A Craft Essay by Elizabeth Galoozis
There’s No Cheating in Poetry

My poems must be composed only of my own original words. This central and stubborn rule hovered, unspoken, over my shoulder for years. Its roots were manifold, from the myth of the lone genius perpetuated in films and books, to my high school English teacher, who warned us before every test, “If you’re talking, looking around, or appear to be cheating in any way, I’ll take your paper and your grade will be zero.” There was no way I was ever getting a zero. I was a good student, which is to say, I was good at following rules. They brought me safety and success. In college writing classes, I relished restrictive poetry assignments with arbitrary rules. Challenged to write without using the letter “K,” I made my whole poem about the letter, the first initial of the person I was dating. I was also adept at imitating specific writers’ styles, and had absolutely no problem covering others’ songs at coffeehouses or making collages out of magazines. But I considered borrowing or using any kind of collage in my own poems cheating. 

Now, engaging with others’ words and art, and reframing them through my own lens, has become the core of my strongest work, including my debut collection Law of the Letter: centos, golden shovels, weaving in sources from Christmas carols to Sharon Olds. This shift was no lightning bolt revelation; there was no one work of borrowing that blew my mind. Like all realizations in my writing and personal life, this one crept slowly in. After I was no longer receiving grades for writing, I couldn’t help but write for my own enjoyment. And it turned out that I enjoyed playing with other pieces of art — rolling a song lyric around in my head for weeks, ruminating on tropes in Friends, not being able to let go of the casual misogyny in a 1970s Library Journal article I read for my work as a librarian.

I rediscovered the cento, the ultimate borrowing form, at a peak moment in this journey. In the early days of the pandemic, I was rereading Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems, seeking solace in the intimately familiar.  These lines from “In the Waiting Room,” a poem about understanding that the self is both separate and connected, resonated newly: “You are an I, / You are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them.” In physical isolation, I craved connection, and wrote my first cento with lines from Bishop and five other queer women poets. In the poem, the lines from “In the Waiting Room” are preceded by these, from Adrienne Rich’s “Double Monologue”:

I have wanted one thing: to know
   simply as I know my name
at any given moment, where I stand.

That there was labor in this effort, I didn’t question. That there was art on the same level as composition, I did. The poem, “Cento: Six Women in Five Parts,” was accepted by the first journal I sent it to, and after it was published, I felt the need to make it very clear, beyond simple attribution, that I did not write the words in the poem. I had to be convinced that the praise I received from the journal and readers was for me, for the art in putting these lines in conversation with each other.

After that, I finally, slowly, let my rule’s grip loosen, and expand to accommodate further possibilities. I centered the cyclical sequence of Abbey Road in “Carry That Weight,” a poem whose haiku stanzas echo each other as the songs do, and integrated lyrics into the final stanza:

That magic feeling,
nowhere to go. but the months
keep coming around.

That Library Journal article yielded an epigraph for “Pass Me the Ladder,” a poem about the complex gender dynamics in the library world (published in Call Me [Brackets.]) The poem also incorporates and responds to a quote from Charles Lummis during his short and ignoble tenure as the chief librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library: 

“You will remember
I was not
a Sweet Girl Graduate
of a Library School.”
I am never allowed
to forget.

My stubborn adherence to the idea that poems must come from my own brain (and not cross over from my “day job”) was not only false, but impossible. There is no cheating in poetry because poetry is not a competition or a game. This all may sound very obvious, but sometimes obvious ideas take a while to soak in, especially when meritocracy and individualism are standing on your neck. And that way of thinking really is an insult to poets whose work I love — Brittany Rogers making library overdue notices and intake forms into poems, Nicky Beer quoting Dolly Parton and Bruce Wayne, Robin Coste Lewis’s masterpiece of a cento made up of visual art titles and descriptions in Voyage of the Sable Venus. I would never accuse them of cheating.

When a friend sent me a call for chapters in a book titled Poetry as Knowledge in LIS [library and information sciences], I decided to submit creative work. I’d been wrestling with a poem about the Library of Congress classification system, and from that initial idea I wrote three poems, all using language from professional literature. This excerpt from “Not a Classification of the World: A Technical Cento,” includes lines from works written about classification in 1886, 1976, and 2004:

The established logical order
will risk being broken.
In many cases we probably have to
follow a pattern already in place.
If these newcomers appear.
One can never foresee who will write books.

but the normal concept of subject
is extraneous to art.

When these poems are published later this year, I’ll list them in both my library and creative CVs, a form of cheating or double-dipping I once would never have allowed myself. But putting others’ words into conversation is deeply related to my work as a librarian. I was drawn to this profession for many reasons, but most relevant to my creative work is its juxtaposition of order and serendipity. There is worth in assembling, organizing, and curating. And no work, creative or otherwise, stands alone. When I meet with students who are stymied by the assignment of making an original argument about an exhaustively-discussed topic like climate change or Shakespeare, they are also, sometimes, held back by the idea that using outside sources is somehow “cheating.” I try to tell them that the way they’ve put their thoughts and outside sources together is a unique contribution. In finally listening to my own advice, I’ve freed myself to create in a different way. 

Elizabeth Galoozis’s debut full-length collection, Law of the Letter, won the Hillary Gravendyk Prize from the Inlandia Institute and will come out in 2025. Her poems have appeared in Air/Light, Pidgeonholes, RHINO, Witness, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. She serves as a reader for The Maine Review, and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for Best of the Net. Elizabeth was selected by Claire Wahmanholm for AWP’s Writer to Writer Program in 2022. She works as a librarian and lives in southern California. Elizabeth can be found on Instagram and Blue Sky at @thisamericanliz, and at her website https://elizabethgaloozis.com/.

Read more Craft Essays on Cleaver.