In praise of the cento, with free PDF at-home workshop.

The cento is a poetic form that relies on appropriation. It is a collage built from lines taken from other sources.

In Latin, cento means ‘‘patchwork’’, evoking the collage-like nature of combinations. In a patchwork quilt, the creative freedom comes from two places:

1 the choice of fabrics (i.e. the lines selected)

2 the particular stitching between patches, or how the poet combines the various lines (i.e. enjambment, spacing strategies, fragmentation, use of the field, etc.)

There are many cento strategies, and the form really allows you to be creative about spacing, attribution, interlocutors, line breaks—it’s a wonderful form to use in order to study poetry more closely.

A cento has the thrill of a logic puzzle, or labyrinth, without a particular ending. There are many persmissions in the cento form, and each permission is a creative opportuntity, or a way in which things could be otherwise.

Play with lineation/enjambment so that selected lines are not always one complete line. Mix different source lines by stitching together fragments. Change tenses (or not). Add conjunctions/prepositions(or not). Use the original punctuation, or add your own. Use the original capitalizations, or change them to fit your plan for the cento.Use the cento in a novel way to create a tribute to a poet or school of poets…

Anyway, here is a free PDF you can download and share to play with the cento. Just click on the image below (whose illustration is by Alice Notley and part of one the writing prompts) and enjoy.

And here’s a sample writing prompt from the cento fever workshop.

Mary Ruefle: The Utmost of It

“The most of it was her handwriting.”

Mary Ruefle is the poet of the Utmost of It.

Or, that’s what I call her in my head, and on the pages of the notebooks where I address her, or question her, or simply continue the dialogue my words find with her own work, and how she sees the world.

Technically, Mary Ruefle is the poet-prosodist of The Most of It , "her first book of prose" titled after one of the 30 pieces, which is titled after its own first line: "My Aunt Miel, who never married and whom I never met, was eccentric, and the most of it was her handwriting. "

Aunt Miel was Mary’s mother's sister. The most of it was her handwriting. Miel worked as a Singer sewing machine model who sat in windows and doorways to demonstrate the aura of electric sewing to others. She was beautiful, alluring, and she wrote long letters that arrived on Thursdays which everyone wanted to read but no one could because her lettering was too large. Those too-big letters, that too-big life, that ginormous persona imagined by the speaker who remembers a game she loved playing when she was six.

The game involved standing inside of Miel's O's, and then lying down, allowing them to encircle her perfectly, hopping from to to o in "soon,", while her own sister “crucified herself” on the t's.

Both girls "would like our letters side-by-side"when the word "Tom "appeared the sisters are performing for their mom but also sharing in the letter from their aunt.

And the question about letters is how one can live in them, or how one can relate to them across time. Miel’s 25-foot letters couldn't be kept or preserved, but they are also the combination of every child's dreamed freedom — page 63.


”The most of it was her.”

Confession: I love taking one of Ruefle’s claims and cutting off the end to see how the claim walks afterwards. The most of it was her handwriting. But the most of it was also her, somehow, this woman named Aunt Miel who was living in a world the child could only imagine.

“Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips.”

Here is how Ruefle qualifies that metaphor.

From Ruefle’s My Private Property.

Ruefle’s irreverent reverence is epistemologically contagious.

I mean: one way to play, or to write, or to do whatever it is we do with a pen and paper, begins with borrowing the head of someone’s else’s statue and building your own torso, maybe adding hips, or even fleshing out feet.

I mean: “Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips…” is where you begin.

“Fear has only the word ear inside of it.”

Ruefle frequently uses a word as a starting point for a poem or essay, and then circles it, poking at it, shining light on it, setting child minds around it, exploring the ways in which the word relates to life.

Sometimes, she leaves this word in the title.

Her essay, "On Fear," is wonderful; I return to it constantly, particularly her articulations of dread. And I’m excerpting this portion just to emphasize how Ruefle literally plays with etymyology —- how she treats etymology as a form of human play rather than scholarship.

From “On Fear” by Mary Ruefle.

“I want to go into the forest and collect lichen.”

"How could I recognize the dead lichen among the living lichen?" Ruefle asks in "Lichen" when trying to find a way to collect forest lichen without causing any harm by "kidnapping a lichen mother".

“I had to admit I could not tell the difference between the living and the dead,” the speaker acknowledges.

Because the poet knows the lichen is "not of " her species, she knows that she does not know the shape of their lives. Nor could she know the shape of their death – although she concludes that lichen "certainly did not bury their dead" because she seems to associate this burying only with humans. The evidence that lichen bury their dead would likely look similar to evidence that lichen did not bury their dead, which is to say—- how would a human know?

"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he previously imagined possible." This is how she opens "Hazeline," trying to figure out when her father died if he claims to have died during surgery.

What happens to those who die and live? What does it mean to die for a minute? At what point does one become officially resurrected? Ruefle's interest in theology intersects with moments of human absurdity—and I love this aspect of her irreverence.

