A message came from a reader this past week. M. wrote:
I think there may be a future post that you could do about how to deal with writers who plagiarize -- do you permanently blacklist them? do you make them jump through extra hoops? do they get put in "time out"?
A very interesting subject. No one likes or supports plagiarism. But what frameworks are in place for lit mag editors and writers to handle it?
M’s message came on the heels of an editor sharing news about a writer who had been plagiarizing work.
On Bluesky, the Editor of Nightmare Magazine and Lightspeed posted:
Apparently, this person has published plagiarized work in many venues:
From the Editor of Bending Genres:
From the Editor of Friends Journal:
From Utopia SF Magazine:
From ONE ART:
From The Hudson Review (regarding other magazines):
From fellow poets:
From the writers whose work was stolen:
And finally, some advice from the Editors of Identity Theory:
All this led me to wonder: How do lit mags check for plagiarism? And when/under what conditions should they?
Should editors really google a few lines of every work they wish to accept before publication, just in case?
Or should they generally trust contributors, leaving it up to readers to spot stolen work?
Also:
Do editors have clear parameters in place regarding what constitutes plagiarism versus what is fair use? Have they had these conversations internally? Should they?
And going back to M.’s questions, what sort of penalty is sufficient for someone who has plagiarized work?
If a writer has been caught plagiarizing, should they be banned from ever publishing anything again?
What if the writer makes a public statement, apologizes to the writers whose work was stolen, apologizes to the journals the writer deceived, and then commits to writing original work going forward? Can they continue publishing new work?
In schools and colleges, there are obviously clear rules as to how plagiarism will be dealt with. Not so in the world of lit mags, where each editor may approach the situation differently.
This guy is like the Typhoid Harry of plagiarism. Definitely should be quarantined from all ports of lit mag entry on a permanent basis. I saw bits of the emerging story this week; thanks, Becky for gathering all the pieces (although there's probably even more out there, he's "prolific" in his craft as well as shameless).
While it's great he's been outed, I wish people would be as quick to actually name lit mags that indulge in suspect behavior. It seems even when writers are wronged repeatedly, they don't name the abusers most times, perhaps worried about some possible blacklisting by more legitimate publications.
In all academic fields I know of (science) a plagiarist would be banned from submitting future work. I don't know why it should be any different in the literary world. The sole reasonable exception would be someone less than 25 (when the brain is fully formed) who plagiarizes, and in that case I would support banning them for a decade. I think history shows that these folks don't stop even after they're caught and there are plenty of overworked editors who don't have the time to check every submission's legitimacy.
When I recruited science grad students, I'd google any line from their personal statement that was unique, and I found plagiarism from all sorts of places. And since you can purchase personal statements, those sites/samples got pinged a lot. A subset of people just don't want to do the work.
Exactly. The first time I truly realized in 1999 was when one personal statement started with the guy talking about the tenacity needed to run a 5k race. Fine, a way to showcase your skills outside science. Few days later the exact same start to another person's statement, for several sentences. Sad thing is, both probably would have been accepted because their transcripts were very good. But nope.
I'd appreciate it if someone would enlighten me as to why a writer would plagiarize poems. Kucera makes/made this a habit. With poetry, most of the reward is in doing the writing. There's very little money in it and few poets become famous. I don't get why anyone would delight in seeing a poem accepted and published when it was actually created by someone else. Clues, anyone?
Here's my incredibly well thought-through theory. John Kucera is a pseudonym for someone who consistently has had their work rejected and, in fine dog-in-the-manger style, is plagiarising to mess things up spitefully AND/OR it's someone doing this to make a point about editors being inattentive or incompetent and it's a game to see how many acceptances he can rack up before getting caught.
One of the pieces he submitted to me was a collection of five poems. Of the five, two were entirely plagiarised from other poets, and two I can find previously published by him in what appear to be defunct, possibly vanity, journals. I suspect he's trying to intersperse his own "work" with that of more established writers, or those deemed good enough for publication, in the interest of making suckers of us all, showing us it's all bullshit, or just building a portfolio off of established writing to jumpstart his own "career." But I kind of wish it were some underground investigation disclosing what shoddy half-baked operations we're all running — I WOULD READ THAT.
In some respects, I think we're lucky to be targeted by such trolling. Someone's paying attention to the work we're doing!
It’s a helluva backhanded compliment to a writer but it does seem to be a plausible explanation. Unfortunately there are victims such as journals that paid for the work, illustrators whose commissioned work had to be pulled, writers whose work might otherwise have been published, and the editors whose reputations are unfairly tarnished.
Oh, definitely. When I saw his submissions in our queue, it took me maybe 2 minutes to google around and identify the real authors, a few more minutes to track down contact information for those authors to let them know. But I had never thought of doing that before — never thought that what we're doing is worth thievery. This experience is a wake-up call for all of us, I think.
And of course I felt incredibly lucky that his work was kicking around in our submittable box, and hadn't yet made it past editors and into our publications. I do think, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the page, that those who have paid him money have a more direct route to action, and hope some of them will pursue that. I'm happy to help navigate that in whatever way.
When I was a marketing consultant I encountered clients who invented grandiose versions of their work experience. For instance, one woman claimed she had owned "the largest cleaning company in Rhode Island" when I believe it was just her and her daughter cleaning houses. Another glorified her work reading submissions in the slush pile for a Hollywood film producer as "an executive in script development." It is just a short leap from that type of near-lying (which is common) to plagiarism.
I saw egregious examples like this on a resume once. One thing that was weird is that in the internet age, it's very easy to check up on these grandiose statements. No, your play is not running on NPR. But at least fabricating stuff on a resume makes some kind of sense in that it seems like a means to an end. I still don't understand publishing plagiarized poems in a whole bunch of litmags, but maybe if you're trying to build a CV that shows you're a widely published writer?
It could be just laziness and a lack of ethics, and a desire to build up a bio. Someone who got through school by cheating in some form wouldn't stop taking shortcuts as an adult.
Years ago a subscriber to my newsletter alerted me to someone who had sent out an issue of mine to her own subscribers without credit to me. When I researched the culprit, I learned that she was a subcontractor for a company that I also did business with. I alerted that business, and they gave the violator a dress-down and said they'd never work with her again.
In that case, I think the plagiarizer didn't think she'd get caught, since neither she nor I archived our newsletter on the Web.
This is interesting — if they're paying, they probably can find out within reason who he is. The address and phone number he included in his submissions to me (both a short story and poetry) are bogus.
There's the validation aspect of acceptance and getting published, which ethical and legitimate writers share, as well as the possible advantage of publication credits. Tobias Wolff's novel Old School also interestingly suggests that plagiarism and imitation can arise out of close identification or admiration with or for someone else's work, or a desire to revise or reinterpret much in the way that jazz musicians cover other people's music.
I agree that admiration might be at work here—a manifestation of Oscar Wilde’s “imitation is the highest form of flattery”. Maybe another aspect of the plagiarist’s motivation is a trickster-type glee in fooling people. The plagiarist isn’t going to gain much money, so the acceptances might be experienced as another form of winning, a power play. Whatever the motivation, I believe that they should be banned--permanently.
Hmm. I don't know how validating it would be to get accepted and published when you'd plagiarized. I guess it works for him. But I get what you say about close identification or admiration of someone else's work. Thanks.
You make a fair point and I can't disagree. And, yes, the number of plagiarisms suggest something pathological. But I also now wonder if desperation to get something published or extreme anger and resentment at rejection were factors in this guy's thinking or lack of thinking.
Marjorie, maybe he's "monetizing" his villainy another way (via a Tik-Tok channel? via a podcast? via seminars?) by mocking the standards of unpaid volunteer slush readers out there.
There is a bestselling Instagram "male poet" out there whose atrocious BDSM erotic verse collections pull in big sales. I have long suspected "he" does not exist & this nonsense is being scripted by the [ahem] "girlfriend" named on his dedication pages.
Thanks very much for your response, LindaAnn. I have to admit that what you’re describing is beyond my comprehension. Can’t say I’m entirely sorry for that. What a world.
I keep having the nagging thought that I've encountered/known this person, and that the name familiarity isn't just that it's also the name of a famous ski racer. I'm pretty darn sure I've run into him on the PNW SFF convention circuit. Maybe not, but....
