Diary of a Mad Editor

On the evening of March 17th, I was contacted by Valerie Stevenson, the editor of nth position, informing me that a poem I’d published in the recent issue of the 13th Warrior Review had been plagiarized. My intial reaction was disbelief. I didn’t like the idea of being hoodwinked. I take pride in the fact that I do a pretty thorough job of checking out the material before accepting it. As such, I was initially skeptical.

I spent the next twenty-four hours investigating the matter and discovered that not only had Amari Hamadene, the poet in question, purloined the poem I published, but at least two dozen others.

The plagiarism was originally uncovered by A.T. van ‘t Hof of Poeziepamflet, who came across Hamadene’s plagiarism while working on a translation of Irish poet, Robin Tierney. Word spread quickly after that. My own investigation has left me with as many questions as answers. In recent days the “real” Amari Hamadene has come forth to deny his part in the plagiarism, claiming, instead, that an English-speaking imposter must have stolen his identity. Yet, I noticed that an email by the “real” Hamadene posted by R.D. Armstrong of Lummox Press fame, was an awful lot like an email the “fake” Hamadene had sent me at the time I accepted his poetry. The syntax and certain phrases were, in fact, identical. Even the sign-off was the same.

It’s difficult to say what the ultimate truth is in this matter. Whether Hamadene is a plagiarist or whether someone pretending to be Hamadene is a plagiarist. Or, a more sinister possibility — that there is no Hamadene, that this is all part of some larger bit of intrigue and skullduggery.

What I can tell you is that the following poems have been verified as being plagiarized:

‘An Instant of Love’ is ‘The Wineglass’ by Maurice Riordan.

‘Apheresis’ is ‘Time’ by Alice Oswald.

‘Apocalypse’ is ‘Hollow Ones’ by Su’Ratt.

‘As A Lover’ is ‘A Farewell To Friends / I. Paul Celan’ by Ilya Kaminsky.

‘Books’ is ‘Hidden Door’ by Jared Carter.

‘Cloning’ is ‘Gene Genie’ by Emily Hinshelwood.

‘Humanity’ is ‘Tuatara’ by Nola Borrell.

‘Middle-Age’ is ‘Protect and Survive’ by Michael Symmonds Roberts.

‘Mythological Decisions’ is ‘A Simple Tale’ by Stephen Oliver.

‘Paris Follie’s’ is ‘24, rue de Cotte’ by Nessa O’Mahony.

‘Prehistoric Presence’ is ‘Becoming’ by Roisin Tierney.

‘Reporters’ is ‘Depth of Field’ by Stephanie de Montalk.

‘Revolutionary Women’ is ‘Movie – part 7′ by Alan Brunton.

‘Sylvan Exoticism’ is ‘The orientalist’ by Ranjit Hoskote.

‘Taboo Frontlines’ (from line 9 downwards) is ‘A Siberian Cold Front Takes Over the Last Week of April’ by Pamela Uschuk.

‘The Big Burst’ is ‘Alchemy’ by Jules Webster.

‘The Dark Angel’ is ‘The boredom Artist’ by Jeet Thayil.

‘The Freedom Song’ is ‘London Pastoral’ by Tobias Hill.

‘The Golden Cupolas’ is ‘Dome’ by Ranjit Hoskote.

‘The Hanging Gardens’ is ‘The Locust’s Vocabularies. A Sequence. 2. To Yasin Taha Hafiz’ by Robert Bohm.

‘The Logic’ is ‘Not Art’ by Kate Clanchy.

‘The Plastic Eden’ is ‘Afternoon Nap’ by David Shumate.

‘Today’ is ‘This Morning’ by Sarah James.

‘Yellow Sparrowhawk’ is ‘Golden orioles’ by Ranjit Hoskote.

It is difficult enough to convince many writers that the Internet is a safe place to publish. This scandal plays into that feeling of insecurity and makes things harder on those of us who publish online. It doesn’t matter that this scandal has also affected several print publishers or that this mess was brought to light because of the interconnectedness of the Internet. People will only consider that for a time Hamadene got away with it.

I don’t know which I find more shocking — that the plagiarism occured in the first place, or that despite ample proof that a plagiarism has occured and despite an organized effort to inform the duped publishers, Hamadene’s offerings are still included on a number of websites and there are people willing to sweep the whole matter under the rug or even defend the crime. There was a time when we would have formed a posse and escorted this guy out of town at the point of a shotgun! Ah, but how times have changed.