Prize-winning Australian poet Andrew Slattery (winner, most recently, of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, that came with a jackpot of £5000) is being stripped of many of his prizes after judges discovered that most of his poetry consists of lines lifted from the works of other poets. For instance, his poem
Ransom, which won him the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (and potentially $10,000 — he hadn't received the money yet) was a stitched-together version of "50-odd poets' work, some of them famous, such as Americans Charles Simic and Robert Bly, and one Australian, Chris Andrews."
Slattery now explains that he intended his poems to be a form of "collage poetry" written in the "cento format." Apparently this is a kind of poetry that's a patchwork of lines from other poems. He just failed to mention this fact to anyone. [
Sydney Morning Herald]
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