In any case, my understanding is that the creator of Moksha, the submission management software used by a lot of SFF mags, has blocked this person from being able to use it. There are apparently further methods to use that particular SMS for enforcing a block on someone. I'm pretty sure that Neil Clarke has configured the Clarkesworld Management Software (another one popular in SFF) to do much the same--he's apparently set it up to reject AI submissions that it detects. Who knows about Submittable...but if Moksha can do it, Submittable should be able to as well.
That is one means of enforcing blocks on plagarists. At this point, I am not wildly sympathetic with plagarists and figure they should be blocked from publishing under that name.
Submittable is not a cheap service for small publishers, and should be able to remove his account and everything attached to it, send an automated email to any publishers to which he's submitted to review him, etc. That's not complicated code.
If they really wanted to up their game and be a service worth paying for, they'd run submitted pieces through a plagiarism checker and flag anything that didn't pass.
One thing you can do with Submittable is mark the submission as "completed," instead of declined. That precludes the submitter from submitting again. Of course that only applies to the email used, so if this plagiarist catches on he may simply create a new synonym and email to submit with.
Hi— In my experience, marking a submission “completed” does not prevent the submitter from submitting again. We use this status for folks who register for our workshops and many writers have registered repeatedly for workshops over time. I do wish Submittable had a way for us to block submitters like this. (I did a quick search, and this guy has also submitted to my magazine.)
Two of my submissions were marked as "Completed" by Panoplyzine and Dipity Lit Mag; in both cases these poems were accepted.
In each case, I subsequently submitted to a FUTURE issue of Panoply & Dipity, therefore, I was not blocked from submitting again.
This Submittable status issue sounds very confusing.
And I also felt "cheated" out of my prized green "ACCEPTED" badge - - - since I try to delete everything else . . . . . . not wishing to step in foul water twice.
The problem with using the limit multiple submissions is that submitters whose work has been accepted cannot submit again either. It would be great if Submittable developed a true way to block nuisance submitters.
Hi. Please see my previous comment on my poems being accepted by Panoplyzine and Dipity Lit, being marked as "completed" - - and in both cases I was able to submit again to future issues of theirs.
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yes I agree with you. It would not be a useful setting for us because we do accept work from folks whose work we have previously published.
While it's a very good thing that this plagiarist has been outed, I am fascinated by his finetuned sense of what editors want. In other words, he seems to know precisely which works to plagiarize. How many of us could say, "This poem will be picked up by at least two or three other magazines"? He should teach a workshop on submissions--except that he'd probably rather plagiarize someone else's workshop on submissions. Sigh. More seriously, plagiarizing whole works is reasonably easy to check, assuming these are online publications, not print-only publications. (I hesitate to post this, as the eager plagiarist will now know to comb through print mags for his next prey.) While I hate to burden editors with additional responsibilities, yeah, they should at least do a search.
Who is this dude? It would be interesting to try to track down him down ... to uncover him ...
According to the biography of this "John Kucera (John Siepkes)," he "was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania." and presently lives in Phoenix. He does apparently have a linkedIn profile as a " Book Author -- freelance editor/writer" and lists an author's website which my antivirus flagged as a possibly untrustworthy site (johnkucerabooksblog@wordpress.com).
With a search of "John Siepkes," the first listing is an eviction case in Maricopa County from June 2023. (Sorry to hear that dude -- noone should be thrown out of their home ...). There are other court cases kisted on other sites (cause of case unclear). He also has a pinterest account under this name -- and other publications.
In a complaint John Sipkes lodged on the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce site, he wrote: "As someone who has worked his entire life and who also has a Master's Degree and who has been employed by a school district for the past twelve years, it troubles me when an employee of a store assumes I am stealing, ..." (https://www.chamberofcommerce.com/united-states/arizona/phoenix/convenience-store/2002168892-circle-k) So -- if John Siepkes is working in the public schools ...
(Of note: Wild Word, Lothlorien and other journals have totally removed his work that a google search lists ...)
I very much agree with the advice from Identity Theory. Though, I'll suggest if one has worked with a writer a number of times, then vetting their work is likely not as necessary. But, if it's someone a publisher has never worked with, then it's indeed a good idea to throw a few lines in to Google to *try* and ensure 1) the work isn't previously published and 2) is original. And I italicize "try" because it's not a foolproof method, most especially as regards detecting plagiarism.
Back when I was editing the boutique and the laboratories, I'd vet the work of writers I was largely unfamiliar with before acceptance and *also* before posting. Reason being, I ran a backlog. Herein, I found a few poets used that window of time between acceptance and publication as an opportunity to place the work elsewhere, despite a clear statement in my guidelines regarding First Serial rights. And, while I never had to deal with a plagiarist, I did have to deal with a half dozen or so poets flouting my guidelines, one of whom was placing the same pieces in multiple journals, many of which--like myself--either explicitly sought First Serial rights or clearly stated they didn't publish reprints.
Kucera, it's worth noting, wasn't just plagiarizing work, but also placing the pieces in multiple journals. Which makes me think, if someone is flouting a journal's guidelines regarding rights, then it could *potentially* be symptomatic of other, more problematic issues regarding how they're conducting themselves in the lit scene. For, when publishers wish to provide their audience with not just original, but new, previously unread work, writers who habitually flout rights like Kucera are treating the publisher as a means to an end in terms of self-promotion. In so doing, they not only breach publisher's trust, but also disregard the publisher's audience by providing them "reruns" of work they may have already read elsewhere. Moreover, it slights publishers when it comes to having their journals credited on the acknowledgment page of any future collection where they lose out on the free promotion that such acknowledgments provide. None of this is considered by individuals such as Kucera, and it's that lack of consideration that should set of some alarm bells with publishers, I believe.
All that in mind, had such vetting been more the standard, then Kucera would have likely been outed far sooner, wherein fewer writers would have had their plagiarized works published under his name . . . in multiple journals! I personally found the Bruce Bond piece he lifted an especially easy catch, given he did little else to the poem but retitle it. When I Googled lines from that piece it came right up as being published in The Hudson Review under Bond's name. And that plagiarized version appeared in at least four different journals (i.e. OneArt, Literary Yard, Sparks of Calliope, and Ghost Writer Inside). This suggests that that there may be a larger systemic issue (or issues) that Kucera inadvertently exposed through his self-serving behavior.
As to whether publishers need to wrestle with plagiarism vs. fair use, I think if a publisher finds themselves wrestling with those two concepts, then it's probably best to decline the work. For, fair use is an extremely arcane area of the law, and unless publishers (or one of their journal staff) have a legal background, they'd probably do best to not try to delineate between whether a suspect work fails the plagiarism test but manages to pass legal muster as fair use. Plagiarism is a violation of professional standards, not legal ones, and it's the former--in my mind at least--that publishers should endeavor to uphold first and foremost. And I sense all these many incidents with Kucera illustrate why such standards need to be treated more seriously.
It was bound to happen eventually… January 17, 2024 ~ Randal A. Burd, Jr.
Dear Reader,
As a literary journal, there is often more risk than reward, but as a labor of love we carry on. The more cynical among us might even agree that misfortune strikes eventually should you travel any road long enough. As an editor, you really want pick the diamonds in the rough, and while you try to vet every submission you receive maticulously, you tell yourself that you can’t possibly catch everything. So, while I have tried to do right by you and will continue to do so, it seems that on one occasion I failed. You see… there is a plagiarist among us.
On September 22, 2023, I published two poems entitled “Harbor” and “Dislocated” allegedly written by a Mr. John Kucera (aka John Siepkes). And while they say imitation is the best form of flattery, these poems were copied with only a couple word changes from poems published in The Hudson Review entitled “Neilah; Creature” by Bruce Bond and in Claw and Blossom entitled “The Q & A Section” by Dorsía Smith Silva. This is intellectual property theft on the part of Mr. Kucera. I am profoundly sorry for the editorial oversight and hope Mr. Kucera is appropriately ashamed of himself.
I am replacing Mr. John Kucera’s plagarized work with links to the original poems and removing Mr. Kucera from our list of contributors. I commend Mr. Bond and Professor Silva on the quality of their poems and extend my apology to them as well.
I am grateful to the editor of another literary journal who also inadvertantly published a plagarized poem submitted by Mr. Kucera and was kind enough to bring this matter to my attention. . . . < continued here > . . . . . . . . SOURCE: Published by the EIC of Sparks of Calliope: - https://sparksofcalliope.com/2024/01/17/it-was-bound-to-happen-eventually/
Karen Rile mentioned the possibility that some mental ailment is at the root of this. I agree. Especially nowadays with so many techno ways to check and compare. And double especially with this guy's apparent serial addiction to it. He must know it was a matter of time. I can't imagine doing all this and just waiting to get exposed. Sleepless nights! Has the guy made any statement? Has it been established that it is indeed a guy? By the way, is it a crime? "What are you in for, Kucera?" "Plagiarizing poetry."
