This affecting tale of a young poet who loses the rights to his work appears in the latest issue of TYPO.

Optional technical note for logophiles: “Uncopyrightable” is one of the longest heterograms in English, consisting of fifteen unrepeated letters. Each paragraph is 60 words, with a two-word anagram of the title in the middle.

Here’s how it begins:

UNCOPYRIGHTABLE

Many poets have attained a fleeting fame, and were then forgotten. The public flocked to their readings and fawned over their books, only to abandon them for fresher talents. Creighton Paulby was one of these, a young poet whose moment of notoriety was followed by oblivion. His story is particularly affecting, since he also lost the rights to his work.

Paulby was born in a tarpaper shack in a remote swampland. He was an only child, and his parents paid little attention to him. I can offer you no lucent biography for him, only the dismal record of a dark and lonely childhood, spent idling by the fetid waters of a swamp, his days unenlivened by either friends or education. 

His parents were kind enough, but busy with their own interests. Haggard, obsessive Mama devoted many hours to tending her still, which produced a brackish moonshine that was probably pathogenic; burly, sullen Papa earned a precarious living by bolting together ramshackle furniture and growing sickly herbs and vegetables, both of which he peddled from his wagon in the nearby towns.

Consequently, Creighton was usually left to his own devices. He lounged by the swamp next to the family property, amusing himself with the plants and animals in his desolate birthplace. Young Creighton made toys and games from stones and sticks, dug for fancied pirate treasure in the mucky banks, and trapped an occasional wild animal to tame as a pet.