Acclaimed poet disputes allegations of lifted material

NEW YORK – An acclaimed poet and editor says she will correct any errors in her current book after a critic alleged she had improperly lifted material.

Jill Bialosky said in a statement Thursday that she had “inadvertently” used “fragments” from “common biographical sources” for her memoir “Poetry Will Save Your Life.” On Wednesday, William Logan alleged in a post on the Tourniquet Review that Bialosky took passages from Wikipedia and other websites without crediting them. One example showed a close resemblance between a section in her book on the poet Robert Lowell and an excerpt from Lowell’s Wikipedia page.

“William Logan has extracted a few ancillary and limited phrases from my 222-page memoir that inadvertently include fragments of prior common biographical sources and tropes after a multiyear writing process,” Bialosky said in a statement released through her publisher, Atria Books. “This should not distract from the thesis of this book, which derives from my own life, my experiences and observations. I will, of course, correct any errors that are found for future editions of the book.”

Atria itself issued a statement defending the book and saying any errors would be fixed.

Bialosky, whose other works include the poetry collections “The Players” and “The End of Desire,” in 2014 received a lifetime achievement honour from the Poetry Society of America. She is an executive editor and vice-president at W.W. Norton & Company, which has published books by Adrienne Rich, Gerald Stern and other prize-winning poets.