Speaking of quilts and poetry ...
Something borrowed, what’s new?
In my last post I wrote about how invisible quilts get stitched across time and space, through our memories and experiences. This is a kind of Part Two to that, with a focus on poetry. April is National Poetry Month in the U.S., as it happens. So, yay!
As mentioned in a previous essay, I recently read “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” a memoir by poet Maggie Smith. In it she mentions a type of poem I’d never heard of, a cento (pronounced “sento”). Check this out:
Let me tell you a little about the cento. It’s a kind of poem assembled using the lines of other poets. Memory, too, is assemblage — a kind of cento, collaged from pieces. From the scraps of a life.
Boy, did this ever get my attention.
I’ve written in my newsletters a few times in the past year about my infatuation with SoulCollage, a style of making 5x8-inch collages using only images, not words. It’s a lot like what goes into writing a poem — choosing just the right pieces, following personal instinct as much as possible, and assembling them into a pleasing whole. This alchemical process reminds me of the yogic term vinyasa, which means in Sanskrit “to place in a special way.” (I always loved that definition, though vinyasa yoga is often marketed as “flow” or fast-paced and-or hot yoga. No thanks; you do you.)
A cento is a collage poem! The American Academy of Poets notes that “cento” comes from the Latin word for patchwork garment (quilt!) and is “a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.”
A Vanity Fair article last year said of Smith:
She still writes by longhand first, and her version of a productive day often involves spending six hours moving the same 50 words around.
Moving the same 50 words around — like assembling in a special way the images in a collage, or poses in a yoga sequence. This impulse to make meaning from found objects, seemingly unrelated events, relationships and the quotidian minutiae of our lives is not new. I wondered if my own accidental experience with the cento style was a byproduct of a fractured and fragmented attention span, but no (well, it still could be in my case, and don’t get me started on AI) — the cento style is said to date to 300-400 A.D., and early works were inspired by Homer (mentioned in my last post!) and Virgil.
Back when I first started yoga teacher training, I noticed that planning class sequences was like writing poetry. Although the human body is a creation full of unlimited potential and possibility, its anatomy can be compartmentalized into basic functions — e.g., internal and external rotation, flexion and extension. So I began to see more than ever the commonalities among movements within poses and how two or three postures might go together. This was partly a gift from Iyengar teachers, who often like to build classes toward one recital-type pose, using the postures that lead up to the grand finale as preparations — although each pose is respected as a discrete experience along the way, worthy of its own time and space. Each asana has many parts; each asana can fit into the overall quilt of a well-structured class.
Smith wrote:
Writing this book, bit by bit, I felt compelled to assemble a lyric essay using sentences pulled from throughout these pages. I suspected that images might gravitate toward one another, as if magnetized: strings and tethers, a heart and the pit of a fruit, various ghosts and hauntings and disappearances. I suspected that the pieces might speak to each other more clearly if I allowed them to be part of a new whole. So I invited sentences to sidle up next to each other, although they were strangers at first, and whisper in each other’s ears like friends. They could be in close, intimate conversation rather than having to call across pages and pages, as if shouting into the wind on either side of a wide canyon.
How great is this? Her whole book reads like a verbal collage, a readable collection of scraps woven together, chapter by chapter, into a coherent story, with some repeated motifs. In this case, it’s a story about her divorce. In the passage below, “he” is her ex-husband, and the phrasing of the question is correct — “he has.”
I’ve become a student of my own pain, my own grief and suffering. In this way, he has been my teacher? Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect. We all come into the world less than done, unfinished, our skulls still stitching themselves together. All wax and feathers, a mess of hope.
Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.
I noted in my last post that poets borrow from one another all the time. We lift lines or phrases to start our own pieces, or write full-on “response” poems to works that trigger deeper ruminations. So what’s original? Good question. A teacher in a workshop once asked, “What are the two main themes in poetry?” I correctly guessed (at least as far as that teacher was concerned): love and death. Human experience doesn’t really change over time, thematically; circumstances and cosmetics do. We keep playing with the same balls of clay, to shift to an earthy analogy, trying to shape nonsense and tragedy and bliss into meaningful forms, over and over again.
James Crews, leader of the poetry part of the retreat I attended earlier this month in California, addressed the notion of repetition and originality in one of his recent online Monthly Pause sessions. He said he once heard someone say we didn’t need any more poems about the moon. Sacrilege, right? He disagreed as well. The world hasn’t heard OUR poem about the moon, he offered. What we each have to say matters.
We all have our own blueprints — from ancestry and DNA, inborn personality, whatever is formed from our nature-vs.-nurture molding — and perspectives on something as common yet mystical as the moon. As a yoga teacher, I wasn’t inventing any poses, but I tried to present them in meaningful ways, through my one-and-only body, voice and experience. Don’t teachers of anything and everything do that? We inherit the canons of what has come before us, study and massage the material, process it and pass it on in our singular ways. The canons expand and are revised with new creations and interpretations as people make up new stuff and publish about it or put trademark and copyright symbols on it. But nobody really “owns” knowledge or language or creativity.
(I can’t help but think of the surprise — to me back in the 1995 day, at least — patchwork-revealing ending of “The Usual Suspects,” which you can find versions of on YouTube. Keyser Söze!)
