[In the excerpt below, Haines argues that Dillard's experimentations in Mornings Like This raise some disturbing questions about sources.]

When I first looked through Annie Dillard's Mornings Like This and read her program notes, I was ready to set the book aside as a stunt and not worth serious attention. Subsequent reading has, to an extent, modified that impression. The book is subtitled Found Poems. The lines, as quoted throughout, are taken from various prose texts—from an eighth grade English text, from Van Gogh's Letters, a Boy Scout Handbook, etc.—and, according to Ms. Dillard, arranged in such a way as to simulate a poem originating with a single author. In her "Author's Note" she says of the poems, "Their sentences come from the books named. I lifted them. Sometimes I dropped extra words; I never added a word." She is at least honest about her sources, in contrast to a recent perpetrator who has actually lifted whole poems from a contemporary poet, changed a word or two, and published them as his own (see Neal Bowers, "A Loss for Words, Plagiarism and Silence," The American Scholar, Fall 1994).

A few of her adaptations are especially effective. Among the best are those taken from the diary of a Russian naturalist, Mikhail Prishvin. Here are the last two stanzas of a poem constructed by Dillard from a walk in the woods as described by Prishvin, and to which she has given the title "Dash It":

      As for myself, I can only speak of what
      Made me marvel when I saw it for the first time.
      I remember my own youth when I was in love.
      I remember a puddle rippling, the insects aroused.
 
      I remember our own springtime when my lady told me:
      You have taken my best. And then I remember
      How many evenings I have waited, how much
      I have been through for this one evening on earth.

These lines are indeed poetic and moving, and might perhaps be even more so in their original context. There are others of a similar nature, such as the title poem, taken from The Countryman's Year, by David Grayson, and on the whole the collection has in places considerable interest. Nonetheless, what she has done here arouses some concern. What does work like this say about the legitimacy of authorship? Who in this instance is the author? Who can claim to be? I worry too about the example being set, and who might be influenced to attempt to repeat it. As it stands, it is mainly an interesting experiment; in the hands of someone less resourceful and intelligent than Ms. Dillard, little more than a trick to be dismissed.