surging spurry-like color"
And here is a passage from "The Secret Agent" by Francine Mathews. Again the emphasis is mine:
"She slipped away from Max...hoping the icy air and fathomless quiet would slap some sense into her skull. The world at this hour was monochrome: black knives of fir thrust deep into the sky, white snow lapping at their roots. When the first sun slid through the woods, jumping from tree to tree like a spreading flame, the landscape surged into color."
The poem makes use of identical phrases from the novel. The relevant passage from the book can be seen here. Screen shots of both the plagiarized poem and the passage are here:





 








But wait. There's more. On December 14, 2012, Anarchist posted a poem called "eating romance". That poem is almost word-for-word the first part of the fourth stanza of the poem "Is It Too Much to Ask", by Matthew Bass, posted at Deep Underground Poetry on June 25, 2012.













But wait. There's more--and this is the "come and gone part". On December 22, 2012, Anarchist12 posted a poem called "christmas nobility". Let's compare the opening lines of Anarchist's poem with opening lines of Tammy Gail Behnke's poem "ink regime", which was the subject of a previous post:
"the evening drops like acid dewupon broken shards of hearts tiny / northern chill stealing comfort warm / eviscerating shivers slicing inside-outside / salivating jack, frosting icy flakes uneatable / woolpack buzzards of swift looming billow" --"christmas nobility"

"the evening drops like acid dew upon broken glass / stealing comfort with its swift eviscerating gust / clouds looming above like salivating buzzards" -- "ink regime"

Pretty similar, huh? The rest of both poems diverge, however, so the similarity ends there. Screenshots of the applicable poems:













So Anarchist12 not only posted a poem that opened similarly to one of Ms. Behnke's, he/she copied a poem from a site Ms. Behnke herself seems to have copied from extensively. Anarchist12 also uses the work "ink" to refer to a poem, an odd affectation that I've only heard Ms. Behnke and her husband on Fanstory. For those reasons, and a couple of others, I suspect--but cannot prove--that Anarchist12 is either Ms. Behnke or her husband.

*****

In summary, then, Anarchist appears to have plagiarized novelist Francine Mathews, poet Matthew Bass, and either Ms. Behnke (if Anarchist12 is *not* Ms. Behnke) or 13 or both.

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