I have thought a bit about the cento. I read with Maxine Chernoff a few years ago for Small Press Traffic’s reading series, and at the time, she read from Among the Names, (some of) which is written in cento. While I don’t remember specifics (it’s been years), I remember enjoying her reading and her poems. Oscar has a poem which is an elegy to GURU, and this poem is comprised of nothing but GURU song titles. So that’s a cento, no?
I am bringing this up now, the cento, because I randomly received (a review copy of) Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source in the mail yesterday evening, and am thinking about its premise:
“We read these words on page 26 of The Source, Noah Eli Gordon’s strange and haunting cento—a book assembled from thousands of instances of page 26, as found in the volumes of the Denver Public Library, their deployment of our alphabet with its twenty-six letters yielding an astonishing variety of source material that constitutes Noah Eli Gordon’s adventure in numerology. Language is literally charged with meaning in exciting new ways.” —Marjorie Perloff
There’s more, regarding Kabbalist numerology as well. I am interested in any process that brings us to the poem. I am wondering though, about the randomness of the source material. Yes, surprise happens. Yes, we must be open to language in all places. I’ve leafed through the collection, and wasn’t particularly held in/by it. So maybe I just need to be open and try again; indeed, I’ve come upon a lot of work that seemed unlikely to move or impress me, and from which I have come away impressed. But if the experiment and the process are potentially more interesting than the resulting work, then is that enough?
Perhaps it’s enough that the unexpected appearance of this book in my mailbox has got me thinking about my own possible forays into cento. What source material would I use? Aren’t I already kind of doing this, in a more directed manner, with my Pinay narratives project?
As a sometimes-book reviewer, how should I decide which books to review?
And finally, how do we come to the book in the first place? Given our busy lives, given how saturated we are with work, how do we decide what to read? When picking up a book off a bookstore shelf, how do you decide which ones to spend your money on and take home?
Thanks for these raising questions, which are a perennial mini crisis for me. I find myself constantly craving inspiration, and, currently, I’m in that limbo state, in between books, wondering what I should read next, not my favorite place to be, particularly because its been months since I read any work that I fell in love with.
I’m always seeking that next literary crush, jonesing for that high when I’m amped on words and under the spell of some great artist. Its rare, which is a good thing, but the crash is dispiriting, and I especially have a hard time deciding whether to commit my pleasure reading, assuming I have space for that, to research for my projekt, which can be a bit of a chore, or to indulge in guilty pleasures. I also have a two-foot stack of “New Yorkers” and “Writer’s Chronicle,” which I’ve been trying to tackle, and these have me thinking I should forgo any pleasure reading until I’ve made some headway. Such a conundrum. Research and academic reading seem to be winning out, right now. Sigh.
Hey Rashaan, I’m with you on not having been “in love” with any recent texts. I have been impressed or interested, but “in love” is harder to come by these days. It could be because we read texts as writers and educators, and so whether or not we’re looking for it, we’re seeing the seams.
One of the hardest things for me is when I am reading and find myself workshopping a published text. So then sometimes, reading for the sheer pleasure of it just doesn’t happen for me.
These days, pretty much most of the books I’m buying are with the intent of teaching. Otherwise I’m reading books sent to me to write reviews.
So I might turn to YA speculative fiction or something so I can enjoy reading again.
I’ve played now and then with the cento kind of thing, and I remember doing a patchwork poem type of exercise once in a poetry writing class long ago (my last year in high school, 1971-72). I enjoy the experiment, though I’ve never found it leading me to write anything further growing out of it.
Once some years back, at an open-mike reading I was going to regularly, one evening I read something I’d been doing as an experiment, not a cento exactly (whatever the exact definition is), but — I went through a Russian-English dictionary (I don’t know more than ten or twelve words of Russian), and I made a partly random, partly chosen list of Russian words and English translations of them. Probably 25 or 30 pairs of words altogether.
Then I arranged the words in groups of three or four pairs of Russian words/English translations. Short stanzas, if you will.
And so I read the list at the open mike. I would read two or three or four Russian words, and then the English counterparts of them, a little bit consciously arranged, a little bit of intentional cadence to the reading, though randomness predominated. Or so it seemed to me.
I got to the end and people clapped. For words picked out of a dictionary. Words in a language that — I’m fairly sure — few if any of them understood, or not more than a word or two. I found it an interesting brief journey through an aesthetic, if that’s what it was, from which I feel remote most of the time.
The other thing I thought of, reading your post here — sometime years ago somebody published a selection of one of the avant-garde English-language (mostly) literary magazines of the 1920′s and 1930′s, the name of which I can never remember for the life of me. Three syllables, starts with a C.
Anyway, one of the items included in the retrospective collection was a short excerpt, two pages, of a “Work in Progress” by James Joyce. It was in fact an excerpt from Finnegan’s Wake. And it included, on the facing pages, Joyce’s own “translation” of the pages into standard English.
And it was a revelation to me. The translation followed the original, word for word. It became clear where Joyce had used Gaelic words, current Dublin street words, subtly hidden plays on other words, the whole range of that remarkable language he conjured for the book.
I’ve only ever read little bits of Finnegan’s Wake over the years, though I always enjoy it when I do, even when I follow little of what it’s saying. I’ll try reading it out loud sometime, just for the music of it.
A bit astray from what you’re talking about here, maybe, though at some intuitive level, for me, it relates.
Thank you, Lyle, yes it does relate. I’m thinking about those collections of words from different sources, and am interested in how audiences respond to them. If it doesn’t make any ‘conventional’ sense, then what kind of ‘sense’ are audiences making from them?
But backing up, what kind of ‘sense’ are we as writers making or hoping for? I guess that’s the experiment.