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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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

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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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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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