Well, it’s the week of reviews getting published for me! My review of Rebecca Loudon’s chapbook with No Tell Books, Navigate, is up at Galatea Ressurects:
http://galatearesurrection5.blogspot.com/2007/02/navigate-amelia-earharts-letters-home.html

A very interesting article in Harper’s about our current society’s hysterical preoccupation with “plagiarism” and copyright:
http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
The author, a novelist, brings up quite a few good points. Today, TS Eliot, Shakespeare, and Nobokov would be shamed and bullied by professors and publishers into eliminating their quotes, allusions, and borrowing, ultimately creating lesser works of art because of the anxiety towards contamination!
This really honks me off. The way you see the world is unique, although you may be contaminated by the same art, culture. Why not include your entire world, contaminated and all that it is?
Coca-cola and Tide are ubiquitous, so we must pretend they do not exist! Pop culture references keep your work from being timeless – or make it frivolous! I’ve heard these arguments so many times, and I believe they are all BS.

Update: Justin Evans makes a good point in the comment box – of course I don’t mean to discount problems with actual plagiarism as practived by students who copy whole encyclopedia entries into thier papers without references – I was referring to a hysteria around creative allusions and enframing and collage and other tecniques that have been around since before Modernism.