RSSPlunge Me Deep: A Cento
Apr 23
Poetry, Reading, Writing building a poem, cento, danielle pafunda, national poetry month, poetry as architecture, poets and writers, writing poetry No Comments
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been following The Academy of American Poets 30 Poets 30 Days Twitter project. They’ve had some great poets guest tweeting for them. One of them, Danielle Pafunda, is hosting a cento (poems composed from the lines of other poets) contest. Throughout her day as guest Twitter-er, she tweeted 75 lines from different poems, then asked followers to compose a cento from those lines in about a day and a half.
I was loving the lines she’d chosen, so I decided to try my own. I’ve never really done this before, but it was an interesting experiment in composition, in order, in arrangement. The spirit of the cento is something new from something old, and so I was free from the stress of the words themselves–I didn’t find myself trapped in the cycle of type, delete, type, delete. Instead I was free to focus my energy on how the poem came together as a whole.
I’m sharing an excerpt from my poem below (you can see it in full here), and I encourage you to check out all the entries over at the official competition blog. There are some pretty amazing poems, and it’s interesting to see all the different ways people worked with the same initial stock of lines and even words. Thanks to Danielle Pafunda for an awesome contest idea, and for picking such great poems to work with.
For six months I arranged museum dioramas;
now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday.
Sewing up the kinks in this film, I’m
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair,
sleepily indifferent, because the continent
was clothed in trees, just jars of buttons spilled.
Once you’re done checking out all those awesome poems, get to work on your entry for the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge. The deadline’s coming up on April 27, but you still have plenty of time. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors! And don’t forget about the cool prizes!