Yes! Kucera could try that. "I unknowingly did it fifteen times." It's inconceivable to me that he thought he could get away with it. And if he got caught this many times, i wonder how many times he didn't, or hasn't yet. It's got to be traumatizing to the victims. Not a line or a paragraph, but the whole poem stolen. Sympathy to them. It's like stealing a piece of somebody's heart and claiming it as your own.
Wow. Thanks for that. Whole thing is astonishing to me. That tattoo takes the cake. Kat Rosenfield from Vulture:
"What would compel someone — even a young, naïve, evidently troubled poet — not just to commit a blatant act of plagiarism, but to tattoo someone else’s poetry on her skin and try to pass it off as her own, on the internet of all places, rendering her humiliating exposure and downfall all but inevitable? Did she secretly yearn to be caught? Did she genuinely believe nobody would notice?"
Oh, no problem. I wanted it included somewhere in this weekend convo. to remind folks that serial plagiarists like Kucera are not unprecedented. There have certainly been others, though he and O'Toole are the worst I've seen in the online poetry scene.
As to Rosenfield's questions, I sense it was the latter; O'Toole thought she wasn't going to get caught. But, who knows, really.
I will say, of the many things I found interesting about her was the actual labor she put into some of her plagiarized pieces. The title piece of the collection that was ultimately cancelled, "Gun Metal," was a kind of mosaic plagiarism (as I've seen the practice called in academia), where she combined lines and passages from at least three different poets' work. That there was a level of creativity and a mingling of her own imagination with said work *may* have led her to deceive herself into thinking that poem and others were "hers." Hence, the tattoo, the interview where she spoke of "Gun Metal" as most representative of her work, etc.
Kucera (a.k.a. John Siepkes), on the other hand, appears to have been under no such delusions, since he was simply lifting whole works or oh so slightly tweaking them. Given the financial arears he appears to be in with unpaid rent and court fees (https://unicourt.com/search?q=john%20siepkes&ct-gr=10&ju-cs=25&ju-ch=157&ju-l2j=3&a=all&init_S=c_srch) I'm thinking about exploring how many of the journals he placed the plagiarized pieces in were paying markets. Likewise, those journals he submitted work to but was rejected. This might explain (at least some of) his motive.
Thanks again for the info. Allow me to ramble, Johnny... I think i'm most fascinated by the psyche of the plagiarist. Especially of poetry, which doesn't promise much recompense. What sort of career is it that is increasingly endangered the more you become published and known? Is it the the thrill of simply getting away with it, being the only one who knows what's happening, as long as it lasts? There must be some block they have wrt the future. The kick of the moment, sending off stolen goods as your own to find more eyes and scrutiny and heighten the risk of exposure and shame. Like secret exhibitionism. Has there been any serious study of the mind of a plagiarist? There must be some moral poverty as well--a friend asks her to read/critique their book of poetry, and she steals one of the poems! It's such lousy behavior you have to laugh, or gasp. The buzz of getting away with the thievery and deception must blind the plagiarist to the nastiness of the act. And if this Siepkis guy is truly after money, stealing poems seems an unlikely pathway. There has to also be some serious lack of self-valuing going on too. They want to be an artist but have no faith in themself & their own creativity? Another sign that something's missing---when they get caught their alibis and amends never ring true, never show heart. The one woman thinks to sue the one who caught her and notified editors?! One more thing---what is with the spelling of plagiarism? They couldn't decide if it should be i or a there so they compromised and kept both?
Interesting. When I Googled Kucera, I discovered he's had two of "his" poems published in a lit mag for which I was once one of the poetry editors. The current editor says he was especially aggressive about getting payment. Seems to me that paying markets would be able to file criminal charges; they've clearly been defrauded. And literary plagiarism is obviously different from the kind of academic plagiarism that's made recent headlines, which is mostly just sloppy citations, not outright theft like Kucera's.
Someone like this should absolutely be banned from all litmags forever, but since he clearly has no shame, I wouldn't be surprised if he just started publishing other people's work under a different name.
Publishing someone else's poem under your own name is obviously terrible, and I'd prefer to see those people banned, but this also makes me wonder about cases that would be harder to detect. What if someone just lifts a line or two? And what if the editor, trying to be as diligent as humanly possible, has checked a different line? Maybe this is where AI comes in. But then what if the poet considers it a famous-enough line that anyone will recognize the source and why it's used that way and is wrong about that? (I once saw a letter to the editor railing at an illustrator for plagiarizing the Wyeth painting "Chrstina's World" when it seemed obvious to me that he expected everyone to recognize he'd based his illustration on that very famous painting - which is what he said in his response to the letter.)
This Kucera is so rampant, it’s feels almost like a bot or some sort of AI spam/crawl/compromise of the submission process, if that’s even possible? Wondering also about the timeline of the pieces accepted/published - close proximity or over a span of time? Good data to gather.
Ha-ha-ha-ha to the "pro tip" of Googling the first line of a work.
Each year, SFPA asks poet-members to submit a list of published SFF poems that might be eligible for the Rhysling Award. During the past 3 years, something has changed with Google - - because I can no longer be sure of finding my own published work via Googling my first line. :-O
"John Kucera" even tricked The Hudson Review with a rip-off? Impressive.
Kucera didn't trick The Hudson Review. That's where one of the many poems he ripped off was derived from, and then published in four different journals. Here's the original poem, by Bruce Bond: https://hudsonreview.com/2022/10/neilah-creature/
The "pro-trip" from Identity Theory read: "Always google at least one sentence or phrase from submitted pieces before accepting." That noted, you're right to point out it's far from a foolproof method of detecting plagiarism, though it works well for previously published work being passed off as previously unpublished.
Using that method with Kucera should have at least raised some red flags. I inserted the following into a search:
"Rain falls into a chronicle we call rain,
and what abstracted politician can tell
the water from the word, the arrival
of spring from the crackle of erasure."
And, lo and behold, this brought up the original piece first, followed by three of the four instances where the plagiarized version was published:
I was referring to an editor's suggestion that people could use Google to search for poetry via the poem's first line - - - but this system has too often FAILED ME when I was trying to gather up my own poems.
Using Google in years past, I used to be able to search for my poetry - - - poems accepted and published in journals - - - whenever there was a need to compile credits for a book's Acknowledgements page or for various contests run by SFPA [i.e., The Science Fiction Poetry Association, which offers annual awards for spec-po such as the Rhysling Award, Dwarf Stars, the Elgin, etc.].
But lately something has changed in the Google search.
It has failed me too many times when hunting down my own writing.
I don't know if this has happened to others in this forum.
Yes, I mean exactly that kind of thing. It is less useful overall, especially for exact-phrase matches. They’ve put their energies elsewhere, and it’s compromised the whole thing, is what I was commenting on.
When I was teaching English comp in community college, plagiarism was a huge problem. The school had a zero tolerance policy. Despite doing an entire unit on what is plagiarism and what the consequences were, I had at least one student every semester plagiarize an assignment. One told me sister wrote it so it couldn't be plagiarism. Another said she had carpel tunnel so she had to cut and paste work from the Internet. I treated each case individually. The carpel tunnel chick filed a complaint when I gave her work an F, and the department chair and I agreed she would receive an F for the class. Then she had the nerve to ask when I was teaching that class again because she liked the way I taught! Lit mags need to have zero tolerance for this stuff, as it's unfair to those who have put in the time and effort to learn their craft and write original work.
1. It's a weird form of flattery. I once had a photo stolen that appeared on a T-shirt. I got a bit of money from it, but still. They could have contacted me.
2. There is such a thing as cryptomnesia:
"n. an implicit memory phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that a current thought or idea is a product of their own creation when, in fact, they have encountered it previously and then forgotten it. Cryptomnesia can occur in any creative enterprise, as for example when an investigator develops a research idea that they believe is original whereas in actuality it can be documented that they saw or heard the idea at some earlier point in time. Also called inadvertent plagiarism; unconscious plagiarism."
-source, APA dictionary
I committed it myself while in college; I was running some really good lines in my head and thought they were mine. they fit my voice so well I thought they were mine. I submitted them to The New Yorker. I am certain they recognized them as T.S. Eliot's. I did so, about a week after I'd sent the submission, and I am still mortified at the memory (50+ years later). There is of course a crucial difference: if confronted, the cryptomnesiac will realize the mistake and apologize for all eternity, where the plagiarist will simply send the stolen work elsewhere.
