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street wall collage - Photo:PxHere
The cento is a poetry form that I used with students but that I haven't used myself or used as a prompt on Poets Online. "Cento" comes from the Latin word for “patchwork." Centos are sometimes called collage poems because they are made up of lines from poems by other poets.
Poets often borrow lines from other writers. It might be an epigraph or the lines might be mixed with their own writing. It sounds like plagiarism and that was part of my point in using it with students. How can you take from other writers legitimately? In prose, we have citations and works cited, but in poetry, other than the epigraph, we don't always cite the source.
If I were to use "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all" in my poem, I might put it in quotes or italics, but I probably wouldn't drop in John Keats' name. But a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources.
Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil. The cento evidently originated in ancient Greece. There are examples in Aristophanes's plays where lines have been taken from Aeschylus and Homer. Roman poets, as early as the late second century, lifted lines from Virgil. It seems to me to be a bit of thievery. Borrowing can be a creative process. Copyright law allows for reuse when the new use is "transformative." But being transformative is a high bar, which is probably why I haven't used it as a prompt for Poets Online. Separating thievery from transformation is not as easy to do as one might think.
I'd never heard of the form before but it brought to mind how I used collage as a therapeutic tool with Family Therapy clients ... and, on a different front, an ongoing debate I have with the organizer of an annual arts competition I routinely enter ... about the legality of using images borrowed from magazines, newspapers and the Internet in collage.
ReplyDeleteI challenged myself to write a 32 line Cento drawing lines from one month of the Poets Online archive, settling on July 2020 ~ Undoing. I debated on whether to include the poem itself ... in case you decided to use Cento as November's Prompt (in which case I'd submit it there).
Here's what I came up with. Thanks for the challenge.
NOT WITHOUT HOPE
a Cento ~ lines borrowed from Poets Online archive ~ July 2020
I’m not sure what we could have done
That night in December
On a boardwalk somewhere in the south of England
At the foot of the steps at Waterloo Station
Backs hugging the drop off lane
The shadowy valleys of your eyes filling with light
Life blossoming into being
We did not speak of fear
Not for the sun’s burning
We didn’t speak of the shadow of death
Our past lives didn’t float off to sea
Beyond the piers and dry-docks
I wrote a list of all my regrets
As though the world weren’t ending
Making it unusable in the future
I’m not wanting to think what could still be
I am not a tree for you to water / I am not
It's never pleasant to undo
That which is not
But we are not alone, not without a voice
No new-born cry, nor last gasp
It is the emptiness out of
The first time we met
There is reason why we must not forget
Memories that haven't been fractured by time
Despite a lot of long days and wasted efforts
Lives, leaving nothing behind
Like a beckoning future
It is where time is born
The screen where words appear
Who knew we would outlive and outlast our wildest
expectations?
Frank Kelly
I also took up the prompt. Mine is made from lines I heard at an open poetry reading.
ReplyDeleteOpen Reading Cento
My body lets me know where it is
with many, many sensations
but nothing is worth thinking about.
It really is. Nothing is worth thinking about
because there are no in-between times.
All times are for mindfulness.
I eat slowly.
Things you enjoy should be done slowly.
Slow is not better than fast, it’s just different.
Practice the feeling of calm.
Sit still, relaxed.
Close your eyes.
Rest on your breath.
Mind states,
body sensations
What is true?
Discomfort is clinging to an experience
that can’t continue
or being eager to end before it is over.
Enjoy what is happening right now.
I sat today in a rainy cafe
writing this poem
and
wondering about the death of death
and enjoying my coffee and a cigarette.