Weekly Prompt: The Cento, Semi-Cento, or Found Poem

The cento is a poetic form composed entirely of secondary (usually poetic) texts.  The word “cento” derives from the Latin word for “patchwork,” or “patchwork cloak,” and in its classical form, was composed exclusively of language from either from a single poet or from several.  Ausonius, the Roman originator of the form, stipulated that the cento-writer could lift entire verses from another work of poetry or splice verses from separate poems together, but never use two consecutive verses from a poem, nor to extract any less than half a verse from an outside poetic text.

Modern forms of the cento include writing a poem that borrows a single line from another poetic work and echoes that line throughout, stitching together lines, images, or phrases from other poems and using only original prepositions and conjuctions, and (or simultaneously) juxtaposing voices and images from a variety of poetic sources, thus creating a wholly new artistic work.  The contemporary cento is generally associated with a certain witty, humorous, or ironic tone, but of course these conventions are subject to (re)invention.  For even more explanation and classic and contemporary examples of the cento ranging from Virgil to John Ashbery, see the Academy of American Poets’ entry on the subject.

In my own writing, I have used the cento as a way to rhetorically frame and arrange found language from a variety of sources: interviews, artists’ statements, oral narrative, and lyrically composed prose.  Because my writing often clusters around a specific constellation of issues (transculturation, cross-cultural/cross-national encounters, “ethnic” narratives, etc.), these sources generally feature Asian/Asian American subjects or speakers, or those (like Vietnam war veterans or turn-of-the-century “globe-trotters”) whose lives have somehow crossed or complicated a sphere of Asian life.

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Editors’ Picks: Reflections on (Re)Fashioning Japonisme

Recently I’ve become interested in nineteenth century japonisme, a strain of “Japan-fever” that Akane  Kawakami, author of Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters With Japan, 1887-2004, describes as a “passing Parisian fad [which] became an important part of the creative imagination of major artists, composers and writers of the period.”  One of these writers, French naval officer Pierre Loti, became widely popular for his novel about a Japanese geisha named Madame Chrysanthemum, whom he arranged to “marry” for a six-month period while stationed in Nagasaki.  In Loti’s fictionalized Japan, Madame Chrysanthemum and her fellow geisha figure as lovely, decorative objects, gaily painted and largely ornamental features of a miniature world filled with dozens of other decorative objects: painted fans, silk screens, teacups and patterned kimono.  Japan is a world of surfaces and puzzling encounters with Japanese women the size of dolls: “yellow-skinned, cat-eyed,” and “no larger than a boot.”  At one point in Madame Chrysanthemum, the narrator remarks that Chrysanthemum is so lovely and “dragonfly”-like, sleeping on her tatami mat, that he would prefer her to always remain in such an attitude of repose—he finds her much more interesting that way.

Initially a bit stunned (and horrified) by Loti’s representations of Madame Chrysanthemum and her counterparts, I began researching the critical conversations that have surrounded this text over the last few decades, and found that opinion is divided between those who condemn the novel for its overt colonial and “sexploitative” agenda, and those who read with a bit more sympathy for Loti’s subtle treaments of japonisme. My stance?  As yet undecided.  I am somewhat unconvinced by arguments in favor of Loti’s veiled sympathies for his Japanese subjects, but remain open to them nonetheless.  At the very least, I find his representations fascinating and, more importantly, telling of the prevailing attitudes held by many in nineteenth-century France while japonisme was all the rage.  The culture’s fascination with “Japan” (or rather, its imagined “Japoniste” equivalent), the aesthetic, and the surfaces of things, bear interesting implications for contemporary Asian American poets (particularly those who, like myself, are invested in revitalizing the “East”-“West” encounter in terms that are more relevant to the current moment, but also informed by the literary histories of the past). Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: Reflections on (Re)Fashioning Japonisme” →

Editors’ Picks: The Art of Writing in Dialect

Paul Laurence Dunbar

For the poet of color, whose repository of language is often composed of multiple “englishes” (standard English being only one of them), the dialect poem can become a site of great experimentation–and great conflict.  Best known in the American canon, at least in terms of dialect poetry, are the works of noted African Americans poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and later, Langston Hughes with his jazz and blues poetry during the Harlem Renaissance.  Dunbar, often considered to be the first African American poet of national eminence, is widely read both for his black vernacular and standard English verse.  The marked differences in syntax, register, tone, and even subject matter that distinguish works like “We Wear the Mask” or “Ships That Pass in the Night” from  “When Malindy Sings” are fascinating to me, particularly because both “voices” are grounded, I think, in Dunbar’s understanding of himself as an English language/African American poet.

Countee Cullen

Equally fascinating to me are figures like Countee Cullen, who, like Hughes, was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but who (unlike Hughes) vociferously rejected the use of black vernacular in his poetry.  Why?  Because he considered poetry worth reading to be poetry that was carefully metered, rhymed, and executed in the tradition of Keats and Shelley, his two greatest influences.  For a more detailed exploration of Cullen and Hughes’ differing views on questions of racial representation, poetics, and aesthetics, see the comparative essay “Jazz or Junk?” posted on Renaissance Collage. Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: The Art of Writing in Dialect” →

LR News: Suggestions and Upcoming Reading Period

Happy New Year, and welcome back to the Lantern Review blog!  We’d like to kick off the year 2010 with a request for suggestions re: topics/questions/books you’d like us to blog about in the New Year.  As always, we love to hear from you, and want very much to be responsive to our readers and wider community of poets/writers.

Also, our reading period is opening soon, which means that we will (if all goes according to plan!) begin accepting submissions for the first issue of Lantern Review sometime toward the end of the month.   If you haven’t already, check out our journal’s main page and preview issue, which offer a glimpse of our mission statement, aesthetic, and layout.

We wish you a Happy New Year, and look forward to reading your submissions!

Best,

The Editors

Event Coverage: Breaking English


Larissa Min reading a creative nonfiction manuscript at Halo, in the Capitol HIll neighborhood of Seattle.
Larissa Min, reading from an account of her family's journey from Korea to Brazil and the United States. Photo courtesy of Maya Li.

I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to check out an event on December 4th called Breaking English, hosted by Korean-Brazilian writer Larissa Min.  Larissa moved to Seattle in 2000, where she got her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Washington.  Since then, she has taught at local community colleges and begun work on a family history project mapping her parents’ journey from Korea to Brazil, and several decades later, to New York City.  Her research, sponsored by the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, has taken her back to Brazil, down the streets of her hometown, and into the archives of her childhood library.  

I arrived at the event a little late, but found a great seat as Larissa assured the audience that she was running on “Latino time” and would be ready in a few minutes.  I felt immediately gratified to be in the company of what seemed to me a different crowd than the one that usually frequents Seattle literary events (where I am often the only person of color present!)  The unusual venue, a darkened second-floor dance studio in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district (known for its arts community), was a lovely event space: floor-length mirrors, wood pillars, votive candles flickering on the hardwood, white paper bags glowing luminously along the back wall of the studio…   Continue reading “Event Coverage: Breaking English” →

Weekly Prompt: “Questions Without Answers”

This week’s prompt is adapted from a writing exercise in Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community (T&W Collaborative, 2005), a writing handbook now on sale on the Teachers & Writers Collaborative website.

Poetry Everywhere by Jack Collum and Sheryl Noethe
Poetry Everywhere by Jack Collum and Sheryl Noethe

What happens when we die?  Where do noises go?  How far is far?  These types of questions without answers are the focus of today’s writing prompt.  According to Collum and Noethe, an unanswerable question is one that causes the mind to “kee[p] on seeking.” Don’t lose sight of this objective!  Allow each question to lead to the next without bothering to consider an answer.  Resist the impulse to know it all.

As it may take a while to get your mind into “seeking” mode, begin with a few practice questions.  Let your thoughts wander.  Stare out the window…  Where do birds sleep at night?  How do they recognize their family members?  Do baby birds ever find their fathers?  Would they want to?  How tall do pine trees grow?  How long would it take for one to grow into outer space?  Unfetter your mind: no question is too whimsical for this exercise.

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Editors’ Picks: Teachers & Writers Collaborative Book Sale!


Teachers & Writers Collaborative book sale!
Teachers & Writers Collaborative book sale!

The Teachers & Writers Collaborative is having a book sale!  If you teach English, writing composition, creative writing, anything… these handbooks are a tremendous resource.

The T&W titles on my shelf are: Poetry Everywhere and The List Poem, though I can vouch for numerous others (Listener in the Snow, Handbook of Poetic Forms, etc. ) as well.  I’ve found these books to be useful not only in leading poetry workshops, but in teaching middle school writing composition, and even elementary school grammar!  The prompts are wonderfully versatile, and can be adapted for writers of any age.

Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: Teachers & Writers Collaborative Book Sale!” →

Editors’ Picks: Haibun at Hugo House

Rebecca BrownHugo House

This Wednesday, I was lucky to attend Rebecca Brown’s haibun class at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood  Haibun is an ancient Japanese poetic form that juxtaposes prose narrative and short haiku. Brown’s interest in the form stems from what she calls “the wonderfully uncategorizeable texts” of contemporary American poets who have taken this ancient form and adapted it to their own literary moment.

The event was packed, and I shared a tiny table in the corner with three other women, one of whom is an alumni of the University of Washington’s M.F.A. program.  Years ago, she helped found the program’s literary journal, The Seattle Review, and studied with the faculty member who initiated The Castalia Reading Series, which is also hosted at Hugo House.  Also in attendance was the editor of a local haiku journal, and one of Seattle’s resident specialists in Beat literature, who volunteered himself to read an example of a haibun from Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, a novel written in 1956 while Kerouac was living in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State.  Brown’s samples of haibun ranged from pieces like Desoluation Angels to works by John Ashbery and Basho himself, the poet credited as the originator of the haibun form.

Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: Haibun at Hugo House” →

Editors’ Picks: Voices From Southeast Asia

Voices from Southeast Asia

While browsing the library for new voices in Asian American poetry, I came across the book Voices From Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States (Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1991).  Though the book is not new, it provides historic context for the experiences that have shaped and seeded much of contemporary Southeast Asian American poetry.  The 247-page volume is comprised of a series of oral histories, each of which features the life experience of a Lao, Hmong, Vietnamese, or Cambodian refugee to the United States.  Though most of the book is written in prose, there are a few narratives in verse form.  The poem below, for example, was written by a Cambodian woman after her relocation to the Bronx.

URBAN LIFE

They take us and put us in boxes to live.

Each family lives in the same kind of box […]

Our boxes are not all in the same building […]

So we talk on the telephone and imagine

what this person does and

how he lives in his box

and I tell him about life in my box.

This poem, probably one of the earliest instances of Southeast Asian American poetry, captures in simple, unsentimental, and uncomplicated terms the experience of resettlement in the United States by a faceless “they,” a “they” responsible not only for “tak[ing] us” from Cambodia, but “put[ting] us in boxes to live.”  In the speaker’s sense of disconnection, her need to construct an imagined community life, and attempts to communicate across fractured lines, one begins to identify the beginnings of Southeast Asian American poetry.

The accounts in the book are, as US Senator Edward Kennedy puts it, “full of the agony of exile, the disruption of the refugee camps, [and] the challenge of starting over.”  Since 1975, over a million Southeast Asians have settled in the United States, established communities across the country, and begun to shape the voice of contemporary Asian American poetry.  The question for Asian American poets writing today, both those of Southeast Asian descent and other ethnicities, is how to engage the concerns of their history and to move forward.

If, in your own writing, you have struggled to engage historical material (family myth, oral narrative, historical text) in verse, please share your experiences here.  What forms and methods have worked for you?  What dilemmas and/or points of resistance have you encountered?  We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Weekly Prompt: The Art of Rhetoric

Note: This prompt was first introduced to me by poet and UW professor Andrew Feld, author of  Citizen (Harper Collins, 2004).  Because I found it so helpful to my own writing, I have decided to share it with Lantern Review.

Shakespeare Resources Center

The art of rhetoric, one of the ancient arts of discourse, is the art of persuasion and using language effectively.  Rhetorical devices and figures can prove tremendously useful to the contemporary poet, in the sense that they offer one a variety of syntactical structures that force tighter form and syntax, quicker turns in language, and—at times—more rigorous thought.

In my experience, experimenting with “rhetorical poetry” can allow a poet’s language to move in unexpected ways, thus enabling them to explore territory they wouldn’t normally breach.  Think of rhetoric as a tool than can be applied to language; the use of chiasmus, for example, will structure your thought in such a way that you begin with a word of idea, move to another, and then circle back to the initial one.  Consider the rhetorical effect of this particular construction: the sense of venturing out, circling, and returning is created not by description or narrative, but by the language itself.

The following excerpt from one of my “rhetoric” poems is an example of how using a rhetorical device in your writing can lead to some productive experimentation with voice, tone, and syntactical structure:

Sometime in the nineties, midway through

Her Southeast Asian exile, she directed the Frenchman at the salon

To Do Anything.  Thus began the cropped years.

She came home and cried.  We all cried.

Here the use of epistrophe is demonstrated in the repeated use of the word “cried” at the end of the two sentences in the final line.  Ending both sentences on the beat “cried” affects not only the rhythm of the language, but the manner in which the stanza shapes meaning and tone as well.

To write your own rhetoric poem, refer to this article, entitled “Shakespeare’s Grammar: Rhetorical Devices,” which is a quick glossary of some of the most common rhetorical devices.  Select a few (two or three, to begin) devices from the list and incorporate them into your writing by either (1) revising a previously written poem, or (2) tackling some new material.  It may be easier to begin with a poem you have already written, although starting on a completely new project may afford you a greater degree of freedom.

In short, consider the ways in which rhetoric can take pressure off you as a poet.  Let syntax do the work of poetry—you may be pleased with the results!  We would love to see any experimentation that results from your work with rhetoric, so please consider posting your responses on our blog.