I'm guessing that, in the future, many litmags will use online AI programs to detect plagiarism. But this could create new problems. One of them would be that your submission, whether accepted or rejected, gets included in the AI program's data base and becomes vulnerable to being used in part or in whole in someone else's AI generated work later on.
I did just read something by a person who ran his own writing through a plagiarism finder, and many instances of plagiarism it detected were related to his own work being published in more than one place (it might have been reprinted in a book he wrote later - I can't quite remember). So you're right that this is a real concern.
So true. I was pretty sure someone once said something along the lines of “That’s the problem with this world: too damn many people trying to be original.” But searching just now, I can’t find the source. Maybe I wrote that but forgot that I did?
It’s important to distinguish between lifted lines and whole lifted poems/works, and to judge on a case-by-case in the middle, too. Good lines can sink into the subconscious and reemerge later, or can be reproduced as allusion or critique or similar, or may not be so unique after all.
But yes, while it’s a disheartening thing to think of, a plagiarism check should be a part of submission review. It has to be human review, since there can be false positives and contextual things like the above.
I agree that young (in years or years-writing) authors should be given a bit of leeway, and I do think some legitimately stack up sources or examples and get confused later (especially if caught up in submit-it-all-mania). But you can usually tell a plagiarist; it’s the way they operate. And poetry submissions are usually multiple, so you have several samples to test.
I have googled my own lines just to be sure. Esp stuff I've written long ago and have entirely forgotten. Inspiration is one thing, but cutting and pasting is entirely another.
This guy contacted me about renting a room in Scottsdale. Now two years later he is using my address and I am getting bills from hospitals etc here for him. He never lived here and is using my address. Wow I am glad I did not take him into my home or he might have done far worse. Now I have to return all of these bills with writing on the outside of the envelopes telling them he is a fraud.
Daniel Wade, the poet & playwright with whom I co-wrote the play Search and Rescue, passed off that work as his alone and won the Eamon Keane Full Length Play Award at Listowel Writers' Week in Ireland. When I objected on Twitter, he accused me of libel and threatened to sue (LOL). When I approached LWW, despite sending them a massive stack of evidence to prove my co-authorship, they suggested I get an attorney. I did, and my attorney sent several cease and desist letters, which Wade ignored, and considering his financial situation, I really don't know if it's worth taking the issue to court because what do I have to gain? There are NO PROTECTIONS in place and no authority in the literary community that can deal with these issues. https://twitter.com/redpenjames/status/1564822698613784577
I know this comment thread has died down. But I'm the senior ed from one of the journals that published Kucera. We also recently came scarily close to publishing a 98% AI-written short article.
It seems we can no longer pretend these are random events. Maybe it's the increased visibility of once-obscure magazines because of the internet and maybe it's centralized systems like Submittable that can let someone submit to a dozen publications in a few hours.
I'm curious what other publishers are doing to check things. I'm Googling lines of poetry now and running suspicious articles through sites like GPTZero.me. But it seems we need to be more methodical and run every article and every poem through a system. This comes out to about 15 documents per month.
The trouble is: what is there? We've used iThenticate in the past (a division of Turnitin) and it's thorough but the pricing structure is clunky for publishers, with a prohibitive price per document. We got around this by combining 10 articles into one doc, but that’s very annoying and doesn’t fit our workflow, which has different articles being accepted at different times of the month.
Originality.ai seemed promising. It charges by word count and we could work with the $15/month account. It catches AI but despite claims, it missed multiple tests for plagiarism (including poems by Kucera!). I might was well use the free AI detection services, to be honest.
Duplichecker would work with a $15/month account. It seems to pick up plagiarism, though not nearly as thoroughly as Turnitin. It fails miserably at AI detection.
I’m curious what other small lit magazine publishers are doing. Is there any of these services that work for our needs?
As a writer only attempting to be published in various magazines last year very intentionally, I am now questioning the entire industry and will maybe just keep to substack for the foreseeable future.
This story seems far more complex. Who is this person? How many aliases do they have? How many works are published of theirs?
Are there mental health issues at play?
Is this whole project exposing the vulnerabilities of the publishing world as an art project?
The person seems untraceable. But very ambitious. And busy. Almost like this is their life's work? But why?
What does it mean for institutions to be exposed as so vulnerable? How does a publisher prevent such trickery in the future? Are there basic internet security protocols that could be instituted that would prevent these actions in the future?
Thanks to an email we received we also discovered a poem that John Kucera plagiarized in our last issue of Shot Glass Journal. We have removed his poems and his listing on our page and our Writer Archive page. We receive thousands of poems submitted each issue so checking one line from all of the poems we publish would be a difficult task - specifically in the case of the poem we found - the words were slightly different. We have a question on our Submittable site to confirm that the work is the poet's original work and not published elsewhere. Everyone answers Yes, so if you are going to plagiarize work what's to stop you from lying on the question.
I haven't had my fiction or CNF plagiarized, but years ago as I was leaving academia, a Wharton scholar lifted work from two articles I'd published and when I called her on it, she said "We must have had the same ideas at the same time." That was total BS.
It's not the magazines' fault if someone is a craven jackass. Editors of literary magazines are busy with MANY things and shouldn't have to waste their time with plagiarism checks. This isn't high school.
I'm currently guest editing the next issue of a magazine and there's a piece submitted by Kucera in the queue. We googled and found the original piece published in another magazine.
John Kucera or whatever his name is -- or her name is -- takes plagiarism to a pathological level. I think there's no question that whoever it is should be barred from publication and even submitting. Though with a sickness like this, there's no end; the process can continue under different names. On the other hand, "John Kucera" has been getting a lot of acceptances. I'm kinda jealous.
Hi Pals: since so many journals and small presses are here, I'll use this space to ask: does anyone have access to plagiarism tools, maybe through a university relationship or a paid subscription to grammarly, etc? Let's safely assume John Kucera isn't unique (ha ha) — I think it's time we trawl our archives and see who else is out there. But of course I don't have the cash for a subscription right now, nor the time to search google for everything we've ever published. Ideas?
Another topic I have so much to say about. Instead, I will just point everyone in the direction of Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist by Neal Bowers. It concerns his poems being plagiarized by the same guy, and the “so what” attitude of the world, including editors, and even other writers! It is a great book.
Just received a submission from this guy. Thanks everyone for alerting us to his plagiarism.
This guy is like the Typhoid Harry of plagiarism. Definitely should be quarantined from all ports of lit mag entry on a permanent basis. I saw bits of the emerging story this week; thanks, Becky for gathering all the pieces (although there's probably even more out there, he's "prolific" in his craft as well as shameless).
While it's great he's been outed, I wish people would be as quick to actually name lit mags that indulge in suspect behavior. It seems even when writers are wronged repeatedly, they don't name the abusers most times, perhaps worried about some possible blacklisting by more legitimate publications.
In all academic fields I know of (science) a plagiarist would be banned from submitting future work. I don't know why it should be any different in the literary world. The sole reasonable exception would be someone less than 25 (when the brain is fully formed) who plagiarizes, and in that case I would support banning them for a decade. I think history shows that these folks don't stop even after they're caught and there are plenty of overworked editors who don't have the time to check every submission's legitimacy.
When I recruited science grad students, I'd google any line from their personal statement that was unique, and I found plagiarism from all sorts of places. And since you can purchase personal statements, those sites/samples got pinged a lot. A subset of people just don't want to do the work.
wow
Exactly. The first time I truly realized in 1999 was when one personal statement started with the guy talking about the tenacity needed to run a 5k race. Fine, a way to showcase your skills outside science. Few days later the exact same start to another person's statement, for several sentences. Sad thing is, both probably would have been accepted because their transcripts were very good. But nope.
The brain-full-formed-at-25 idea has been [at least somewhat] debunked now, but I think your point holds.
*fully
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-7-things-to-know Mark, I'm not sure that it's been debunked but no point arguing about a point we both agree on. cheers, g2
I'd appreciate it if someone would enlighten me as to why a writer would plagiarize poems. Kucera makes/made this a habit. With poetry, most of the reward is in doing the writing. There's very little money in it and few poets become famous. I don't get why anyone would delight in seeing a poem accepted and published when it was actually created by someone else. Clues, anyone?
