[Tim Murphy]

Jim, I think your poem is brilliant, though it deserves more than the half hour you claim to have spent on it. G. would of course prefer the inversions inherent in its lines, the anfractious, archaic syntax, to the free flow of speech in Gwynn's cento (which has made it a staple of anthologies), but that's G.; and we love him, just as we love Swinburne. I'm particularly fond of the interposed period in the last line. You've saved it from the glutinous clutches of Dylan Thomas!

[Jim Hayes]

You are very kind Tim, I assure you that my motives were at no time intended to decry Mr Gwynne's work, but truly, I may have exaggeragted when I said I only spent half an hour on my piece, but only by about fifteen minutes.

I greatly admire and respect Golias, but I don't think, and I wouldn't for one moment presume to speak for him, that he "prefers" inversions as much as that he respects their merits as a legitimate tool of poetry.

Thank you again, I do enjoy our varied discourses;

Jim

[Alan Sullivan]

Coming late to this thread, I am most amused. For Sam's sake, Tim might have chosen something less clever and more substantive---not a difficult task, given the quality of Sam's book. But he has started fine discussion.

Sam's cento is mainly a performance piece, a crowd-pleaser. But it has another attribute that may be apparent only in the context of a reading or a book. It manages to sound in Sam's own voice, wry and full of foreboding, and that is an odd thing for a bunch of Frankensteined lines to do.

Jim, although you may have taken but thirty or forty-five minutes to assemble your own essay in cento-craft, you brought all your education and practical skill to the task. I think you underestimate your accomplishment. This is not something any grad-student could cobble together in a day or a week.

Alan Sullivan

[Jim Hayes]

Hi Alan, I believe in fact that it is difficult not to appear clever and witty if one writes a cento that uses well known lines.

Putting them into a fresh context imbues them with a meaning that the original author never intended leaving the reader with the impression that he's reading a very clever work indeed.

Frequently the new meaning is serendipitously beneficial to the cento maker, in that, unlike many a sonnetwriter who doesn't know where the poem is leading until the first three lines have been written, the cento author drifts along in the current of someone elses lines, but never knows where he's going until he's finished, and then finds he has something that made sense.

Here is a cento using for the most part lines from works
that have not yet (although the final six, if I may make so bold as to say so, will) become famous

I stand upon a hill and see
the red haired boy who drove a van
I am thinking of how I might be
Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman?

Miniver cursed the common place
furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun,
I am afraid this morning of my face,
I'm scared and lonely, never see my son


a boy who played and talked and read with me,
sitting on plush divan;
"Collected Poems- Robert Mezey"---
I want to speak to you while I can.

He was just a young Nebraska boy--
all I can say is what I do,
someone, not I
would manifest that hour's peculiar blue.


The first ten lines are taken from Norton, but two stand out
the well known 5 and 6. These are the lines the reader will relate to and say what a clever fellow I am. The remaining six lines are from Mr Mezey's collected poems and those familiar with it will accord me the same accolade. But really all I have done is comb it for apposite lines with the appropriate rhyme.

You will note that this appears to have a serious theme, but if all the lines were very well known it would come across as clever, nay- a work of genius.

Far be it from me to decry my own efforts, I need all the recognition I can get but,

"I am ashamed to take delight in these rhymes" Norton 1540.

Jim









[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited March 07, 2001).]

[MarcusBales]

Originally posted by Alan Sullivan:
"Sam's cento is mainly a performance piece, a crowd-pleaser. But it has another attribute that may be apparent only in the context of a reading or a book. It manages to sound in Sam's own voice, wry and full of foreboding, and that is an odd thing for a bunch of Frankensteined lines to do."

Not merely odd and not merely an attribute but rather it seems to me the central charm of Gwynn's piece is that he has arranged others' lines in his own voice. There's a PhD dissertation in why the poets Gwynn chose to use in his cento sound so much like Gwynn: "RS Gwynn and Tradition: Influences and Confluences"

"Jim, although you may have taken but thirty or forty-five minutes to assemble your own essay in cento-craft, you brought all your education and practical skill to the task. I think you underestimate your accomplishment. This is not something any grad-student could cobble together in a day or a week."

