The topic of pla­gia­rism has been in the air of late, at this blog and, in unre­lated ways, else­where: Some poets advo­cate the prac­tice shame­lessly; others wield the term accusato­rily; now and then, others deny their guilt defen­sively. Strained par­al­lelism like that is not the most ele­gant way to begin, I sup­pose, but in any case, the mini-​zeitgeist has got me to think­ing about some­thing, so here goes:

Close to five years ago, now, I sent the fol­low­ing email to the poet Gabriel Gudding:

At 02:05 PM 11/26/2004, you wrote:

>Gabe,
>
>I wrote this last night. It’s too close. So could you give it a read­ing
>for me and tell me what you think?
>
>thank you,
>
>Kent

The poem I attached and asked Gud­ding to read was this one, later to appear online in an issue he edited of MiPoe­sias mag­a­zine.

Mar­i­lynne Robinson’s review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees gets the cover of this week’s Wash­ing­ton Post Book World. The Post also fea­tures a funny inter­view of Dil­lard by Daniel Asa Rose. For more reviews of the novel, click here.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s new novel, is out. An ever-​expanding list of reviews fol­lows. Annie read a pas­sage of the novel for NPR and talked a little about the book (whose orig­i­nal sub­ti­tle was “A Roman­tic Comedy about Light Pollution”) in a Pub­lish­ers Weekly inter­view. She did another inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Daniel Asa Rose. A chap­ter of the book orig­i­nally showed up as “The Two of Them” in the Nov ‘03 Harper’s.

Here’s the list of reviews:

+Wash­ing­ton Post Book World (by Mar­i­lynne Robinson)

+New York Times

+NYT Book Review

+Boston Globe

+LA Times

+SF Chronicle

+Slate

+Book­Page

+Pub­lish­ers Weekly

+New York Observer

+New York Daily News

+Miami Herald

+Seat­tle Times

+Cape Cod Times

+Cleve­land Plain Dealer

+Chicago Tribune

+USA Today

+Hart­ford Courant

+San Diego Union-​Tribune

+Wash­ing­ton Post (where Annie runs neck and neck with Toby Keith)

Buy it from your local inde­pen­dent book­store or sup­port this site by order­ing a copy from Amazon.