Here's my incredibly well thought-through theory. John Kucera is a pseudonym for someone who consistently has had their work rejected and, in fine dog-in-the-manger style, is plagiarising to mess things up spitefully AND/OR it's someone doing this to make a point about editors being inattentive or incompetent and it's a game to see how many acceptances he can rack up before getting caught.
This seems so on point I believe you are the guy, pretending not to be the guy, hoping to become the next guy's agent.
I hate it when people see right through me like that
LOL
One of the pieces he submitted to me was a collection of five poems. Of the five, two were entirely plagiarised from other poets, and two I can find previously published by him in what appear to be defunct, possibly vanity, journals. I suspect he's trying to intersperse his own "work" with that of more established writers, or those deemed good enough for publication, in the interest of making suckers of us all, showing us it's all bullshit, or just building a portfolio off of established writing to jumpstart his own "career." But I kind of wish it were some underground investigation disclosing what shoddy half-baked operations we're all running — I WOULD READ THAT.
In some respects, I think we're lucky to be targeted by such trolling. Someone's paying attention to the work we're doing!
It’s a helluva backhanded compliment to a writer but it does seem to be a plausible explanation. Unfortunately there are victims such as journals that paid for the work, illustrators whose commissioned work had to be pulled, writers whose work might otherwise have been published, and the editors whose reputations are unfairly tarnished.
Oh, definitely. When I saw his submissions in our queue, it took me maybe 2 minutes to google around and identify the real authors, a few more minutes to track down contact information for those authors to let them know. But I had never thought of doing that before — never thought that what we're doing is worth thievery. This experience is a wake-up call for all of us, I think.
And of course I felt incredibly lucky that his work was kicking around in our submittable box, and hadn't yet made it past editors and into our publications. I do think, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the page, that those who have paid him money have a more direct route to action, and hope some of them will pursue that. I'm happy to help navigate that in whatever way.
Or, perhaps he's working on a computer program that will detect plagiarism and is doing this so he can make money selling his program.
It’s got to be some kind of mental illness. Otherwise, the behavior makes no sense.
When I was a marketing consultant I encountered clients who invented grandiose versions of their work experience. For instance, one woman claimed she had owned "the largest cleaning company in Rhode Island" when I believe it was just her and her daughter cleaning houses. Another glorified her work reading submissions in the slush pile for a Hollywood film producer as "an executive in script development." It is just a short leap from that type of near-lying (which is common) to plagiarism.
Interesting comparison
I saw egregious examples like this on a resume once. One thing that was weird is that in the internet age, it's very easy to check up on these grandiose statements. No, your play is not running on NPR. But at least fabricating stuff on a resume makes some kind of sense in that it seems like a means to an end. I still don't understand publishing plagiarized poems in a whole bunch of litmags, but maybe if you're trying to build a CV that shows you're a widely published writer?
It could be just laziness and a lack of ethics, and a desire to build up a bio. Someone who got through school by cheating in some form wouldn't stop taking shortcuts as an adult.
Years ago a subscriber to my newsletter alerted me to someone who had sent out an issue of mine to her own subscribers without credit to me. When I researched the culprit, I learned that she was a subcontractor for a company that I also did business with. I alerted that business, and they gave the violator a dress-down and said they'd never work with her again.
In that case, I think the plagiarizer didn't think she'd get caught, since neither she nor I archived our newsletter on the Web.
Yeah, someone who got through school by cheating and just went on that way. That makes sense. Thanks. And: sorry your plagiarizer didn't get caught.
Actually -- he plagiarized both poems AND stories.
And several of the publications that accepted "his" works are paying markets.
This is interesting — if they're paying, they probably can find out within reason who he is. The address and phone number he included in his submissions to me (both a short story and poetry) are bogus.
There's the validation aspect of acceptance and getting published, which ethical and legitimate writers share, as well as the possible advantage of publication credits. Tobias Wolff's novel Old School also interestingly suggests that plagiarism and imitation can arise out of close identification or admiration with or for someone else's work, or a desire to revise or reinterpret much in the way that jazz musicians cover other people's music.
I agree that admiration might be at work here—a manifestation of Oscar Wilde’s “imitation is the highest form of flattery”. Maybe another aspect of the plagiarist’s motivation is a trickster-type glee in fooling people. The plagiarist isn’t going to gain much money, so the acceptances might be experienced as another form of winning, a power play. Whatever the motivation, I believe that they should be banned--permanently.
I vote for “trickster glee” & perhaps a personality disorder.
Hmm. I don't know how validating it would be to get accepted and published when you'd plagiarized. I guess it works for him. But I get what you say about close identification or admiration of someone else's work. Thanks.
You make a fair point and I can't disagree. And, yes, the number of plagiarisms suggest something pathological. But I also now wonder if desperation to get something published or extreme anger and resentment at rejection were factors in this guy's thinking or lack of thinking.
I wonder how old he is. He does sound as if he's had issues for a while, given how far he's gotten with the acceptances (there are quite a few).
I've had the same question as you, Marjorie. I don't get it.
Ha! I was thinking the same - then saw your comment! Cannot even imagine the desire to do this.....
Marjorie, maybe he's "monetizing" his villainy another way (via a Tik-Tok channel? via a podcast? via seminars?) by mocking the standards of unpaid volunteer slush readers out there.
There is a bestselling Instagram "male poet" out there whose atrocious BDSM erotic verse collections pull in big sales. I have long suspected "he" does not exist & this nonsense is being scripted by the [ahem] "girlfriend" named on his dedication pages.
Thanks very much for your response, LindaAnn. I have to admit that what you’re describing is beyond my comprehension. Can’t say I’m entirely sorry for that. What a world.
Could not agree more. Talk about cheap thrills. The only possible motivation may be to beef up the résumé
I keep having the nagging thought that I've encountered/known this person, and that the name familiarity isn't just that it's also the name of a famous ski racer. I'm pretty darn sure I've run into him on the PNW SFF convention circuit. Maybe not, but....
In any case, my understanding is that the creator of Moksha, the submission management software used by a lot of SFF mags, has blocked this person from being able to use it. There are apparently further methods to use that particular SMS for enforcing a block on someone. I'm pretty sure that Neil Clarke has configured the Clarkesworld Management Software (another one popular in SFF) to do much the same--he's apparently set it up to reject AI submissions that it detects. Who knows about Submittable...but if Moksha can do it, Submittable should be able to as well.
That is one means of enforcing blocks on plagarists. At this point, I am not wildly sympathetic with plagarists and figure they should be blocked from publishing under that name.
Submittable is not a cheap service for small publishers, and should be able to remove his account and everything attached to it, send an automated email to any publishers to which he's submitted to review him, etc. That's not complicated code.
If they really wanted to up their game and be a service worth paying for, they'd run submitted pieces through a plagiarism checker and flag anything that didn't pass.
One thing you can do with Submittable is mark the submission as "completed," instead of declined. That precludes the submitter from submitting again. Of course that only applies to the email used, so if this plagiarist catches on he may simply create a new synonym and email to submit with.
Hi— In my experience, marking a submission “completed” does not prevent the submitter from submitting again. We use this status for folks who register for our workshops and many writers have registered repeatedly for workshops over time. I do wish Submittable had a way for us to block submitters like this. (I did a quick search, and this guy has also submitted to my magazine.)
I checked this on Submittable. If you use the Completed status in conjunction with Limit Multiple Submissions, it will block the submitter from submitting again. https://submittable.help/en/articles/2138351-how-can-i-limit-multiple-submissions-from-the-same-user
Thank you for researching this. I can see how this setting could be very useful.
Two of my submissions were marked as "Completed" by Panoplyzine and Dipity Lit Mag; in both cases these poems were accepted.
In each case, I subsequently submitted to a FUTURE issue of Panoply & Dipity, therefore, I was not blocked from submitting again.
This Submittable status issue sounds very confusing.
And I also felt "cheated" out of my prized green "ACCEPTED" badge - - - since I try to delete everything else . . . . . . not wishing to step in foul water twice.
The problem with using the limit multiple submissions is that submitters whose work has been accepted cannot submit again either. It would be great if Submittable developed a true way to block nuisance submitters.
Hi. Please see my previous comment on my poems being accepted by Panoplyzine and Dipity Lit, being marked as "completed" - - and in both cases I was able to submit again to future issues of theirs.
Very confusing.
Contradicts my experience certainly.
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yes I agree with you. It would not be a useful setting for us because we do accept work from folks whose work we have previously published.