Jim is pointing out, I think, that the technical accomplishment of a cento isn't as difficult as it appears to be. Alan is pointing out that Gwynn's accomoplishment in his famous cento is greater than merely the technical accomplishment. But if I understand the tone of Jim's objections, his question seems to be "Why not?" And I join him (if I have his objecion right). I think any grad student studying poetry *ought* to be able to write a cento as good as Jim's (since most grad students don't yet have a "voice" I leave Gwynn's out of it for the moment).

[Jim Hayes]

Yes Marcus, in essence you have my objection right. But I go further than that, I say that the cento-maker usurps the original voice, in a way that was never intended.

The lines are appropriated to appear in a new and hardly earned voice. For example, in Mr Mezey's lines above, which I got for the price of his book, those lines are no longer his in this new context.

I have taken them and used them, hardly better, to my ends in my voice.

I do not believe that I am particularly accomplished, being as the man said " A modest man, with much to be modest about", nevertheless, I would be willing to accept a challenge from anybody that I could construct a passable cento in my own voice, in form, on any reasonable theme.

Any poetry grad in possession of a decent anthology and a poetry shelf should be able to do so.

A performance piece is a totally different matter. I, in common with millions of others, will never have the undoubted pleasure of hearing Mr Gwynne recite, so I must judge his work on how it reads for me.

Jim


[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited March 07, 2001).]

[robert mezey]

Well, I feel I should defend the ancient
cento, but perhaps it would be better to
wait till I have more time. I will say,
at the risk of seeming slow and unclever,
that my Stevens poem took me quite a long
time and a lot of work, not just turning
his prose into verse but making sense of a
very obscure essay---or trying to, and
giving it a real structure, a beginning,
a middle, and an end.

[Jim Hayes]

Dear Robert (if I may) speaking personally, I shall be delighted when your time permits and you post a defence of the ancient cento. I promise I am capable of being swayed by argument.

In the meantime I trust you will forgive me if I remain faithful to my position and hesitate to call it venerable, excepting, of course, in its evident association with venerable practitioners.

I will also content myself by observing that your post above accords with my belief that the primary personal requisites of the cento are time and diligence, acknowledging as I do, however, degrees of competence in its execution.

Sincerely,

Jim



[This message has been edited by Jim Hayes (edited March 08, 2001).]

[robert mezey]

Jim, your first stab at a cento is pretty
good, and I wouldn't claim it's as hard as,
say, a canzone, or that one would want to
write more than one or two in a lifetime.
But lots and lots of them were written in
antiquity, usually using Homer or Virgil.
(Don't know about Homer, but I bet Virgil
would have been pleased.) I don't remember
Borges' ever speaking about the form, but I
am sure he would relish it---and might argue
reasonably enough that inasmuch as we make
most of our poetry out of the poetry of our
predecessors, the cento is perhaps one of
the most honest ways of doing it. You'd
need a lot of luck to write one as good as
Sam Gwynne's in an hour or so---to make each
line seem to lead (in a slightly wacky way)
to the next line and make a kind of sense.
It's something like a found poem, isn't it?
One wouldn't want to read too many found
poems, but there are some wonderful ones, no?
I can't recall the critic's name, but some-
body in an essay about Hardy, speaking about
how large absence and the negative loomed in
his work, pointed out that you could make a
revealing cento out of a hunk of his index
of titles and first lines. It wouldn't take
but a couple of minutes---in fact, I think I
could reconstruct it---but it is still very
much to the point, and rather touching. (It
went something like this:

No more summer for Molly and me;
No mortal man beneath the sky
No; no;
No--not where I shall make my own;
No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
No use hoping, or feeling vext,
Nobody says: Ah, that is the place
Nobody took any notice of her as she stood
>>>>> on the causey kerb,
Not a line of her writing have I...


and so on. Anyway, I like it.






[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited March 08, 2001).]

[MacArthur]

The discussion seems to have turned a lot on whether a cento is easy or difficult to do-- with the implication that poems are artistically meritorious or not, depending on the level of difficulty involved, and one supposes the resulting comparative rarity of the product.
It takes me to another question...
...this may only betray my ignorance of all things techno-- but if there isn't now, won't there soon be computer programs to assist the composition of Formal Verse? Like the Spell-Check you'd have to check the checker...but it should be easier than a Translator program--- and those already work reasonably well.
Pretty soon anyone with a 100 IQ and acquainted with PC's should be able to generate Formal Verse as technically flawless as HallMark cards.
...what happens when Jonson or Pope's genius becomes commonplace?