When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse

[ed.  My favorite topic these days: copyright - this time as it relates to quoting poetry.  Our copyright laws definitely need an overhaul, but would you trust this Congress, or any other in recent memory, to produce anything forward-looking and fair?  Yeah...me, neither.]

by David Orr

Copyright law is so often a matter of guesswork and loopholes, small print and obscure provisions. One such provision, dating from the ’70s, has recently come to the music industry’s attention. “Termination rights” allow musicians to reclaim the copyrights on their songs after 35 years — meaning songs from albums like Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” may soon be back in the hands of George Clinton and his funkified compatriots. Late last month, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called on Congress to clarify the statute in question in order to protect artists’ rights.

Would that the uncertainties of copyright law in my industry garnered so much attention.

American poetry criticism faces a major problem, one that has nothing to do with poetry, or readers, or anything remotely literary. The problem is that a critic who wants to quote a poem in a book has to face a permissions regime that ranges from unpredictable to plain crazy, as I discovered while working on a guidebook to modern poetry for general readers. The permissions took months to compile, and the initial estimate was nearly $20,000.

The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?

If you ask publishers, the answer varies — a lot. Some think a quarter of a short poem is appropriate, some think almost an entire poem can be acceptable in the right circumstances, and many others believe you should quote only three or four lines. If you want to play it safe — and that’s what your own publisher will most likely prefer — then you’ll find yourself adhering to the three- or four-line standard.

But that standard doesn’t make much sense. Poems, like excuses, come in all shapes and sizes. They range from single lines to book length. And individual lines range from one word to whatever will fit on the page. Consequently, three or four lines can be 3 words or 70. And what about poems that aren’t lineated at all? Or visual poems? George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is famously shaped like a pair of wings — if Herbert were alive today, could we quote a feather?

Nor does it help to say that the standard should be, say, 5 percent of a given poem. Here’s the entirety of Monica Youn’s poem “Ending”:

Freshwater stunned the beaches.

I could sleep.

What’s 5 percent of that? “Fr”?

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