How hard is it to write something no one else has ever written anywhere? It sounds like a bit of a challenge, doesn't it? Am I so original that I can concoct a phrase that no one ever anywhere has rigged up just that way, the words in an order perfectly comprehensible but as yet utterly unattempted? I don't know.
Maybe it's easy. Really easy.
What with the recent noise about the Washington Post hiring a rightwinger to be their "conversative voice" in the blogosphere, a blogger who turned out to be a serial plagiarist, I became curious again about how often we (let's say, I) say the same shit as ever'body else.
So I went to my featured poems page and started grabbing phrases that it seemed unlikely anybody else would say. I would put these phrases into Google in quotes and Google would give me back one page. Mine. For instance:
"its distaste for his wrinkled kidneys"
"a thumb you want to plumb him with"
"the mechanical lung and a bathing cutie"
...
Well then. I could try other phrases, phrases that were sure to have been said by others, phrases I maybe even stole from others.
What about:
"does it matter whether john is walking"
"Go and when you come back let me know."
"even the grass bowed."
...
Hm. It's not until I choose really generic language that I start coming up with other pages.
"The picture of three men"
"many roads cross"
"It's okay, he whispers"
... in all three of these searches I found my own poems easily (only for "many roads cross" did I have to scan past the first page of results).
4/12 Update: Funny. When you click on the links above, this blog entry shows up alongside the original poem. Sometimes the blog outranks the poem.
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