Wordplay: Cento

I've not had much time lately for wordplay, but last evening I found myself just needing to spend some time with language...not organizing anything with it, not planning out my next writing projects (though I did that yesterday too) just enjoying it.

I always enjoy the Monday stretch over at the Miss Rumphius Effect, but I hadn't popped over there in a while. The stretch that intrigued me most last night was one she posted a couple of Mondays ago, a challenge to write a cento.

For those who have never heard of this form (I hadn't) a cento is defined as "a poem made entirely of pieces from poems by other authors. Centos can be rhymed or unrhymed, short or long." (Copying Miss R's attribution, this definition comes from The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms.)

Although I'd never heard the name of the form, I've seen similar ideas played with through "found poetry," and through the book A Stone, A Leaf, A Door (essentially prose by Thomas Wolfe that's been arranged into poems by another author).

Last night, tired as I was, this seemed just the right kind of exercise to get me reading, reflecting on, and writing poetry. I quickly pulled two books from my shelf: The One Year Book of Poetry: 365 Devotional Readings Based on Classic Christian Verse, and The Roar on the Other Side: A Guide for Student Poets. Both good books in different ways, and both crammed with lots of poems I could peruse and borrow words, lines and phrases from.

One of the enjoyable things about this creative stretch was the way it freed me to read poetry, at least the first time through, not so much for meaning as for sound. Sometimes I get caught up from the start in trying to discern what a poet is saying, and I lose the opportunity to simply fall into the poem as an artifact for the eye and ear. Last night I let myself fall, though I found that when a line grabbed me, as one almost inevitably did, I usually wanted to back up and find out why. Where did the line fit in the grander scheme of the whole poem? What would happen if I lifted it out of its context? What would happen if I lifted it out of its context and put it next to something completely different from it, written by someone else in a different time and place altogether?

The result was exhilarating. Not only for the joys of finding similar sounds and images that seemed to run through wildly disparate poems (like recurring wild flowers in amazingly different gardens) but for the ways those sounds and images began to weave together in my mind to create something entirely new.

Here's the result: the poem I assembled, followed by notes that tell you where the various lines came from.

Let this day's air
praise the Lord --
for ne'er saw I,
never felt, a calm
so deep!
Rinsed with gold,
endless, walking the fields,
the beauty of the morning;
silent, bare --
Let this day's air
praise the Lord
for strange treasures
lodged in this
fair world appear.
I cannot drift beyond
his love and care.
Let this day's air
praise the Lord --
his praise shall tune
my voice.

(EMP, 6-30-10)

"Let this day's air praise the Lord," which became my recurring line, is the first line of Robert Siegel's poem "Rinsed with Gold, Endless, Walking the Fields," printed on page 147 of The Roar on the Other Side.

"Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!" comes from William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," the poem for July 3 in The One Year Book of Poetry.

It seemed to be that returning to Siegel's poem, with the line he draws from his title, "Rinsed with gold, endless, walking the fields" provided the perfect description for that deep calm.

And then it made sense to return to Wordsworth again for "the beauty of the morning; silent, bare..."

As I kept going back to the Siegel refrain, I kept thinking of reasons why the very air around us praises the Lord (and oh it does). And so I moved to "strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear" from Thomas Traherne's poem "The Salutation," the poem for June 30 in The One Year Book of Poetry.

Both the sound and sense of that line seemed to move naturally to the more individual and personal gratitude of the line "I cannot drift beyond his love and care" from "The Eternal Goodness" by John Greenleaf Whittier (poem for May 25 from the One Year Book).

And as I repeated Siegel's line one more time, I wanted to try to tie it into a different (and again more personal) line involving praise, and so borrowed "his praise shall tune my voice" from William Cowper's poem "Joy and Peace in Believing" (the poem for May 14 in the One Year Book).

*******

This was a fascinating exercise. The poem I ended up stitching together somehow felt greater than the sum of its parts, more like a choir of voices singing to me of similar themes. I found myself grateful to remember that everything that has breath praises the Lord, and that my own breath, my own voice, can be "tuned" by listening to the praise all around me...in the air, in the strange treasures of the world, and in the poems of those who have gone before.

I'll definitely be adding cento poems to my regular repertoire of wordplay. If you're inspired to give it a try, let me know how it works for you!