Great Regulars: American poetry criticism faces

a major problem, one that has nothing to do with poetry, or readers, or anything remotely literary. The problem is that a critic who wants to quote a poem in a book has to face a permissions regime that ranges from unpredictable to plain crazy, as I discovered while working on a guidebook to modern poetry for general readers. The permissions took months to compile, and the initial estimate was nearly $20,000.

The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment.

from David Orr: The New York Times: When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse

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