Prompt: Cento and Apostrophe

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

The Cento

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.

---

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

---

Prompt: Terrance Hayes and the Golden Shovel

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes invented a poetry form he calls the Golden Shovel. You take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire, and use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem while maintaining the order. So, if you choose a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long.

This borrowing method is not without precedent in poetry. One similar form is quite ancient: the cento, in which you make a poem entirely from other poets' lines. Another form makes a new poem by removing lines from an existing poem - that is known as an erasure.

For my own first Golden Shovel attempt, I wrote a poem for my daily writing practice last year. I chose a poem by Gary Snyder called "Changing Diapers" and used his line "you and me and Geronimo." I wrote it in the ronka form that all my daily poems for 2014 used.

Geronimo [after Gary Snyder]

After the reading, talking briefly to you
and recalling another time – when I, Steve and
you shared coffee conversation – you remembered me.
A wonderful lie. We are men, and
we jump like paratroopers and shout Geronimo.

My poem came out of a brief encounter with Snyder recently when he read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. It also recalls a longer conversation we had at another Dodge Festival more than 20 years ago.

In what I believe must be the first Golden Shovel poem, Terrance Hayes used a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. He started with Brooks' often-anthologized poem, "We Real Cool." His poem is called "The Golden Shovel.".

"The rules" for this new form are:

• Take a line(s) from a favorite poem
• Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem and
• Keep the end words in the order they appeared originally. That means that you could read the stanza at the right edge like an acrostic.
• Give credit to the original poet (it can be in the title, an epigram or within the poem) and for our prompt also include a note a reference to the poem, though it doesn't have to be part of the poem itself. It would be great if you could include a link to the original poem online so that readers could see your inspiration.
• The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the original poem, but it can be related.

We know how poets love to play by the rules. Mr. Hayes pushes a bit on his own rules by using more than a line and and using every word from the Brooks poem. Twice. Setting the bar high. In his collection, Lighthead, he also has a poem using Elizabeth Alexander's poem, “Ladders” (for his "Last Train to Africa") and borrows lyrics from songs by Marvin Gaye and Louis Armstrong for others.

___________________________________

Terrance Hayes' poem “The Golden Shovel” is from Lighthead (2010, Penguin) which won the National Book Award.




Extra Credit: Think you know why Hayes called his poem and form "The Golden Shovel?"   Tell us your answer in a comment on this post.