Spontaneously spouting poetry requires work

Sure, we all want to be able to throw off a line of poetry in conversation to sound as brilliant as we really are, but what to memorize for maximum smarm?

Shel Silverstein writes from beyond the grave

Shel Silverstein, beloved poet, will be publishing a second posthumous collection for children. I would be more excited, but I recently saw a staging of "Shel's Shorts," which was, perhaps, the dirtiest collection of short plays I have ever seen. Shel, your childlike wonder is now tainted by hilarious dirtiness.

Don't believe me? The first one stars a guy who dreams about effing his daughter. I saw this sitting between my parents. Emotionally scarred!

Finding poetry in all the wrong places

So here's a doozy for you: is "found" poetry plagiarized? Andrew Motion's recently published poem, An Equal Voice, is made up of quotations from several generations of shell-shocked soldiers. But Ben Shepard says that almost all of the quotations were taken from his book.

Shepard didn't write the quotes, but he did collect them (although, since they're from a number of generations, I don't think he conducted the interviews himself). Alison Flood wrote in the Guardian article:

Motion said his poem drew on "a long and honourable tradition" of "found" poetry, pointing to TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Ruth Padel's poetic biography of Charles Darwin and Anthony Thwaite's Victorian Voices. "It goes right back to Shakespeare," he said. "It's very well established."

So: plagiarized or not? And, if not plagiarized, ethically questionable?