Andrew Motion rubbishes plagiarism charge Military historian claiming that 'found' poem published in the Guardian makes unfair use of his work has 'got the wrong end of the stick', says former poet laureate
by Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 November 2009

The military historian who accused Andrew Motion of plagiarism has "got the wrong end of the stick", the former poet laureate said today.Author pic by David Levene.

Ben Shephard said that Motion's poem An Equal Voice, a stitching together of the voices of several generations of shellshocked soldiers which was published in the Guardian on Saturday, draws heavily from his history of medical psychiatry A War of Nerves. "Of the 152 lines in An Equal Voice, all but 16 are taken directly from A War of Nerves. Only in two places has Motion quoted my own words: in all the other cases, they are those of soldiers and doctors," Shephard wrote in a letter to the Guardian yesterday. "So, in terms of copyright, he's clean as a whistle. Morally, it's another story. Motion has added nothing new or original to this subject. There is a word for this. It begins with 'p' and it isn't 'poetry'."

But Motion said his poem drew on "a long and honourable tradition" of "found" poetry, pointing to TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Ruth Padel's poetic biography of Charles Darwin and Anthony Thwaite's Victorian Voices. "It goes right back to Shakespeare," he said. "It's very well established."

His intention in using soldiers' voices to tell the story was "to keep it as much with the soldiers as possible, rather than interposing my body", he said. "I have always felt that with the best will in the world, writers writing poetry about war with no experience of fighting themselves do run the almost inevitable risk of grandstanding. I thought this was one way to get around this – to give voice to the people who were there. Where the artist comes in is around selecting or arranging," he said. "Here, it's in a series of sonnets. Ben Shephard can say what he likes about his book, but it's not a series of sonnets."

The historian's comments, Motion believes, "sit oddly with what I thought to be the impetus of his book, which was to give a voice to sufferers, so to then get possessive ... That's what jars with me."
"I wanted it not to be about me – it's their poem ... Quite a lot of my annoyance is precisely to do with the distortion of that," he added. "The reason I feel so robust about this is that if I felt I had done anything at all underhand, I would be sitting here with a hot conscience, but that's absolutely not the case. I was absolutely clear about what was involved in the process. I'm very sorry he doesn't like it, but as far as I'm concerned I feel OK about it."

Motion pointed out that he credits Shephard's book in his introduction to the poem, and includes an extract from it in his epigraph. "It's not for me to say if it's good publicity [for A War of Nerves]," he said. "It's been out for eight years and it's a good book. I hope my mention will give it a new audience."

Motion is currently in the middle of negotiations with the Ministry of Defence about a project to talk to soldiers about their experiences of war. He then intends to turn their stories into poems for his next collection. "I've written about 25 or 30 pages, with one or two entirely by me, about my father who fought in the second world war and my grandfather who fought in the first world war," he said. "The subject has always interested me very much. The thing which is the most depressing of all, apart from the individual stories of suffering, is that nothing changes. The reasons for killing each other become more terrible, but the human feelings in it all are the same."
Shephard's publisher Cape said he was too busy working on his new book to comment further.