Now for something completely different:

Centos for the 21st century

Poet JC Sulzenko is curator of the Glebe Report’s Poetry Quarter. Her collection, Bricolage, A Gathering of Centos, published by Aeolus House and launched this fall, represents a departure from her lyric and narrative poetry, so much so that it came out under her pseudonym, A. Garnett Weiss.

The Glebe Report asked Sulzenko (or Weiss) why and how she embraced the cento, a particular and unusual form of poetry. A cento is a poem composed entirely of lines taken from other poems. The word cento is derived from a Latin word meaning “patchwork garment.”

What attracted you to the cento form?

Collage always has attracted me as an art form. Centos date back to the Greeks and the Romans and the term conjures the notion of patchwork, a collage in words.

Perhaps that’s why I find joy in using what comes to hand and in drawing lines from the work of other poets – well or lesser known, living or passed, Canadian or international – to create a cento, independent in form and meaning from the source material. It’s an adventure each time. The first cento I wrote won an award and I never looked back.

Do you go searching for a specific type of line of poetry, or are your choices serendipitous, led by chance and inspiration? How do you recognize the next line – is it like a Rubik’s cube where you know when you’ve got it right?

I approach current or archival collections and anthologies as a predator. I note lines that stay with me. Then I live with them, sometimes for hours, sometimes for weeks or longer. Until a first line or a title suggests itself. The next line and lines fall into place from that starting point. In a way the cento tells its own story.

Not every collection or anthology I read leads to a new cento. On the other hand, sometimes more than one cento emerges from the same anthology or collection.

For the most part, I don’t begin with any preconceptions about how a poem will evolve. On occasion, I may write a piece for a reason, prompted by an event or a person. Sometimes, after a cento has been written, it acquires new purpose, which an epigraph may reflect. Though these are the exceptions, rather than the rule.

In his review of your book, Colin Morton talks about a kind of “spooky action at a distance.” Is there a sense that you are working “once removed” from the source material, giving you a sense of distance and a larger perspective? Or is it the opposite, a sense of digging deeper, dissecting, examining and rearranging close up?

That characterization interests me. I see my own involvement and how I live the process as an intimate experience, felt close-up as each line leads me on. I relate to each line, I respect the relationship of the line to what precedes and what follows it and I revere the source poet and poem. That’s why the collection includes a key with full attribution to the originating poet and poem for each line. And why bibliographical notes list the anthologies and individual collections from which the lines were taken.

Who would enjoy this book?

This is a collection poetry readers and writers can appreciate as they discover how poets, renowned or obscure, dialogue with each other or with themselves in each cento of my making.

While each poem stands on its own merits, the added twist, the mystery if you will, comes from taking the poem in and then checking the keys to find out the origin of the lines in the piece. The reader becomes somewhat of a sleuth, pursuing these threads to gain a deeper understanding of the new poem.

Copies of Bricolage are available at Octopus Books and from bricolage.weiss@gmail.com.

These comments first appeared in The OSCAR, November 2021.