I just googled John Kucera, Joyce, and there is indeed a famous ski racer by that name.
While it's a very good thing that this plagiarist has been outed, I am fascinated by his finetuned sense of what editors want. In other words, he seems to know precisely which works to plagiarize. How many of us could say, "This poem will be picked up by at least two or three other magazines"? He should teach a workshop on submissions--except that he'd probably rather plagiarize someone else's workshop on submissions. Sigh. More seriously, plagiarizing whole works is reasonably easy to check, assuming these are online publications, not print-only publications. (I hesitate to post this, as the eager plagiarist will now know to comb through print mags for his next prey.) While I hate to burden editors with additional responsibilities, yeah, they should at least do a search.
Who is this dude? It would be interesting to try to track down him down ... to uncover him ...
According to the biography of this "John Kucera (John Siepkes)," he "was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania." and presently lives in Phoenix. He does apparently have a linkedIn profile as a " Book Author -- freelance editor/writer" and lists an author's website which my antivirus flagged as a possibly untrustworthy site (johnkucerabooksblog@wordpress.com).
With a search of "John Siepkes," the first listing is an eviction case in Maricopa County from June 2023. (Sorry to hear that dude -- noone should be thrown out of their home ...). There are other court cases kisted on other sites (cause of case unclear). He also has a pinterest account under this name -- and other publications.
In a complaint John Sipkes lodged on the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce site, he wrote: "As someone who has worked his entire life and who also has a Master's Degree and who has been employed by a school district for the past twelve years, it troubles me when an employee of a store assumes I am stealing, ..." (https://www.chamberofcommerce.com/united-states/arizona/phoenix/convenience-store/2002168892-circle-k) So -- if John Siepkes is working in the public schools ...
(Of note: Wild Word, Lothlorien and other journals have totally removed his work that a google search lists ...)
The plagiarist in Neal Bowers’ case was a teacher in Oregon . . . I wonder if he moved to Arizona and is still plagiarizing! Yikes!
Hmm. Interesting. I taught community college in the Phoenix metro area. I wonder if we crossed paths. (See my post about teaching Eng. comp.)
I very much agree with the advice from Identity Theory. Though, I'll suggest if one has worked with a writer a number of times, then vetting their work is likely not as necessary. But, if it's someone a publisher has never worked with, then it's indeed a good idea to throw a few lines in to Google to *try* and ensure 1) the work isn't previously published and 2) is original. And I italicize "try" because it's not a foolproof method, most especially as regards detecting plagiarism.
Back when I was editing the boutique and the laboratories, I'd vet the work of writers I was largely unfamiliar with before acceptance and *also* before posting. Reason being, I ran a backlog. Herein, I found a few poets used that window of time between acceptance and publication as an opportunity to place the work elsewhere, despite a clear statement in my guidelines regarding First Serial rights. And, while I never had to deal with a plagiarist, I did have to deal with a half dozen or so poets flouting my guidelines, one of whom was placing the same pieces in multiple journals, many of which--like myself--either explicitly sought First Serial rights or clearly stated they didn't publish reprints.
Kucera, it's worth noting, wasn't just plagiarizing work, but also placing the pieces in multiple journals. Which makes me think, if someone is flouting a journal's guidelines regarding rights, then it could *potentially* be symptomatic of other, more problematic issues regarding how they're conducting themselves in the lit scene. For, when publishers wish to provide their audience with not just original, but new, previously unread work, writers who habitually flout rights like Kucera are treating the publisher as a means to an end in terms of self-promotion. In so doing, they not only breach publisher's trust, but also disregard the publisher's audience by providing them "reruns" of work they may have already read elsewhere. Moreover, it slights publishers when it comes to having their journals credited on the acknowledgment page of any future collection where they lose out on the free promotion that such acknowledgments provide. None of this is considered by individuals such as Kucera, and it's that lack of consideration that should set of some alarm bells with publishers, I believe.
All that in mind, had such vetting been more the standard, then Kucera would have likely been outed far sooner, wherein fewer writers would have had their plagiarized works published under his name . . . in multiple journals! I personally found the Bruce Bond piece he lifted an especially easy catch, given he did little else to the poem but retitle it. When I Googled lines from that piece it came right up as being published in The Hudson Review under Bond's name. And that plagiarized version appeared in at least four different journals (i.e. OneArt, Literary Yard, Sparks of Calliope, and Ghost Writer Inside). This suggests that that there may be a larger systemic issue (or issues) that Kucera inadvertently exposed through his self-serving behavior.
As to whether publishers need to wrestle with plagiarism vs. fair use, I think if a publisher finds themselves wrestling with those two concepts, then it's probably best to decline the work. For, fair use is an extremely arcane area of the law, and unless publishers (or one of their journal staff) have a legal background, they'd probably do best to not try to delineate between whether a suspect work fails the plagiarism test but manages to pass legal muster as fair use. Plagiarism is a violation of professional standards, not legal ones, and it's the former--in my mind at least--that publishers should endeavor to uphold first and foremost. And I sense all these many incidents with Kucera illustrate why such standards need to be treated more seriously.
SOURCE: Published by the EIC of Sparks of Calliope: - https://sparksofcalliope.com/2024/01/17/it-was-bound-to-happen-eventually/
It was bound to happen eventually… January 17, 2024 ~ Randal A. Burd, Jr.
Dear Reader,
As a literary journal, there is often more risk than reward, but as a labor of love we carry on. The more cynical among us might even agree that misfortune strikes eventually should you travel any road long enough. As an editor, you really want pick the diamonds in the rough, and while you try to vet every submission you receive maticulously, you tell yourself that you can’t possibly catch everything. So, while I have tried to do right by you and will continue to do so, it seems that on one occasion I failed. You see… there is a plagiarist among us.
On September 22, 2023, I published two poems entitled “Harbor” and “Dislocated” allegedly written by a Mr. John Kucera (aka John Siepkes). And while they say imitation is the best form of flattery, these poems were copied with only a couple word changes from poems published in The Hudson Review entitled “Neilah; Creature” by Bruce Bond and in Claw and Blossom entitled “The Q & A Section” by Dorsía Smith Silva. This is intellectual property theft on the part of Mr. Kucera. I am profoundly sorry for the editorial oversight and hope Mr. Kucera is appropriately ashamed of himself.
I am replacing Mr. John Kucera’s plagarized work with links to the original poems and removing Mr. Kucera from our list of contributors. I commend Mr. Bond and Professor Silva on the quality of their poems and extend my apology to them as well.
I am grateful to the editor of another literary journal who also inadvertantly published a plagarized poem submitted by Mr. Kucera and was kind enough to bring this matter to my attention. . . . < continued here > . . . . . . . . SOURCE: Published by the EIC of Sparks of Calliope: - https://sparksofcalliope.com/2024/01/17/it-was-bound-to-happen-eventually/
Wow
Unbelievable
And everyone in this forum is still wondering: WHY? WHY? WHY? :-O
Karen Rile mentioned the possibility that some mental ailment is at the root of this. I agree. Especially nowadays with so many techno ways to check and compare. And double especially with this guy's apparent serial addiction to it. He must know it was a matter of time. I can't imagine doing all this and just waiting to get exposed. Sleepless nights! Has the guy made any statement? Has it been established that it is indeed a guy? By the way, is it a crime? "What are you in for, Kucera?" "Plagiarizing poetry."
Recall the Seinfeld episode where Elaine unknowingly submits a Ziggy cartoon to the New Yorker. Mr. Peterman's reaction: "You ripped off a Ziggy?"
Yes! Kucera could try that. "I unknowingly did it fifteen times." It's inconceivable to me that he thought he could get away with it. And if he got caught this many times, i wonder how many times he didn't, or hasn't yet. It's got to be traumatizing to the victims. Not a line or a paragraph, but the whole poem stolen. Sympathy to them. It's like stealing a piece of somebody's heart and claiming it as your own.
This particular plagiarism scandal is up there with Ailey O'Toole back in 2018 (at least as far as serial plagiarists in the poetry scene go).
https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/poetry-twitter-erupts-over-plagiarist-ailey-otoole.html
Wow. Thanks for that. Whole thing is astonishing to me. That tattoo takes the cake. Kat Rosenfield from Vulture:
"What would compel someone — even a young, naïve, evidently troubled poet — not just to commit a blatant act of plagiarism, but to tattoo someone else’s poetry on her skin and try to pass it off as her own, on the internet of all places, rendering her humiliating exposure and downfall all but inevitable? Did she secretly yearn to be caught? Did she genuinely believe nobody would notice?"
