For our December 2025 issue, we are combining two poetry forms, the cento and apostrophe.
The cento form is ancient, in existence since at least the days of Virgil and Homer. In the Modern era, famous examples include T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Ezra Pound's "Cantos."
A purist version of a cento poem is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from other poems, essentially creating a collage of existing works. The term "cento" is derived from the Latin word for "patchwork garment".
More recent centos include John Ashbery's odd, "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" with lines from poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Edward Lear, and others, and a long poem by Connie Hershey, "Ecstatic Permutations"
The model cento we are featuring is from Simone Muench’s fifth collection titled Wolf Cento, which is composed of short poems all titled "Wolf Cento,” and we selected one of them. Muensch footnotes the poem with her sources for the wolf poems: Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaux, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joyce Mansour, William Burroughs, Meret Oppenheim, Mary Low, Adrienne Rich, and Carl Sandburg.
Though centos are usually made from lines from other poems (and sometimes prose), they could be made from lines from anyone, such as a family member.
For the December issue, we added the apostrophe form to this call for submissions.
Apostrophe poems are directly addressed to a person or thing that is almost always absent and cannot respond. For example, Wordsworth's sonnet "Milton" which begins: "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour." "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg is addressed to Walt Whitman. But not all apostrophe poems are addressed to other poets or writers. Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is addressed to her deceased father, a dentist and professor, and Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" is addressed to his dying father, a grammar school teacher. A third father poem is Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," which is also addressed to a deceased father.
And apostrophes are not limited to people. Robert Burns' "To a Mouse" is addressed to a mouse -"Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie - but the famous closing is an apostrophe to the common man's fate - "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promis'd joy!"
Shakespeare's Hamlet addresses the inanimate skull of Yorick, and Juliet addresses Romeo from the balcony, though he is not there at that time. And many an apostrophe is addressed to something abstract, such as love, fate, night, summer, etc.
Submit an apostrophe directly addressed (usually in the title or first line) that is also a cento, using lines by other writers. In a sense, this will be a very specific kind of found poem. If you choose to write about a person who is not a writer that you can borrow lines from, use quotes best remembered from them, or at least in their style. (You might want those "quotes" to be punctuated or in italics?) If you choose an inanimate object, it is more challenging since you will need to borrow lines from poems or prose that relate. Optionally, you can footnote your cento with the sources which would probably be of interest to readers.
Simone Muench was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas and holds a PhD from the University of Illinois Chicago. She is the author of
seven full-length collections, including
The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), co-written with Jackie K. White, and
Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry. Muench is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry, the 2014 Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, two Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and other honors.
Simone is the writing program director at Lewis University, where she teaches English, creative writing, and film studies. She is the chief faculty advisor for
Jet Fuel Review and a senior poetry editor for
Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Chicago.
Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org