Look, sometimes the poet destroys us by redefining a word with an image. “Deconstruction” will never be the same.


Utmosting Our Way Through the Dark

I want to end by sharing the talk on bringing joy to your writing practice which Ruefle delivered at the Bennington Writing Seminars Commencement Address on June 11, 2022.

And to draw attention to how Ruefle plays with words in order to parse them, how, for example, she evokes the relationship between “poetry” and “poverty.” But also to note her respect for ruins—for the ruins of books, humans, stones, artwork, civilization, idols, “slow-motion cherry blossoms,” and anything we don’t see disappearing, anything which disappears without giving a damn whether we see them doing their disappear-tango thing.

I love her.

I love how she quotes Tom Cruise so that I can laugh and cry at the futility of this calling, or the absurdity of dreams, hopes, beliefs, hero stories, Tom Cruise in general…

“Words, words, words”—Ruefle, more than any contemporary poet, prepares me to write the incredible joy of not knowing anything at all, and watching in fascination as language rips open the seams and mouths bloom like a run in the crotch of tan pantyhose while standing in line, waiting for a sanctified wafer which may also be the body of a human who died.

Annie Ernaux on abortion (from IWWG free-write August 2022).

[This is an excerpt from a longer workshop given for International Women Writer’s Guild this summer. Other readings for this workshop included "Etiology" by Linda Gregg; "Short Talk on Defloration" by Anne Carson; "The Little Girl Dreams of Dying" by Cameron Awkward Rich; Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920, collage, mixed media; "Cut with the Kitchen Knife" by Rosmarie Waldrop; Carlos Drummond de Andrade's "In the Middle of the Road" (trans. by Elizabeth Bishop); Robert Desnos, "Dove of the Ark" (translated by Timothy Adès); Linda Pastan's "The Almanac of Last Things". If you’d like a copy of the handout, email me and I’ll be happy to share it.]

It Keeps Happening: Annie Ernaux’s temporal strategies

Each word has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning. 


My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:

Poems are made from words, and some words carry so much that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. Abortion is one of those words — it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. Abortion, in many ways, is meaningless when one says it because it's abstraction overwhelms its contextual reality. As a word, abortion is like God, nearly meaningless and certain to evoke strong emotions.

If anything is still interesting about abortion, it is this abstraction—this failure to mean what we expect when we use it.

Epigraph from Ernaux’s Happening.

One of my favorite French authors, Annie Ernaux, titled her book about abortion Happening.

In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux  found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to break the silence of shame. 

At a time when abortion was illegal in France, Ernaux attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died.

Happening is not the same thing as happened. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time. 

Although the book includes a memoir, it has been called an "eponymous novel." Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errors of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. But abortion is the subject today—and abortion is a topic that haunts the author —it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Chist. Throughout the book she wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it. Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control. 

*

Am I the author of my abortion? I have asked this question of the writer who uses my name. It is a question I love for its frictions.

Two more thoughts:

  1. "I shall have no more power over my text," Ernaux writes. Writing about it will also have its aftereffects—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.

  2. "This thing had no place in language," Ernaux says of abortion. It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: "(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy." 

This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable, the marginalized. 

To quote Ernaux's book:

I want to pause at this invisible ellipsis—or the breakoff point—the cliff labeled “This investigation” which waits for you to stand at its steep edge and look down. There is no “correct” moral response or sentiment: I laughed during my abortion. I laughed at the absurdity of suddenly finding myself fallen. A “fallen woman” may find the fall interesting.

The war and W. H. Auden: Britten, Mann, and pacifisms in poetry.

In the spring of 1939, at a talk sponsored by the League of American Writers, W. H. Auden fell in love.

Hair tumbling over his eyes, jacket wrinkled, Auden read "Elegy to Yeats" aloud as the much-younger Chester Kallman listened with interest. After the reading, Kallman used Thomas Rogers, Auden's  favorite Renaissance poet, as currency to begin a conversation. One conversation later, the two became lovers.

"I am mad with happiness," Auden gushed in a letter to his close friend,  Benjamin Britten. 

Auden and Kallman.

Auden and Kallman set out to travel across the US by train and bus.

Auden expressed his hatred for the "unspeakable jukeboxes... the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs" as he worked on a prose treatise, "The Prolific and the Devourer," addressing the question of artistic duty during wartime.

On a stop in Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood told Auden that, like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, he had become a pacifist, rejecting the impetus to kill the young German men he had once loved or cared for. "The trouble about violence is that most of the punishment falls on the innocent," Auden wrote, channeling Isherwood. In this treatise, Auden concluded that the works of war should be left "to those who believe in them," but he didn't draw a hard line against soldiering, or the artist who felt called to serve in uniform.


