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.

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At Home with Piles of Books

Hopefully, your tsundoku is not this big.

I wrote a post about Japanese loanwords for another blog that focuses on word origins, names and language oddities. A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language (the donor language) and incorporated into another language without translation.

We have loanwords in English from many other languages and a good number from Japanese, including karaoke, karate, tsunami, typhoon, teriyaki, sake, sushi, manga, anime, tofu, emoji, origami, shiatsu, ramen, and wasabi.

The new word for me is Tsundoku which I think might apply to some poets and writers. It's one of those words that beyond a meaning implies almost a lifestyle. The word is used to mean acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in your home without reading them or refers to an actual "reading pile."

Readers and writers do tend to have these piles. I have one on my nightstand (mostly novels), one in the family room (many magazines) and two in my office (one with non-fiction; one with poetry books).

Most people with these piles intend to read those books, but sometimes the pile grows faster than our reading consumes it.

Another Japanese loanword I recently discovered isn't meant to be used for poets or other writers, but I know a few who it describes. 

 

Otaku literally means “house" but in English and Japanese, the word is used to describe someone who spends a lot of their free time at home.

In the original Japanese usage it meant home playing video games, reading manga and watching anime. I know a few writers who I think spend too much time inside reading and writing and not enough time in nature or with people. The word is not always considered negative. Fans of anime and manga use otaku to describe others who have similar interests.

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Prompt: Sleep

To sleep, perchance to dream," said the Bard. That is sometimes easier said than done. Is your sleep that of John Keats?

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,

Even when the eyes are willing, the sleep may not come.

And it would be sweet if sleep brought dreams in this cold month about spring, as in the "Winter Sleep" of Edith Matilda Thomas

I know it must be winter (though I sleep)—
I know it must be winter, for I dream
I dip my bare feet in the running stream,
And flowers are many, and the grass grows deep.

Is this month's call for submissions "sleep" or "insomnia"? I think those are two sides of the same coin. Maybe your sleep associations are more like Rita Dove's "Insomnia Etiquette"

There's a movie on, so I watch it.

The usual white people
in love, distress. The usual tears.
Good camera work, though:
sunshine waxing the freckled curves
of a pear, a clenched jaw—
more tragedy, then.

I get up for some scotch and Stilton.
I don’t turn on the lights.
I like moving through the dark
while the world sleeps on,
serene as a stealth bomber
nosing through clouds...

Or is it more like the "Insomnia" from my undergraduate poetry professor, Alicia Ostriker?

...But it's really fear you want to talk about
and cannot find the words
so you jeer at yourself

you call yourself a coward
you wake at 2 a.m. thinking failure,
fool, unable to sleep, unable to sleep

buzzing away on your mattress with two pillows
and a quilt, they call them comforters,
which implies that comfort can be bought

and paid for, to help with the fear, the failure
your two walnut chests of drawers snicker, the bookshelves mourn
the art on the walls pities you, the man himself beside you

asleep smelling like mushrooms and moss is a comfort...

I chose as our model this month, a "Sleep" poem from Rock Tree Bird by Twyla M. Hansen. I like the contrast of sleep seen from the perspectives of a child, teen and adult. I like the idea on this cold day that "the ancient ones" probably spent most of winter sleeping.

...the ancient ones
whose lives revolved around the same sun—sun worshipers—

who discovered fire, calculated the heavens, tracked stars,
who likely slept through most of this gloomy season...

What are your sleep associations? Do they come from your childhood, a baby or child's sleep, what dreams may come, or not come, along with restless sleep, nightmares, and no sleep at all?

The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2024
Please refer to our submission guidelines, and look at our archive of 25 years of prompts and poems to get a sense of the poems we publish.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Paying the Poetry Bills

Poets Online has been a free site since it started in 1998. Free to use, free to read the issues and free to submit. That doesn't mean it doesn't have bills. All of us (mostly me, Ken) who read the poems, do some editing and then format the web versions and promote all of it through social media and our blog are unpaid. It is a labor of mostly love. 

We need to pay for the hosting and for the domain poetsonline.org and through the years the only source of income has been by having Amazon.com links to books and occasionally other items

At the end of 2023, Amazon is going to stop allowing image links (like a book cover) and many of its banner and box ads that we have used on the website and blog. Poof. They will disappear and sometimes leave behind an ugly white block in their wake on the screen. We received about a two-month notice about this and it will be quite impossible for us to fix all those links easily. It also means people are less likely to click on a link and possibly make a purchase. 

Each purchase made through our links sends a few pennies (literally) into our account. There are months where that income doesn't even hit the Amazon $10 minimum so it just gets held over. 

I don't know anyone who went into poetry to make money. I certainly did not, but I'd like to see Poets Online at least break even for the year.

People have suggested adding one of those Patreon or some such donation link but that feels wrong. To charge a fee to submit, as many poetry publishers do to cover costs, would require some fancy setup or using a service like Submittable (which would cost us more than we would probably take in). And I know that a fee would stop many people from submitting.

Poets Online began amongst some poet friends and grew and was always meant to be open to a wide range of poets by age and experience. We would like to keep it that way. 

