Matt Hart
C E N T O I N T R O
What’s weird about these “collaborations” (and I do use that word loosely) is that
they’re totally one-sided. No poets interacted in the process of making them. There was
no give and take, and no ideas were exchanged. I made them all by myself—though I
wrote very few of the words—appropriating lines from other poets’ poems and then re-
assembling them into new ones, taking whatever liberties I felt like along the way. In
other words, these collaborations (now looser than ever) are centos—poems primarily
composed using lines borrowed, hefted, and otherwise lifted/thefted from the works of
others.
I first got really involved in writing centos a couple of years ago when I was writing an
essay on the poetry of Gregory Corso. I loved his work, but found it sometimes to be
pretty hit and miss in terms of its quality and power. Somewhere in the midst of reading
about him and his work, I was reminded of the final lines of Dean Young’s index cento “If
Thou Dislik’st What Thou First Light’st On”: “Go down any road far enough and you’ll
come to a slaughter house, but keep going and you’ll reach the sea.” It was then that I
started making some centos of my own out of Corso’s work, as a means of going through
his slaughterhouse to get to the sea that was evidently there—more obviously in some
poems than in others..
What ended up being a surprise to me was that the centos composed mainly from
Corso’s lines didn’t sound much like Corso anymore. Instead, they looked and sounded
like me rummaging around in Corso and coming up changed. That is, they felt wholly like
my poems, but not poems I could’ve/would’ve written all by my lonesome. The cento
form/technique had allowed me to find my own voice in someone else’s mouth. KA-
BLAM! And why not? As poets, the sounds and marks and moves we make alway come
from somewhere out beyond us. “Nobody creates out of a void, the materials must first
be afforded,” wrote Mary Shelley in her introduction to Frankenstein. Ultimately what’s
great about the cento form/technique is the way it uses the idea of influence as a
generative and compositional strategy to make new poems out of whatever guts one can
find (or produce) on the cutting room floor.
Like other kinds of collage poems (centos are collages!), centos always wear their
influences on their sleeves—or rather, they are their influences on their sleeves, and yet
also the unique creations of the person who ripped them out of their old contexts and then
wrestled them into a new one. The cento is thus, weirdly, always wholly allusive and also
its own new (im)possible (heretofore unimaginable) world, pointing forward and back and
into the void. It’s a love letter, a death threat, a patchwork quilt (the word “cento” comes
from a Latin word meaning “patchwork,” and in Italian “cento” means “one hundred”—
thus the Cento Inferno—100 lines by 100 different poets).
As compositions of fragments, then, centos are not only collages (the monster descendents
of Frankenstein’s monster), but a special kind of list poem as well—a list assembled from
the severed limbs of poet-trees! I like this about the cento, its initial destructive gesture,
ripping something out and off—tearing things apart in order to build something new out
of the pieces—space ships, basilisks, stupefied error. In writing centos one gets to wear a
lot of hardhats: grave robber, mad scientist, charming middle manager. Middle manager?
Yep. Charming. For now, think: Dionysian dance party planner—violent, drunk and
electrically charged. Enter: lightning bolt. Enter: the joy of process. Now talk to the
dead. No, really. You can and you must.
I should also note, however, that in the face of my own blank page (not to mention the
amazing history of poetry, which is both DAUNTING and HAUNTING to little old me),
tearing the lungs or gall bladders or tongues (etc!) out of poems is a way to level the
playing field of language (that’ll show it!). In other words, during the initial process of
making a cento, something of the gravity and marvel and sacredness of POETRY is
allowed/forced to go missing—is reduced, but not destroyed—and in its wake is a largely
disconnected and randomized field of linguistic material (not Corso’s or Ceravolo’s or
Shakespeare’s lines, but simply lines and half-lines, turns of phrase, bits of syntax—the
MESS). Welcome to the wildflowers and their instructions obliterated, fast-scribbled in
the margins—the remnants of an incomplete and super-secret code.
