Hooking

Patrick Warner raises his concerns about Mary Dalton's collection of centos, Hooking, in the form of a "cento" review—that is, an essay spliced together from bits and pieces of other essays.

(Photo by Paul Daly)

Patchwork Poetry

Working with Mary Dalton on her new collection, Hooking, brought into sharp relief how little I knew about the cento. Over at Oona, a blogger makes a case for the form's cultural relevance:

 In an age of sampling, remixes, & flarf, the renaissance of the cento, a form that dates, one way or another, at least to ancient Greece, is oddly apt. The possibilities of this kind of poetic collage are dizzying.

Marie Okáčová zooms in:

I believe that the cento, rather than being an eccentric curiosity devoid of all literary value, is primarily a kind of intricate and actually perfectly legitimate play with language, which reflects its principles of operation. Being in fact the embodiment of absolute intertextuality, the patchwork poems implicitly question every notion of literary originality because they emphasize the interdepenence of individual texts representing different literary meta-languages. The cento is therefore "recycled" art only in a more conspicuous way than the rest of literature inevitably is; this, however, does not mean that a work of literature can actually never be original and inventive. In fact, as an example of intertextuality par excellence, the patchwork poetry is, at least conceptually, a highly innovative literary form.

Hooking

Mary Dalton's collection of centos, Hooking, arrived in the office yesterday. She launches her book tonight in Montreal at Argo (with special guest Sue Sinclair).  She reads in Ottawa on April 23 and Toronto on April 24. In an interview with John Barton, she explains the notion of authorship underlying the book:

I think of the lines I’ve excised from poems as material, as strips of words. Each line, the hooking of these words into this particular sequence on a line, is the creation of its individual author; the sum of the lines in each cento, the way in which these syntactical fragments have been hooked together, is my creation. These pieces are at once mine and not mine. They give rise to the question, where does originality lie?

Sunday Poem

BRAID 

a.
There are others besides you who have worn that look—
peeking through the window-grille,
and in that place,
the mouth moving uniquely with each dialect.
Shall I tell you the secret
I braid by rote? Rough memories coiled like rope:
a fevered memory of
mild, mild eyes ricocheting off his fate;
a body riding up over the hood,
bleeding into the soft grass.

b.
This brings nobody peace, The ancient war
leads you through the streets of this shady city.
They somehow look as if they knew, except
the nude hills come back and the sleepless
stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
After a while,
the matches, the wrong key-rings,
the lucky ticket with the right signs
are stuck. They can’t join the flag-waving;
they stiffen, when they should bend.

c.
Omega’s long last O, memory’s elision
jostle the vessel he cannot refill.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
like a furious pink rabbit from a hat.
She buys up all
the notion of what his whiskers would feel like—
smack! Oh, attaboy, attaold boy.
Lost to TV reruns flickering overhead.
The point was to react,
to an ocean, or sorrow.

d.
You could be waiting for a tailor
that made the sky.
Listen: the heavens hiss—
and when one of the lookers Lily asked me what the hell
came late and will probably leave early,
I looked around at nothing.
Like an album: there: elf-child with dog—
little bastards. It was impossible to tell
and you are someplace else and thirty-three.
You’re running out of things to try.

e.
Mysterious voyagers from outer space
wrap their wings in sun-splints,
shuffle. They laugh together; their money shrinks.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk
or shrewd donkey,
to work green magic on my flesh.
Monarchs are falling,
trailing through ditches of water and nevus-ied grapes.
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
without you, the endless guessing.

From Hooking: A Book of Centos (2013) by Mary Dalton. (See book for source list of individual lines.)