Celebrate National Library Week and Poetry Month with us!
Thursday, April 13, 2017 • 11AM-1PM
Cudahy-IC Connection • LSC
Drop by any time to make your own poetry remix! We’ll have materials for creating erasures and centos.
An erasure is created by erasing some words from an existing text so that the remaining words form a poem. This as a blackout poem, where words are blacked-out with a marker so that the erased words and the newly created poem form a visual object or the words can be “lifted” from the existing text to create a poem that stands alone. Erasures can transform the meaning of an existing text, work against that meaning, or create entirely new meanings of their own.
Centos are a form of “remix” poetry dating back to Ancient Greece and Rome. Cento is the Latin word for “patchwork” and the basic premise involves taking individual lines or phrases from other poets’ works and recombining them to create a new poem in a new voice. Centos are often designed as a play between the many voices of particular authors into one poetic conversation, or as a combination of the images and sounds of many voices into one new and coherent poetic vision. Some famous examples of the Cento style are John Ashbery’s “To a Waterfowl,” David Lehman’s “Oxford Cento,” and local author Simone Muench’s book of the form “Wolf Centos.”