With poetry out of the way, then, it’s time to manage(!) and cajole (bandage and hammer)
the deliberately disconnected material into something living breathing anew. A successful
cento is, like any successful poem, a thing with a pulse, which amounts to more than the
sum of its parts. “[In poetry] we’re trying to make birds, not birdhouses” (Dean Young).
Such poems often radiate, rather than delineate, their meaning(s), pointing out beyond
their author/manager/maestro to capital-P Poetry and also the world in which it exists.
Thus, in addition to whatever else they may be doing, centos are fundamentally
demons/trations of a process—intuitive, accident prone, and unfashionably romantic.
Truly, the sea is at the end of this next line or just up over that bended meadow… And
speaking of Romantics, it strikes me here that Richard Woodhouse was correct when he
wrote in an 1818 letter to John Keats that, “…the wealth of poetry is unexhausted and
inexhaustible…” Indeed. But perhaps Apollinaire put it best in his essay “The New Spirit
and the Poets” (and in this case imagine swapping out the phrase “new spirit” for “cento”
—a move I think Apollinaire would be happy to oblige):
Even if it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, the new spirit does not
refrain from discovering new profundities in all that is not new under the sun.
Good sense is its guide, and this guide leads it into corners, if not new, at
least unknown.
~Matt Hart, June 07
C e n t o C o r s o I
Long live man!
God how I love!
Splashed across the world’s loveliest floor
I am bleeding
I am coughing
Agamemnon!
Heavy like the seas
CRASHBOOM and billows of orange
But who will take the message
And who will thank the bees
Who will will and who won’t will in spite
The sky is brown
The leaves are leaves
It’s Spring again and Man is the victory of life
C e n t o C o r s o I V
Dawn is sky sky is blue blue is long and far
And now for the wooly hike back to the city
Experiment and technique Fossilific trees…
Light winged light O wonder of light!
I too weep in rain at night
I can’t face the stiff blanche day
I! I! out of you, Gregory Corso
And the stars in the sky are still boss
C e n t o p h e l i a
To put it plainly, loosed out of hell I was sewing
In my closet Blasted with ecstasy Dear kingly
of famous, I would give you some violets
His beard his dove was white as snow
And thrice his head thus waving up and down
He seemed to find his way without his eyes I did,
of course, repel his letters Dear brother, My father died
His head a grass-green turf With a difference
Exuberance Like a puffed and reckless robin
And now he is gone, he is gone,
And with him rich gifts so sweet of breath composed
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The honey of his music vows
Could beauty, my lord, have any better commerce
Than with ever-blown youth The owl was a baker’s daughter
The baker was an owl and a brother to a son Both daughter
and sun, mere players in a riddle I shall forever
the effects of this compose Good night Ladies
And cast away moan I a’done by yonder sun
Like sweet bells jangled Their perfume lost
Indeed, la, without an oath, I’ll make an end on’t:
he rose and donned his clo’es
C e n t o C e r a v o l o
I want you to steal me alarum
to the banging the hammer hotel
I want you on purposely period
purpose and by that I mean:
garden comes Music
goldfish for the rooms boom!
What time are animals? Against my raw heart
A flying duck or an antler beside me
Take thee this picture of everyone I love
Car goods awake Friendly the bear
Dear sun with your dreadful
Tomorrow rained screeching
Ran into the woman with its horns out of joint
O visible gym of flowered
C e n t o I n f e r n o
I.
The wine didn’t help like we thought it might
but how dumb to be sentimental in the face of it.
Tonight, I want to feel every part of you
and release my belongings to your glutinous clutches.
The microphone is on. I can’t shake this headache.
O how the bolt begins to twist like a tongue!
When I dream of you, I want to go back to sleep.
The radio is teaching my goldfish Jujuitsu.
And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon,
but when I look back there’s a blindspot in the car,
an everlasting song, a tree singing tree.