*

Klaus and Erika Mann issued warnings of what they had witnessed. In 1930, the Nazi press denounced Erika as "a flat-footed peace hyena". She was committed to fighting fascism continuously. Klaus had lost his German citizenship in 1934 for publishing Die Sammlung,  a journal by artists exiled in Amsterdam. His brother, Thomas Mann, was still (cough) figuring things out.

"Culture must take sides and turn militant, or it is bound to perish," Klaus Mann wrote from the house in New York.Austrian novelist Franz Werfel was married to Alma Mahler, who had brought a suitcase carrying Mahler's scores, Bruckner's Third Symphony, and Warfel's manuscript in progress. The Emergency Rescue Committee helped bring them to safety once they passed through the Pyrenees. While American intellectuals debated liberal responses to tyranny, Hitler demanded absolute unity from Germans. 

When Hitler's armies invaded Poland, it was clear the European war had begun.

Auden wrote the poem, "September 1st, 1939" in commemoration of that day which represented, for him, the  immensity of history. While he supported the war against Hitley, Auden also saw the Hitler in each of us, meaning that war would not resolve what education failed to alter. 

*

Edward Mendelson expands on the two sides of Auden in “The Secret Auden”:

At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.

Certainly, Auden used poetry and correspondence to untangle his thoughts. (A critic described Auden's poems as "colloquies between various quarters of his mind.)

"I'm delighted to see my friends for an hour," Auden wrote, "and then I want to be alone like Greta Garbo."  The persistent problem was truth – or not knowing how to judge one's actions given that hindsight would define the good, the just, the right. In the US – as in his mind, Auden lacked a foundation for ethics - the leap of faith felt too loose, religious, and unmoored.

Pacifism could not bring about world peace by seeking individual incorruptibility; in this, he agreed with Niebuhr. Lack of action in the face of catastrophe could not be ethical, and Isherwood's commitment to yoga and personal development seemed like an easy way out from the dark side of humanity. This tension inherent in magical thinking would bring American writing communities, especially those centered and appropriation of Eastern religious practices, to the point where counterculture went mainstream. Only the sacred had an excuse to bail out – but the secular sainthood competed with the sainthood of the monk for a world one had abandoned. 

In a letter to Britten, Auden poked at his comforts and defenses, urging him to risk coming out, or to risk standing for something, which is how Auden was construing this risk at the time. To quote the letter:

After spending time in the Midwest, and writing a libretto about the Midwest, Auden told Charles Miller "the land of the lonely" was the "true America," and he wished someone would write a novel about it.

“The Lonelies could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel,” Auden wrote, adding:

Auden blamed Benjamin Britten's musical impasse on his avoidance of openly-lived homosexuality. He introduced Britten to Arthur Rimbaud, inspiring the cycle of settings Britten would name, Les Illuminations. The cycle repeated the phrase: "I alone have the key to this savage parade." 

W.H. Auden; Sir William Menzies Coldstream; Benjamin Britten

Britten's essay, "An English Composer Sees America," was published as he and Auden worked on the operetta, Paul Bunyan. What Britten and Auden seemed to want from this musical was the depiction of American mythos, and the weakness at the heart of this mythos, namely,  that freedom created new moral challenges.

In an essay on Paul Bunyan, Auden articulated it: "what happens when men refuse to accept this necessity of choosing, and are terrified or careless about their freedom, we have now only too clear a proof."

The prologue of this American Opera included a trio of wild geese announcing the coming of Paul Bunyan - the religious exceptionalism was there, but the message was not well-received by critics staring at war in Europe. The disconnect continued.

Janet Flanner's essay, "Paris, Germany," first published in the New Yorker in 1940, attempted to convey the complexity of the exile community Just as the US press started to complain of an excess European presence in media — "an intellectual blitzkrieg"—-that dog-whistled to chauvinist xenophobia. 

In a letter to his sister, Britten said that he was "definitely disliked" for being British and "because I'm not American (everything is nationalistic)" and because he wasn't "educated in Paris."

*

On the day France fell to Germany in World War II, Auden gave the commencement address at Smith College. He said death and fear made it difficult to stop and think, to consider what was happening: "Nevertheless, that is our particular duty in this place at this hour. To try and understand what has come upon us and why."

*

Auden was practical rather than mystical. When he won the National Medal for Literature in 1967, he refused to accept it in Lyndon Johnson’s White House during the Vietnam War or “to make a Cal Lowell gesture by a public refusal,” so he arranged for the ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian, where he gave an acceptance speech about the corruption of language by politics and propaganda.

When Time magazine offered him $10,000 for a short essay on empires, Auden wrote “The Romans”, and maybe this is a good place to end my notebook dump, quoting Auden’s essay:

“I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.”

*

Auden’s poem, “The Geography of the House,” was dedicated to Isherwood.

"I shouldn't have minded a vestigial tail," Louise Bogan said, after telling Auden about a man who sobbed when confessing his vestigial tail to a fellow cab-rider.

"No," Auden replied, "one can always stand what what other people have."