Today’s prompt at Found Poetry Review comes from Simone Muench, who wrote a favourite of mine, a collection titled Wolf Centos. Please click on the link to access the full post, and for more information about Simone, as well as to view other poems answering the challenge today.
The prompt:
“The Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira created the cento “Anthology” (see below) using lines from his own poems, instead of employing the traditional method of cento-construction (in which you build a poem entirely out of lines from other people’s poems). Following his example, write a cento that is a self-portrait, or anthology of your life, utilizing lines and fragments from your own work.
Or, alternatively, create a “self-portrait” cento using lines and fragments from other people’s poems (the traditional method), or song lyrics, or prose (fiction and/or nonfiction)
*To see the basic stipulations for writing a traditional cento, see http://myenchiridion.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html
I decided to use my own poems as source material. To keep it simple, I chose only from poems written in 2016. My attempt is titled “Only About Light”
Only About Light
Sometimes I wake, not because there was music—
here the silence deafens as only silence can.
Suppose the world was only about light—
the ultra-sentient particles.
I convince myself each fear is a chimera
while we sleep the Earth rotates east
the song dog
lifts his muzzle to the wind
and desert dog song soars skyward in a moon moan
but he doesn’t understand the depth of sky.
Carol A. Stephen
April 7, 2016
*the phrase, song dog is quoted from Alice Notley’s Culture of One
For more centos also check out Newfoundland poet, Mary Dalton, who wrote Hooking. Each of the poems in this collection used lines from a specific location in the source poems, for example a poem might consist of lines that were the 9th line of each source poem. Her process is detailed at the back of the book. Hooking, from Vehicule Press
At this link, Mary discusses her book in an interview with The Malahat Review’s John Barton.
Quillfyre 