PN Review 274: Editorial

by Michael Schmidt

Editorial

AI developers have perpetrated an immense piracy on writers of all shapes and sizes, and indeed on digitally archived magazines and journals. They feed the words into text digestion- and regurgitation-programmes so that students and larger pirates (including front-bench politicians) can present us with by-products of our work.

The issue of ‘copyright clearance’ may seem to pale into insignificance beside such technological voracity. But for the author, critic, anthologist, journalist, it is a disagreeable, time-consuming task and it can be very expensive. In her book Also a Poet, centring on her and her father’s relations with the life of Frank O’Hara, Ada Calhoun quotes six lines from Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, published in 1940. She would have preferred to quote the whole poem, as her father had, but

for permission to share these six lines I had to sign two contracts and pay $285.37. So for the rest, please look up the poem free on the Internet and imagine it being read in the top-floor kitchen of an East Village brownstone by a very thin man with a scraggly beard while his middle-aged daughter, looking tired, her hair in a ponytail, leans against the counter and listens.

Maybe we should be grateful because the licensing process did elicit a vivid and wry paragraph from the author, and the fact of the magnitude of the fee will surprise and alert some readers. As William Carlos Williams’s UK publisher, I always contend that ‘So much depends / upon’ is less about a red wheelbarrow, more about the importance of copyright fees in the ecology of poetry publishing.

Clearance is required for re-use – in books, anthologies, articles for this journal, even memorial addresses – of material copyrighted and printed, though much of it exists gratis (by mistake or by deliberate piracy) online. Copyright does expire and work eventually enters the public domain, but its quotation always carries a whiff of danger: has the passage quoted been re-edited, so that copyright is restored for an additional period, as with the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Charlotte Mew? Was it published posthumously, so that copyright starts with the date of first publication? Caveat scriptor. Some authors and their agencies and estates patrol the wynds and snickets of contemporary writing armed and ready to strike.

Another kind of authority, exercised less for pelf and more for narrative control, resides with estates who see it as their duty to police the posthumous reputation of the writers whose executors they are. Readers can be entirely unaware of how much is withheld, and why. Again, copyright will expire and eventually the beans will all be spilled (if an appetite for those beans, and the typescripts, survive). The censorship of a literary legacy can affect the reception of the writer’s work. Issues of politics, sexuality and other elements can be kept under wraps. Many a literary scholar comes up against such barriers. Some may know the truth but are not permitted to disclose it. The whole truth can be more telling, more to the author’s credit, than the protection of well-meaning guardians. Relatively minor indiscretions can blur and erase a writer’s large discretions. Even if their statues are not tumbled into Bristol Harbour, their works can be removed to storerooms, their books withdrawn from circulation in bookshops and libraries…

Other more personal, small-scale acts of censorship blur the record. When Philip Larkin’s letters were being edited, I was approached for permission to print a few disobliging things he had said in letters about Carcanet and about me. I agreed: it was part of the record and I respect archival completeness, though I was sad that this man, courteous and wry in person, was far from courteous in private correspondence. A close friend of the poet was approached at the same time for permission to quote. He refused: the passages about him did not appear. There was no indication of what or who had been omitted from the final volume.

Subscribe to PN Review magazine here.