Our presentations have drawn to an end. To conclude this part of the class, I’d like each of you to pull something you loved by each of the contemporary poets and write a cento. A cento is a poem made up of different quotes. Or, to quote the Academy of American Poets: “From the Latin word for “patchwork,” the cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.” So, basically, you can arrange the borrowed line (lines, sentence or fragment) in any way you want. Just don’t change the authors’ language. Hopefully, by the time you read this you’ll be able to find a poem by each of our eight poets (Diamond Forde, Morgan Parker, Christopher Soto, Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Justin Phillip Reed, Phillip B. Williams , Terrance Hayes) on the OpenLab, but if not, feel free to Google and find one of their poems.
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