Poetic license  

I like posting poetry, but there are a couple of obvious issues that ought to (but probably won't) be resolved before I'll feel comfortable posting verse wholesale. For one thing, it would seem to be blatantly illegal, and at the expense (literally?) of what I generally consider to be a disadvantaged group. I think of myself as having pretty radical views on copyright, especially when it comes to the creative; but I'm not yet ready to impose those views on others.

Also, there are formatting problems with poetry -- so often poems require spacing at the beginning of lines, which isn't the most convenient thing to arrange. In the case of some simple concrete poems (and I'm a big concrete poetry enthusiast) different fonts, both fixed width and otherwise, are needed -- so there are (important!) choices to be made there. And then there's the whole question of whether to put poems in blockquotes with introductory text and titles, or to take a more poem-as-post approach, which is probably related to the questions above about intellectual property.

(It's interesting, I think, that bloggers take so much care with quotations and credit. The form makes it so easy to steal things, and so easy to blur those lines -- and yet people seem very conscientious about attributing even the smallest of borrowings. Is this because attributing things has positive external effects, as in other bloggers notice when you credit them and it feels good, or does it have more to do with reputational? I guess it's mostly the former.

Does anybody know of any high profile cases of blog plagiarism? The only think I can think of is the whole Agonist flap at the start of the Iraq war, and I'm not sure everyone would even agree that the Agonist was even a blog at the time.

In my experience, there aren't a lot of people playing with this aspect of the medium -- there doesn't seem to be much experimentation with the mechanisms of attribution or the expectation of veracity in blogging. In that sense maybe it's still in a confessional phase? Little known fact: before I first started blogging, I had the idea that I would write a blog that was entirely made up of commentary on nonexistant and/or false news stories, complete with quotes (but no links, I guess). This pomo idea gave way to the much less interesting stuff I actually write, but if you've been with me long enough, you'll remember that the very first title of this blog was counterfactual, and that's where the name came from.)

MORE: The title of this post also happens to be the title of a literary magazine I started with a couple friends in high school, and incredibly I have just discovered that it's still operating there (scroll down... it's right between the Ping Pong Club and Promise to Keep, the CHS chastity police).