Oh, no problem. I wanted it included somewhere in this weekend convo. to remind folks that serial plagiarists like Kucera are not unprecedented. There have certainly been others, though he and O'Toole are the worst I've seen in the online poetry scene.
As to Rosenfield's questions, I sense it was the latter; O'Toole thought she wasn't going to get caught. But, who knows, really.
I will say, of the many things I found interesting about her was the actual labor she put into some of her plagiarized pieces. The title piece of the collection that was ultimately cancelled, "Gun Metal," was a kind of mosaic plagiarism (as I've seen the practice called in academia), where she combined lines and passages from at least three different poets' work. That there was a level of creativity and a mingling of her own imagination with said work *may* have led her to deceive herself into thinking that poem and others were "hers." Hence, the tattoo, the interview where she spoke of "Gun Metal" as most representative of her work, etc.
Kucera (a.k.a. John Siepkes), on the other hand, appears to have been under no such delusions, since he was simply lifting whole works or oh so slightly tweaking them. Given the financial arears he appears to be in with unpaid rent and court fees (https://unicourt.com/search?q=john%20siepkes&ct-gr=10&ju-cs=25&ju-ch=157&ju-l2j=3&a=all&init_S=c_srch) I'm thinking about exploring how many of the journals he placed the plagiarized pieces in were paying markets. Likewise, those journals he submitted work to but was rejected. This might explain (at least some of) his motive.
Thanks again for the info. Allow me to ramble, Johnny... I think i'm most fascinated by the psyche of the plagiarist. Especially of poetry, which doesn't promise much recompense. What sort of career is it that is increasingly endangered the more you become published and known? Is it the the thrill of simply getting away with it, being the only one who knows what's happening, as long as it lasts? There must be some block they have wrt the future. The kick of the moment, sending off stolen goods as your own to find more eyes and scrutiny and heighten the risk of exposure and shame. Like secret exhibitionism. Has there been any serious study of the mind of a plagiarist? There must be some moral poverty as well--a friend asks her to read/critique their book of poetry, and she steals one of the poems! It's such lousy behavior you have to laugh, or gasp. The buzz of getting away with the thievery and deception must blind the plagiarist to the nastiness of the act. And if this Siepkis guy is truly after money, stealing poems seems an unlikely pathway. There has to also be some serious lack of self-valuing going on too. They want to be an artist but have no faith in themself & their own creativity? Another sign that something's missing---when they get caught their alibis and amends never ring true, never show heart. The one woman thinks to sue the one who caught her and notified editors?! One more thing---what is with the spelling of plagiarism? They couldn't decide if it should be i or a there so they compromised and kept both?
Copyright infringement can entail jail time, yes. But I imagine you have to show harm/benefit. This is more a nuisance.
Interesting. When I Googled Kucera, I discovered he's had two of "his" poems published in a lit mag for which I was once one of the poetry editors. The current editor says he was especially aggressive about getting payment. Seems to me that paying markets would be able to file criminal charges; they've clearly been defrauded. And literary plagiarism is obviously different from the kind of academic plagiarism that's made recent headlines, which is mostly just sloppy citations, not outright theft like Kucera's.
Someone like this should absolutely be banned from all litmags forever, but since he clearly has no shame, I wouldn't be surprised if he just started publishing other people's work under a different name.
Publishing someone else's poem under your own name is obviously terrible, and I'd prefer to see those people banned, but this also makes me wonder about cases that would be harder to detect. What if someone just lifts a line or two? And what if the editor, trying to be as diligent as humanly possible, has checked a different line? Maybe this is where AI comes in. But then what if the poet considers it a famous-enough line that anyone will recognize the source and why it's used that way and is wrong about that? (I once saw a letter to the editor railing at an illustrator for plagiarizing the Wyeth painting "Chrstina's World" when it seemed obvious to me that he expected everyone to recognize he'd based his illustration on that very famous painting - which is what he said in his response to the letter.)
Off to Google a few of my best lines.
This Kucera is so rampant, it’s feels almost like a bot or some sort of AI spam/crawl/compromise of the submission process, if that’s even possible? Wondering also about the timeline of the pieces accepted/published - close proximity or over a span of time? Good data to gather.
The poet Neal Bowers had an experience in the 1990s with a person who kept plagiarizing him. He wrote a book about it: Words for the Taking.
Wow!
Ha-ha-ha-ha to the "pro tip" of Googling the first line of a work.
Each year, SFPA asks poet-members to submit a list of published SFF poems that might be eligible for the Rhysling Award. During the past 3 years, something has changed with Google - - because I can no longer be sure of finding my own published work via Googling my first line. :-O
"John Kucera" even tricked The Hudson Review with a rip-off? Impressive.
Kucera didn't trick The Hudson Review. That's where one of the many poems he ripped off was derived from, and then published in four different journals. Here's the original poem, by Bruce Bond: https://hudsonreview.com/2022/10/neilah-creature/
The "pro-trip" from Identity Theory read: "Always google at least one sentence or phrase from submitted pieces before accepting." That noted, you're right to point out it's far from a foolproof method of detecting plagiarism, though it works well for previously published work being passed off as previously unpublished.
Using that method with Kucera should have at least raised some red flags. I inserted the following into a search:
"Rain falls into a chronicle we call rain,
and what abstracted politician can tell
the water from the word, the arrival
of spring from the crackle of erasure."
And, lo and behold, this brought up the original piece first, followed by three of the four instances where the plagiarized version was published:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Rain+falls+into+a+chronicle+we+call+rain%2C%0D%0Aand+what+abstracted+politician+can+tell%0D%0Athe+water+from+the+word%2C+the+arrival%0D%0Aof+spring+from+the+crackle+of+erasure.&sca_esv=600142611&sxsrf=ACQVn09k-KNz_AZ_hl2dQyf02F1ZVnpX1g%3A1705800617196&source=hp&ei=qXOsZcGeCuysptQP5oCa2A4&iflsig=ANes7DEAAAAAZayBuQP67sJzpiVYoWt88Czl1Bp1vaUd&ved=0ahUKEwiBl-C-qu2DAxVslokEHWaABusQ4dUDCBY&oq=Rain+falls+into+a+chronicle+we+call+rain%2C%0D%0Aand+what+abstracted+politician+can+tell%0D%0Athe+water+from+the+word%2C+the+arrival%0D%0Aof+spring+from+the+crackle+of+erasure.&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6Ip0BUmFpbiBmYWxscyBpbnRvIGEgY2hyb25pY2xlIHdlIGNhbGwgcmFpbiwKYW5kIHdoYXQgYWJzdHJhY3RlZCBwb2xpdGljaWFuIGNhbiB0ZWxsCnRoZSB3YXRlciBmcm9tIHRoZSB3b3JkLCB0aGUgYXJyaXZhbApvZiBzcHJpbmcgZnJvbSB0aGUgY3JhY2tsZSBvZiBlcmFzdXJlLkgAUABYAHAAeACQAQCYAQCgAQCqAQC4AQzIAQD4AQL4AQE&sclient=gws-wiz
Google has become a trash heap. Too interested in guessing your meaning to help.
Oh, dear, I was not being intentionally obscure.
I was referring to an editor's suggestion that people could use Google to search for poetry via the poem's first line - - - but this system has too often FAILED ME when I was trying to gather up my own poems.
Using Google in years past, I used to be able to search for my poetry - - - poems accepted and published in journals - - - whenever there was a need to compile credits for a book's Acknowledgements page or for various contests run by SFPA [i.e., The Science Fiction Poetry Association, which offers annual awards for spec-po such as the Rhysling Award, Dwarf Stars, the Elgin, etc.].
But lately something has changed in the Google search.
It has failed me too many times when hunting down my own writing.
I don't know if this has happened to others in this forum.
Yes, I mean exactly that kind of thing. It is less useful overall, especially for exact-phrase matches. They’ve put their energies elsewhere, and it’s compromised the whole thing, is what I was commenting on.
Definitely true.
When I was teaching English comp in community college, plagiarism was a huge problem. The school had a zero tolerance policy. Despite doing an entire unit on what is plagiarism and what the consequences were, I had at least one student every semester plagiarize an assignment. One told me sister wrote it so it couldn't be plagiarism. Another said she had carpel tunnel so she had to cut and paste work from the Internet. I treated each case individually. The carpel tunnel chick filed a complaint when I gave her work an F, and the department chair and I agreed she would receive an F for the class. Then she had the nerve to ask when I was teaching that class again because she liked the way I taught! Lit mags need to have zero tolerance for this stuff, as it's unfair to those who have put in the time and effort to learn their craft and write original work.
