Found this over on Sky Gellaty’s blog. It’s an add for Gourmet Footwear, and it got me thinking…
I feel that as an artist — particularly a spoken word-focused poet — a lot of my work is heavily inspired, if not outright stolen from the writers and performers I admire. Often times in performance, I’ll find myself emphasizing an off syllable the way Saul Williams might, or rasping the end of a sentence a la Adam Falkner — both as a means of paying homage to their work and of appropriating the power of those techniques into my own. Taylor Mali once said that there isn’t a poet in the world that hasn’t plagiarized, and that is certainly true when you count stylistic elements (as opposed to raw, verbatim copying of words). The key to remember, however, is that whereas plagiarism is frowned upon in academics, when it comes to art, plagiarism is a tool of progression. Hip-hop, for example wouldn’t exist if artists didn’t copy each other.
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