So, if you shopping online for books or whatever, you can help us by using our general Amazon link link (You can bookmark the short version https://bit.ly/poetsamazon) or by clicking on any of our poetry book links for our featured poets and their books and making a purchase. Anything purchased through our general link counts - buy that engagement ring there! Using the links does not affect your price. 

Thanks for reading this post, and for using the site whether you only read the poems or submit your own poems for consideration. We hope to still be here at the end of 2024.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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25 Years of Poets Online

Closing out 2023 means that Poets Online has been online for 25 years. A significant number for any publication, especially one that features only poetry.

Our January issue will be the 316th prompt and issue of poems. I never referred to them as "issues" at the start back in 1998, but over the years as our audience and contributors expanded that became the label. 

The site started as an e-mail exchange among four poets taking turns at suggesting a prompt and then e-mailing our poems to each other. As more poets joined the group, it became an awkward mailing process, and the website was created. The following year we created a mailing list to remind people to check the latest prompt and read the poems. That list now has hundreds of subscribers.

By 20023, a free hosting website and free domain weren't enough, so I bought the domain poetsonline.org, purchased hosting, and created a new list and email using Google.

We still try to accept the best poems that respond to the current prompt in a serious way. We have always thought of the site as a place where poets of varying ages and experiences could get published. We have plenty of people who read and don't submit and a good number of teachers and students have written us to say that they find the site useful. More than a hundred other sites link to us. If your poem is published and you use it in a book later, Poets Online should be acknowledged as its first appearance. 

Although I never know how many more anniversaries we will have, I am thankful for all the poems I've read and poets I have made contact with over this quarter century. 

Ken Ronkowitz

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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"The Clock" - a prose poem for a lady

I am neither a big fan of the poet Baudelaire nor am I a fan of prose poems, but this one got my attention.

 I'll admit that the opening got my interest and I wanted to know how, But I too often find prose poems to be just prose. Like flash fiction. Poetic language? Perhaps, but many novelists have poetic language but I would call the novel a epic prose poem. 

I'm told that intent is key in making a prose poem a poem. That is a tough one to evaluate.

Feel free to educate me on this with a comment.

"L'Horloge" (The Clock)

a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire [translated by David Lehman]

– for a lady

How do the Chinese tell time? By looking at the eyes of their

cats. Here’s how.

A lost missionary, afoot in a sleepy suburb of Nankin, had

forgotten his watch and asked a little boy what time it was.

After a moment’s hesitation, this street urchin of the celestial

Empire said: ‘‘Wait, I will tell you.’’ A few seconds later, he

reappeared with a very fat cat in his arms, looked into the 

whites of her eyes, and said, ‘‘It is almost but not quite noon.’’ 

Which was the case.

As for me, if I favor my beautiful Feline, so felicitously named –

the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart, and the perfume 

of my spirit, day and night, rain or shine – in the depths of her

 adorable eyes I can always tell what time it is, and it is always

 the same time, an hour vast, solemn, limitless as space undivided

 into minutes and seconds – a lingering hour no clock observes, 

soft as a sigh, swift as a glance.

And if an intruder came to disturb my study of this enchanting dial,

if some malevolent genie, some demon of ill fortune, were to address

me as a vain and idle mortal and say: ‘‘What are you staring at?

What are you looking for in the eyes of that creature? Is time told there,

 and can you tell it?’’ I would reply without hesitation. ‘‘I know what time

it is; it is Eternity.’’

Madame, is not this a most meritorious bagatelle, and as full of vain

self-regard as your high and mighty self? Frankly, my dear, it has given me

so much pleasure embroidering this pretentious piece of puffery that I ask

nothing of you in return.

from the Summer 2019 issue of The Yale Review, in which four other prose poems by Charles Baudelaire appear.

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Blake's Tyger and Lamb

Blake's illustrated version of the poem

William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is his most-read poem. It consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation. It asks how the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger. 

The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion's most difficult questions: Why does God allow evil to exist?

I first read the poem in a high school class and my initial question was "Why did he spell tiger wrong?" Not the deepest of literary issues. In writing this essay, I did some digging for an answer since my teacher had no answers other than "It's what they did back then."

 William Blake intentionally spelled "tiger" as "tyger" in his poem that was in his collection titled "Songs of Experience" (1794). It is thought that changing the traditional spelling of "tiger" to "tyger" not only gave the word a unique. mythical and archaic quality. It also allowed Blake to exercise creative freedom about the creature he was describing. The tyger is a literal creature but also a symbolic force.

Blake was also known for his interest in the relationship between sound and meaning in language and tyger captures the phonetic qualities of the word.

"...What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
...Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" 

The lamb refers to Blake's poem, "The Lamb," where God is associated with a gentle and innocent lamb. 

THE TYGER

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,|
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Compare that tiger to the lamb. Blake was clearly a religious person who saw visions of angels, but to me "The Tyger" is a poem that literally questions God. Can God be credited with both the good and evil in the world? I din't think you could give him the credit for creating the "lambs" of this world without also giving him responsibility for the "tygers" of this world.  That was my high school interpretation (which my teacher did not appreciate or agree with) and it remains my interpretation.

THE LAMB

Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice! 

         Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee 
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.

         Little Lamb God bless thee. 
         Little Lamb God bless thee.

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