it seems someone has been giving poor jo unending shit about allegedly “stealing” designs.

for some reason this reminds me of my advanced creative writing class. in that class i wrote some really, really, really lame poem about a girl haunted by the mail. yeah, i never claimed to be a poet (even though i tried my damndest to be one). at one point i used the line, “more a father than a lover.”

professor peg wrote on my poem that “more a father than a lover” was actually a quite famous line by a quite famous poet whose name i cannot remember and who i’d never heard of.

i was mortified, then the delectable tom, who i had a crush on said something to the effect that good writers copy, great writers steal.

and i just blushed.

i just tried to find the poem that i had written in the big book of bad writing, and i couldn’t find it. i did find this and a bunch of other stuff like, “Image of Black Manhood: Reactions to Malcolm X,” “Thoreau and Civil Disobedience,” “Setting the Color Line a Review of The Souls of Black Folk,” “Dick and Jane, Shirley and Pecola’s Role in The Bluest Eye“.

yeah, some good stuff there.