The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems

Preface

25 A noTe from The edITor As I was putting this collection together, one of the contributors, Allan douglass Coleman, brought up several thought-provoking ideas. “Is ‘cento’ just another word for found poem,” he asked, “an attempt to gussy up that concept (as giclée is used to gussy up ink-jet prints in the fine-art field) and perhaps give it a history that goes back further than the early twentieth century?” He goes on to explain his reasoning: As this may suggest (and as my poems probably don’t), I’m something of a formalist, something of a traditionalist, and even something of a conservative. By this I mean that I think forms in art arise for a purpose, and that their transformation, violation, or abandonment should happen purposefully and consciously. I don’t want to be the poetry equivalent of Moliere’s bourgeois gentleman, proudly discovering that I’ve been generating centos all my life. Coleman explains further: I suppose my underlying query—and perhaps my suggestion—is that an anthology such as you propose, which as the first of its kind will stand for some time as definitive, requires a more precise and rigorous definition of the form than you provide in your guidelines. . . . First of its kind? Perhaps so. Definitive? I’m not so sure. This collection may help to define the term “cento,” but my main goal is, simply, to present an intriguing array of poems in a form that I’ve grown to love. Also, to be honest, I simply started using the term “cento,” then got in the habit. Other terms, such as “collage poems,” “patchwork poems,” and “mosaics,” are equally appealing to me. The original rules for the “cento” form were quite strict. However, as david Lehman suggests in his introduction, the rules and the definition have evolved over the years. 26 In selecting the poems for this collection, I have used the definition Lehman gives in his opening paragraph: A cento is a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources— often, though not always, from great poets of the past. In Latin the word cento means “patchwork,” and the verse form resembles a quilt of discrete lines stitched together to make a whole. And, about that “bourgeois gentleman” in Moliere . . . I don’t mind confessing that, in this case, I’m the female version of that fellow, who was tickled to learn that he’d been using prose his whole life. I wrote a cento before I’d even heard of the form. In the late 1990s, I sent dana Gioia a copy of a poem that I’d composed using mix-and-match snippets from emily dickinson. He very kindly wrote back and congratulated me on my cento. Cento? I had to look up the term in my dictionary of poetry. From that day on, I began studying the form, and I became hooked. similarly, several contributors to this book told me that they’d also been interested in this type of poem for a long time but hadn’t known what to call it. should we have known sooner? Well, yes. Knowledge is, after all, a good thing. But learning is exciting whenever it takes place, whether it happens in the “right” order or not. I first encountered a collage poem when I was about ten years old, reading my Companion Library edition of Huckleberry Finn (which has Tom Sawyer on the flip side). At the time, I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but the encounter has stayed with me nevertheless. Huck and Jim run into a pair of con artists who claim to be a “duke” and a “dauphin” in exile. In the passage below, Huck describes the fake duke’s preparations to deliver his soliloquy: so he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear . . . Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted 27 back, looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth; andafterthat,allthroughhisspeech,hehowled,andspreadaround,andswelled up his chest, and just...