Poems have been written about all kinds of things. Joy Harjo references potato chips in one of my favorites. Until you dive in and try, you never know what kind of meaning you can make, or poem or collage. And the results don’t have to mean anything to anyone else, setting aside marketability and public consumption for the moment.
Which brings me to a poem-lette I wrote in late October, using phrases from other writings. I didn’t know that was a thing! It came together during a gathering to celebrate the full moon (speaking of … and which is today, April 23, as it happens) in the Ayurveda course that I’ve been in for two years. Teacher Ivy Ingram often shares poems, and in this session she noted how poems can be containers for strong emotions, and poetry itself a reminder of our shared humanity. Ivy had invited us to bring and share poems and jot down any phrases that rang bells, then write for ourselves. This is a super-fun way to play with poetry and generate your own work.
Below is what I wrote back in October, but first:
Here are two ways to play with writing poetry somewhat cento-style when you feel stuck or want to break out of what Anne Lamott calls butt-in-chair mode. You don’t always need prompts to get the wheels turning, but they help. We’re all in this — creativity, life — together.
> In a session with a therapist I had in D.C., she busted out a Magnetic Poetry kit that I had a blast playing with, moving the word tiles around on a cookie sheet into something that made sense to me. I did it very quickly — like picking out images for a collage, following something other than my rational brain. So get a kit and try that.
> Make your own kit. Print out a poem or, even better, a few, and cut apart the individual lines. Put the strips of paper into a bowl, mix them up and pick out several. Play with them and arrange them in a way special to you. Rinse and repeat as often as you like. You can also use one line at a time as a prompt for a full poem, or part of a line.
•••
I wouldn’t submit what I wrote last fall to any publication, at least not without full attribution and disclosure about its origins (not to mention editing), which would be clunky, so I’m sharing it below to illustrate how I wrote my accidental cento, or at least a partial one. It’s a bit of an academic exercise, and a wordy one, but I wanted to share the full works (apologies to the copyright gods; I’m claiming fair use) with the lines that stood out to me. Feel free to find your own among the pieces below and play with the cento style. (For further reference, here is an example of a true cento poem by John Ashbery, and here is an annotated version of it.)
My raw, untitled collage poem, with the borrowed parts bolded:
To look at things in bloom
is to give birth to fullness
you’re doing it right
no worries about keeping score
or showing it to anyone else
an empty bowl can’t be
depleted but it’s full already
with spaciousness, with potential
and the mystery of choice
where feelings are contained
in infinite exchanges
though we live with rage
and we wish
this routine moment
were anything but
carved out of and into
impermanence these
worlds unencumbered
because there are too many
to count to name to claim
yes no but you’re paying
attention and crazy with
happiness like the cherry
hung with snow or like where the fire left its
marks on you
scarred but healed and whole
golden, shimmering with
light perhaps not everyone
can see
still shine, don’t dim
your inner glow
in this routine moment
how important it is
this endless and proper work
•••
Bolded parts in the pieces below are the ones I wrote down, but I didn’t use all of them.
Loveliest of Trees
A.E. Houseman
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
•••
Yes! No!
Mary Oliver
How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.
The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.
The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.
How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out
Yes! No! The
swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.
•••
Danna Faulds
Life will not be neatly
wrapped and tied, boxed
or pigeon-holed. Just when
we think all the fruit is in
the bowl and we can name
it piece by piece, the still
life is upended. Plums and
peaches roll to the far corners
of the room. Now it’s the
empty bowl that beckons.
Can we have faith and wait?
Can we allow the mystery of
choice or chance or circumstance
to give birth to fullness once
again? Can we trust the fruit
will be ripe for picking when
it’s time to break the fast?
•••
Glennon Doyle
From “Untamed”
We hurt people and we are hurt by people. We feel left out, envious, not good enough, sick, and tired. We have unrealized dreams and deep regrets. We are certain that we were meant for more and that we don't even deserve what we have. We feel ecstatic and then numb. We wish our parents had done better by us. We wish we could do better by our children. We betray and we are betrayed. We lie and we are lied to. We say goodbye to animals, to places, to people we cannot live without. We are so afraid of dying. Also: of living. We have fallen in love and out of love, and people have fallen in love and out of love with us. We wonder if what happened to us that night will mean we can never be touched again without fear. We live with rage bubbling. We are sweaty, bloated, gassy, oily. We love our children, we long for children, we do not want children. We are at war with our bodies, our minds, our souls. We are at war with one another. We wish we’d said all those things while they were still here. They’re still here, and we’re still not saying those things. We know we won’t. We don't understand ourselves. We don’t understand why we hurt those we love. We want to be forgiven. We cannot forgive. We don’t understand God. We believe. We absolutely do not believe. We are lonely. We want to be left alone. We want to belong. We want to be loved. We want to be loved. We want to be loved. [ … ]
If you are uncomfortable — in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused — you don’t have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.
•••
Scraps I collected from an original poem shared by an IWC member:
pink backpack bouncing
carrying their burden bravely
feelings are contained
routine moment
worlds unencumbered
infinite exchanges
•••
Enjoy your own poetic adventures! Feel free to share any reflections or writings in the comments section.