1. It's a weird form of flattery. I once had a photo stolen that appeared on a T-shirt. I got a bit of money from it, but still. They could have contacted me.
2. There is such a thing as cryptomnesia:
"n. an implicit memory phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that a current thought or idea is a product of their own creation when, in fact, they have encountered it previously and then forgotten it. Cryptomnesia can occur in any creative enterprise, as for example when an investigator develops a research idea that they believe is original whereas in actuality it can be documented that they saw or heard the idea at some earlier point in time. Also called inadvertent plagiarism; unconscious plagiarism."
-source, APA dictionary
I committed it myself while in college; I was running some really good lines in my head and thought they were mine. they fit my voice so well I thought they were mine. I submitted them to The New Yorker. I am certain they recognized them as T.S. Eliot's. I did so, about a week after I'd sent the submission, and I am still mortified at the memory (50+ years later). There is of course a crucial difference: if confronted, the cryptomnesiac will realize the mistake and apologize for all eternity, where the plagiarist will simply send the stolen work elsewhere.
Lillian Hellman’s “Julia” is another example- she wrote the story as memoir but evidently it was another woman’s experience.
Mary McCarthy said that everything that came out of Lillian Hillman‘s mouth was a lie, including the isf, anda, buts, and the commas.
At the very least, the paying publications should demand their money back. If that doesn't work, boiling in oil used to be popular. ;-)
I'm guessing that, in the future, many litmags will use online AI programs to detect plagiarism. But this could create new problems. One of them would be that your submission, whether accepted or rejected, gets included in the AI program's data base and becomes vulnerable to being used in part or in whole in someone else's AI generated work later on.
I did just read something by a person who ran his own writing through a plagiarism finder, and many instances of plagiarism it detected were related to his own work being published in more than one place (it might have been reprinted in a book he wrote later - I can't quite remember). So you're right that this is a real concern.
This possibility is scary!
I mean, I've often said to myself, "Damn, that's good. I wish I'd written that." Still a huge step to claim that I did write it.
So true. I was pretty sure someone once said something along the lines of “That’s the problem with this world: too damn many people trying to be original.” But searching just now, I can’t find the source. Maybe I wrote that but forgot that I did?
It’s important to distinguish between lifted lines and whole lifted poems/works, and to judge on a case-by-case in the middle, too. Good lines can sink into the subconscious and reemerge later, or can be reproduced as allusion or critique or similar, or may not be so unique after all.
But yes, while it’s a disheartening thing to think of, a plagiarism check should be a part of submission review. It has to be human review, since there can be false positives and contextual things like the above.
I agree that young (in years or years-writing) authors should be given a bit of leeway, and I do think some legitimately stack up sources or examples and get confused later (especially if caught up in submit-it-all-mania). But you can usually tell a plagiarist; it’s the way they operate. And poetry submissions are usually multiple, so you have several samples to test.
" sink into the subconscious and reemerge later"
I have googled my own lines just to be sure. Esp stuff I've written long ago and have entirely forgotten. Inspiration is one thing, but cutting and pasting is entirely another.
This guy contacted me about renting a room in Scottsdale. Now two years later he is using my address and I am getting bills from hospitals etc here for him. He never lived here and is using my address. Wow I am glad I did not take him into my home or he might have done far worse. Now I have to return all of these bills with writing on the outside of the envelopes telling them he is a fraud.
Daniel Wade, the poet & playwright with whom I co-wrote the play Search and Rescue, passed off that work as his alone and won the Eamon Keane Full Length Play Award at Listowel Writers' Week in Ireland. When I objected on Twitter, he accused me of libel and threatened to sue (LOL). When I approached LWW, despite sending them a massive stack of evidence to prove my co-authorship, they suggested I get an attorney. I did, and my attorney sent several cease and desist letters, which Wade ignored, and considering his financial situation, I really don't know if it's worth taking the issue to court because what do I have to gain? There are NO PROTECTIONS in place and no authority in the literary community that can deal with these issues. https://twitter.com/redpenjames/status/1564822698613784577
I know this comment thread has died down. But I'm the senior ed from one of the journals that published Kucera. We also recently came scarily close to publishing a 98% AI-written short article.
It seems we can no longer pretend these are random events. Maybe it's the increased visibility of once-obscure magazines because of the internet and maybe it's centralized systems like Submittable that can let someone submit to a dozen publications in a few hours.
I'm curious what other publishers are doing to check things. I'm Googling lines of poetry now and running suspicious articles through sites like GPTZero.me. But it seems we need to be more methodical and run every article and every poem through a system. This comes out to about 15 documents per month.
The trouble is: what is there? We've used iThenticate in the past (a division of Turnitin) and it's thorough but the pricing structure is clunky for publishers, with a prohibitive price per document. We got around this by combining 10 articles into one doc, but that’s very annoying and doesn’t fit our workflow, which has different articles being accepted at different times of the month.
Originality.ai seemed promising. It charges by word count and we could work with the $15/month account. It catches AI but despite claims, it missed multiple tests for plagiarism (including poems by Kucera!). I might was well use the free AI detection services, to be honest.
Duplichecker would work with a $15/month account. It seems to pick up plagiarism, though not nearly as thoroughly as Turnitin. It fails miserably at AI detection.
I’m curious what other small lit magazine publishers are doing. Is there any of these services that work for our needs?
As a writer only attempting to be published in various magazines last year very intentionally, I am now questioning the entire industry and will maybe just keep to substack for the foreseeable future.
This story seems far more complex. Who is this person? How many aliases do they have? How many works are published of theirs?
Are there mental health issues at play?
Is this whole project exposing the vulnerabilities of the publishing world as an art project?
The person seems untraceable. But very ambitious. And busy. Almost like this is their life's work? But why?
What does it mean for institutions to be exposed as so vulnerable? How does a publisher prevent such trickery in the future? Are there basic internet security protocols that could be instituted that would prevent these actions in the future?
Could chatgpt help here?
Thanks to an email we received we also discovered a poem that John Kucera plagiarized in our last issue of Shot Glass Journal. We have removed his poems and his listing on our page and our Writer Archive page. We receive thousands of poems submitted each issue so checking one line from all of the poems we publish would be a difficult task - specifically in the case of the poem we found - the words were slightly different. We have a question on our Submittable site to confirm that the work is the poet's original work and not published elsewhere. Everyone answers Yes, so if you are going to plagiarize work what's to stop you from lying on the question.
I haven't had my fiction or CNF plagiarized, but years ago as I was leaving academia, a Wharton scholar lifted work from two articles I'd published and when I called her on it, she said "We must have had the same ideas at the same time." That was total BS.
It's not the magazines' fault if someone is a craven jackass. Editors of literary magazines are busy with MANY things and shouldn't have to waste their time with plagiarism checks. This isn't high school.
I'm currently guest editing the next issue of a magazine and there's a piece submitted by Kucera in the queue. We googled and found the original piece published in another magazine.
But how would an Editor/ Publishing lit mag
Go about distinguishing a poem
That might seem/look similar
To another poem that's been
Submitted, Without being
Considered as "plagiarised"
Or "plagiarism"?
The magazine editors should sue Mr. Siepkes for submitting work that is not original and thus breaches their respective contracts.
Fabulation ?
John Kucera or whatever his name is -- or her name is -- takes plagiarism to a pathological level. I think there's no question that whoever it is should be barred from publication and even submitting. Though with a sickness like this, there's no end; the process can continue under different names. On the other hand, "John Kucera" has been getting a lot of acceptances. I'm kinda jealous.
Hi Pals: since so many journals and small presses are here, I'll use this space to ask: does anyone have access to plagiarism tools, maybe through a university relationship or a paid subscription to grammarly, etc? Let's safely assume John Kucera isn't unique (ha ha) — I think it's time we trawl our archives and see who else is out there. But of course I don't have the cash for a subscription right now, nor the time to search google for everything we've ever published. Ideas?
Also, more recently than Neal Bowers’ case, there is this: https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/poetry-twitter-erupts-over-plagiarist-ailey-otoole.html
Another topic I have so much to say about. Instead, I will just point everyone in the direction of Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist by Neal Bowers. It concerns his poems being plagiarized by the same guy, and the “so what” attitude of the world, including editors, and even other writers! It is a great book.