My life my room are like two huge bugs following me around the moon.
There, I said it plainly, “moon.” As I look out through your hair today
in the hubbub of the flattening storm,
I have as large supply of evils as January has not flowerings.
but why shouldn’t I be ambitious?
Wax dolls climb onto the xylophone
An elephant beats against the wall of my forehead
rhythmically repeats in a loud voice, the trumpet,
then commencing all to hello in a getup like a grackle.
O breathe a word or two of fire! I the dynamite you the igniter
For fun: find me among my self-indulgent artbooks
Aha! Aha! laugh the young, but
I’m not going to let all this fucking soot
taint my tomorrow-blue morning.
II.
Words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness.
But you should feel free to stop—breathe deep, buy pumpkins.
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise of skyscrapers,
remember that your afterlife is only real estate, and it’s your job
to get young Americans to buy some. Ice cream
on my face I hear the screech of trees that fell,
but I’d prefer to kiss that silent chipmunk.
Presentiment is merely that long Shadow on the Lawn.
But why did I come inside to tell you this?
Well, this is what I’d like to say to modern life in general:
Starting to type with numb hands, the book
full of hammers, dog song and crème rinse,
I think of you relentlessly, like a blind machine
a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!
One wants words meat-hooked from the living steer, clearly.
But here, in the clearing between things, a flamingo flies over a moose,
and I’m listening to the speech I’m having you make
in the vaginal leaves of old magnolias under the ghost lights
of the stars. 11:15. With different breaths,
“How’s your pocket book problem?—your being,
the blindness and noise by which you stand?”
Sometimes, you have to be a totally different person.
The future seems dim to me now and the past…
Have I fallen in love with my checkout lane?
III.
Always the voice seems to come from behind me
while the organ keeps exploding and exploding again.
Such are the passions of democracy, and yet still we feel the need
to ask the doctor why things are so distorted—
beautiful question mark, tail-end of a scorpion?
And why also the body’s so astonishingly vague?
Beneath one’s guiding star and beneath all the mud and muck
one feels struggling intently. Collecting
ceramics, both dogs and cats, I am awake early
because… Lovers of poems, of all mis-deviled messages—
is this supposed to be weather or furniture I’m listing?
In time it shall break, or I shall broker it on purpose.
And weeds—I’ll gather weeds as well.
The Parthenon crumbles ’neath our carbon monoxide.
Death & Eros out lunching together. Part doomed genius, part sickly little other.
And you still a liar, O blue marching day.
When I can’t get around you, I climb up the fire.
Crank me and keep me, or so I always say,
and beyond that the Kitchen called Snowflake.
The bestial growl of a raspberry sputters. In these nets
I catch nothing but shuddering and skin.
Trampled to shore, to suffer awhile,
how pale the paint of the birdhouse gas pump
Someone throws a shadow or a vista ’cross a tree—
surely we shall not continue!
IV.
To be unhappy, I’m tired of tiny noises.
There’s an air-conditioner in my bedroom window,
so I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window
then open my lips to take a keen strand of hair.
I watch half a moon boil in its tremendous kettle,
a weather vane knocked half askew by a rifle.
I order rabbit anti-mouse serum.
These are not words—convulsions compressed into lumps,
my fingers tipped with fire. Nevertheless
upon their clamorous wings,
when the plane dips, you hold to the arms of the seat,
my spirit so high it splatters the heavens.
Science says “what exists”:
the pleasure of green woods and ways.
Astronauts now knit the quietly thickly.
Cupid kicks over his kerosene lamp.
And in time, in good time, your own blood
rides her great blue ox across the moat—
out and out tears on the face of the sea.
I say it’s hopeless as holding a bag of strawmen,
and clamber up the globe’s impossible sides.
“Farewell, O Warbler! till to-morrow, my prison
Dread not their taunts, my little cracked life.
My nerves are bad. And tonight at their worst.
Pterodactyls cast shadows on the floor.”
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