![]() ![]() One was a poetry collection called blud, by Rachel McKibbens, with some unmistakable language. When she Googled the tattooed phrase she got two noteworthy results. “She told me she was a poet.” O’Toole was no longer employed at B&N, but Conrad was still following her on social media. “We sort of got along as two girls with an interest in feminism and stuff of a literary nature,” she explains. “Turns out I was wrong.”Ĭonrad had become friendly with O’Toole a few years back, when they worked together at a Barnes & Noble in Greensboro, North Carolina. “I thought it was a Richard Siken poem,” says Conrad. El7ThA5bXv- Rachel McKibbens December 1, 2018 It’s a line from “Gun Metal.” When she posted the photograph on Instagram, a former coworker named Kristina Conrad was sure she’d seen it somewhere before. The words “ramshackle girl” are clearly visible on top, with “spitting teeth in the sink” inked in smaller type beneath. “I DID THE THING! I got my own words tattooed on me,” O’Toole proclaimed last week in a now-deleted post, smiling and showing off a new forearm tattoo. Yet what O’Toole did wasn’t just outrageous it’s also deeply weird, from her self-incriminating emails and interviews to the Scooby Doo-esque denouement: She would have gotten away with it - maybe - if not for her own seemingly compulsive need to advertise what she’d done. To steal the words of another poet isn’t just theft, but violation. Poetry is as intimate as it is non-remunerative, a tiny part of the small word of books where writers lay themselves bare and mine the darkest corners of their lives for art. ![]() Within 24 hours, the literary press Rhythm & Bones had canceled her forthcoming book of poems, and the insular world of poetry Twitter had already gone through a cycle of blame, bafflement, and measured defense.Īt the center of the controversy is a void: O’Toole herself, and her unexplained motivations. ![]() O’Toole’s bizarrely brazen act of plagiarism - stealing lines, phrases, and structural elements from the work of at least three other writers - was uncovered last Friday, unraveling her career at the speed of Twitter, the medium by which her fledgling reputation lived and died. That interview reads now like a confession of guilt, as it turns out that “Gun Metal” is very much a collection of reassembled pieces: pieces of other poets. In late September, the young poet Ailey O’Toole told the Rumpus that her Pushcart Prize–nominated poem, “Gun Metal,” was “a great representation of how I started from a place of mental and physical destruction, but eventually collected the pieces of myself and reassembled them into someone new.” Photo: ms_ocoole via Rachel McKibbens/Twitter ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |