Poetry Cento Assignment

Final assignment

This assignment asks you to build your own cento, based in part on Ashbery’s “The Dong with the Luminous Nose (a cento),” and on your reading across the trajectory of this semester.

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For an overview / review of the cento, see the powerpoint presentation for the week of September 1-3. For another sample of a cento (other than Ashbery’s), see Maureen McClane, “My Poets I: An Interlude in the Form of a Cento”

Requirements:

Choose 40 lines of poetry, from poems on this semester’s syllabus (including the revisions to the syllabus apropos ballads and the lyric), and arrange them in a cento, consisting of four stanzas of ten lines each.

You can use more than one line from a given poem, but not more than two lines from a given poem (and not in succession).

You can use more than one poem from a given poet, but not more than three poems from any given poet.

The title of your cento should also be a line taken from one of the poems we have read this semester.

Format your cento as McClane has (see “My Poets I: An Interlude in the Form of a Cento”), making sure to introduce a numerical footnote at the end of each line. (NB: not endnotes but footnotes.)

In the footnote, identify the name of the poet and the title of the poem from which you have borrowed the line in question. (Again, see McClane.)

After you have completed your cento (again, a 40-line cento consisting in four stanzas of ten lines each), answer all of the questions below (numbering your answers).

Questions:

  1. According to what criteria did you title your cento as you did?
  2. According to what criteria did you choose your opening line? And the opening lines

of stanzas two, three, and four?

  1. According to what criteria did you choose your concluding line?
  2. Identify and define at least three genres of poetry in the poems from which you have

taken lines in your cento.

  1. What are five vocabulary terms (not including cento or nonsense verse) that will help

your reader think about your cento? Define each term and explain its importance for

understanding your cento.

  1. What are your three favorite lines in your cento? Why?
  2. What would you like your reader to take away from your cento?
  3. What else? What else would you like your reader to know about your cento?

From “Turn Articles into Poetry” (Leah Umansky, New York Times, 28 November 2020):

The hunt

Hunt, or skim through the paper for lines that speak to you. Maybe your eye will settle on a sentence that uses interesting language, like a vibrant verb or a compelling adjective; maybe you will find a sentence that includes a description of an image you admire, or maybe you will find a line that refers to something that resonates with you, like a mention of a season, a color or an emotion. Keep hunting for your treasured lines. You may already have a topic in mind, or your topic may come to you once you have your lines cut out and you really examine them.

Keep track

Though this poem will be your own creation, the lines are not. Take out a piece of paper, or you can use a laptop or phone and write each line down and then write down the author of the article that line came from. You will need this later.

Thieve (or Cut)

If you are working from the print newspaper, cut out the lines you have found and place them on a flat surface. Or copy them to a document on your phone.

Connect

Look at your individual lines and start playing around with their order, as you stretch them out like snippets of yarn on a table or floor. Could one line jump off another? If so, put that pair to the side. Keep finding connections. Imagine these stolen lines to be threads you are weaving together in meaning, image or emotion.

Layout

Once you have laid out your lines, think about how to put them together. If you are still deciding what your poem is about, perhaps focus on an emotion, a place or an image. Your topic is up to you. Let these borrowed words spark something creative inside you.

When you’re ready, decide what line you want to start with and what line you want to end with. Laying these lines out as a frame will get you motivated. Then, start laying out your other lines. If something seems wrong, move it around, or cut it. You may even want to look for another line to substitute for it.

Paste

Paste your lines on paper or on a document, and you have your cento. Make sure to carefully write out, or type your sources.

 

POEMS to choose:

 

September 1-3: Introduction / Nonsense Verse

Lear, “The Dong with a Luminous Nose”

Ashbery, “The Dong with the Luminous Nose”

Seuss, *Fox in Socks

 

September 8-10: Blank Verse

Surrey, *from The Aeneid

Marlowe, *from Tamburlaine the Great, Part I

Milton, from Paradise Lost (selections from Books 1 and 3)

Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”

Smith, from Beachy Head

Frost, “Mending Wall,” “The Wood-Pile”

Merrill, *from The Book of Ephraim (“A”)

 

September 15-17: Stanzaic Patterns I

Herrick, “Delight in Disorder”

Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

Denham, *from Cooper’s Hill

Finch, “A Nocturnal Reverie”

Pope, from An Essay on Criticism (Part II, ll. 337-83)

Montagu, “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband”

Dickinson, 340 “[I felt a Funeral, in my Brain],” 372 “[After great pain, a formal feeling comes],” 479 “[Because I could not stop for Death]”

Thomas, “Adlestrop”

Wilbur, “Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning”

Merrill, “The Victor Dog”

 

September 22-24: Stanzaic Patterns II

Wyatt, “[Is it possible]”

Jonson, “A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme”

Herrick, “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “The Night Piece, to Julia”

Cowper, “Lines Written during a Period of Insanity”

Browning, *“A Toccata of Galuppi’s”

Auden, “Refugee Blues”

Stevens, “Of Mere Being,” *“The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract”

Bishop, *“Roosters”

Stallings, *“Like”

 

September 29-October 1: Ballads I Early Modern Ballads

“Lord Randal”
“The Three Ravens”
“The Twa Corbies”
“Sir Patrick Spens”
“The Unquiet Grave”
“The Wife of Usher’s Well” “Bonny Barbara Allan”

Wordsworth, “[Strange fits of passion have I known],” “[Song],” “[A slumber did my spirit seal]”

Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

October 6-8: Ballads II
[Anonymous], *“John Henry”
Harper, *“The Slave Mother”
Dunbar, *“Black Samson of Brandywine”
Hughes, *“Ballad of the Landlord”
Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham”
Merwin, *“Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen” Nelson, *“15-cent “Futures”

October 13-15: Understanding Lyric

Culler, *“Rhetoric, Poetics, and Poetry,” *“Why Lyric?”

Wordsworth, “[There was a Boy]”

Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”

Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”

 

October 27-29: Sonnets I

Wyatt, “[The long love, that in my thought doth harbor],” “[Whoso list to hunt],” “[My galley charged with forgetfulness]”

Surrey, “The Soote Season,” “Love, that Doth Reign and Live within My Thought”

Spenser, from Amoretti: 1 “[Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands],” 75 “[One day I  wrote her name upon the strand]”

Sidney, from Astrophil and Stella: 1 “[Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show],” 31 “[With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies],” 47 “[What, have I thus betrayed my liberty?]”

Drayton, from Idea: “To the Reader of These Sonnets,” 61 “[Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part]”

Shakespeare, from Sonnets: 29 “[When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes],” 30 “[When to the sessions of sweet silent thought],” 71 “[No longer mourn for me when I am dead],” 73 “[That time of year thou mayst in me behold]”

Wroth, from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: 1 ‘[When night’s black mantle could most darkness prove],” 3 “[Yet is there hope],” 37 “[Night, welcome art thou to my mind distressed]”

 

November 3-5: Sonnets II

Smith, “Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex,” “To the Shade of Burns,” “Written in October”

Wordsworth, “It Is a Beauteous Evening,” “London, 1802,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room”

Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “When I Have Fears,” “On the Sonnet”

  1. Rossetti, “Remember,” “In an Artist’s Studio”

Hopkins, “[No worst, there is none],” “[I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day]”

Berryman, *from Sonnets to Chris: 23 “[They may suppose]”

Wilbur, *“Praise in Summer”

Heaney, from Glanmore Sonnets: VII “[Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea],” X “[I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal]”

Hayes, *from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins

 

November 10-12: Elegy I                                                     November 12: Close Reading #2 Due

Dunbar, “Lament for the Makers”

Surrey, “Wyatt Resteth Here”

Jonson, “On My First Daughter,” “On My First Son”

Dryden, “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham”

Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

Wordsworth, “Surprised by Joy,” *“Elegiac Stanzas”

 

November 17-19: Elegy II

Hughes, *“Night Funeral in Harlem”

Auden, “Funeral Blues,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”

Bishop, *“North Haven”

Hecht, *“For James Merrill: An Adieu”

Heaney, *“Audenesque”

Doty, *“Tiara”

Bang, *from Elegy: “The Watch,” “The Role of Elegy,” “You Were You Are Elegy”

Merwin, *Lament for the Makers

 

December 1-3: Villanelles

Dowson, *“Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures”

Empson, *“Villanelle”

Auden, *“If I Could Tell You”

Roethke, “The Waking”

Bishop, “One Art”

Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”

Merrill, *“Dead Center”

Muldoon, “Milkweed and Monarch”

Stallings *“After a Greek Proverb”

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