Discovering new forms of poetry

can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack.  Finding a form that perfectly fits a poem idea turns that pile of hay into gold.  This at least was my experience with the cento as it is a form I discovered in reverse. I wrote a poem draft and then searched and searched the proverbial haystack until I could figure out what it was I was trying to write.

After the 2016 election, and the horror I feared would ensue, I was heart broken.  I kept hearing the words of Emma Lazarus’s*, “The New Colossus,” whose lines proclaim, “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free[.]”  These are the words that adorn the statue of liberty.  I was hearing the words but in a different rhythm and tone.  I was hearing Emma’s words inside the structure of Sylvia Plath’s, “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” and my mind was transposing lines from the first poem into Plath’s villanelle that reads, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;/I lift my lids and all is born again.”  To soothe my soul that post-election-day I created this newly imagined version hobbled together by the poetry of these two authors (and when I realized the title a third author, Billie Holiday, also delivered a central piece to what became this new poem).

Once the poem was drafted, I was stuck.  I didn’t know what to do with it because I didn’t know how to credit it or what to call it.  I scoured the internet with reverse definitions as best I could but was having trouble finding the right poetry term.  This wasn’t exactly erasure or pastiche poetry.  I then remembered my friend and poet LeAnne Hunt* blogs about poetry prompts.  It was there that I finally found the description of the cento!  That is:

A Cento is a poem made up from the words of other writers. 

Doing the Wikipedia-internet-research-spiral I discovered that this is indeed an ancient form, one of the first known examples is by the Roman author, Hosidius Geta, who used lines from Virgil to compose his original work, Medea, written sometime in the 2nd-3rd century AD.  In Greece it was also in practice to use lines from Homer to create new works. Recalling familiar lines was especially useful to oral traditions, because it entertained and engaged the gathered audience.  

“The Latin term cento derives from Greek κέντρων (gen. ), meaning "'to plant slips' (of trees)," says Wikipedia. A later word in Greek, κεντρόνη, means "patchwork garment".  I like both of these translations, as writers we are often called “weavers,” of stories, and so a cento is this “garment,” made up from snippets of cloth woven by other authors.  And If these stories have a purpose it is to plant ideas that will one day thrive and forest and bloom for the reader.  It is an exciting form when thinking about the progression of ideas, the pedagogy of thoughts that we as readers and writers must cultivate.  The cento occupies a space between reader and author, between the self and others.

There are many ways to collaborate through the cento.  It’s no surprise that the cento has become a form I’ve returned to over the years.   It is a way to remix and sample from the greats, from the poets you want to be in conversation with.  And it is a powerful lens into the use of voice.  Centos allow us to do close reading of the original text, whether positive or negative.  Playing with someone else’s words brings a whole new insight into just how they are functioning within a poem and the tricks the author is implementing. 

This is a form that can be used to modernize voices

from the past or to completely flip them on their logic.  Centos can be a form of critique to works by authors that are misleading or offensive to you—a way to confront voices that are racist, bigoted, or sexist.  These voices can be rearranged and reconfigured to find whole new meanings or just to point out the error of perspective.