© 2025 poetsonline.org
For this December 2025 issue, we combine two poetry forms, the cento and apostrophe.
The cento form is ancient, in existence since at least the days of Virgil and Homer. In the Modern era, famous examples include T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Ezra Pound's "Cantos."
A purist version of a cento poem is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from other poems, essentially creating a collage of existing works. The term "cento" is derived from the Latin word for "patchwork garment."
More recent centos include John Ashbery's odd, "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" with lines from poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Edward Lear, and others, and a long poem by Connie Hershey, "Ecstatic Permutations."
The model cento we are featuring is from Simone Muench’s fifth collection titled Wolf Cento, which is composed of short poems all titled "Wolf Cento,” and we selected one of them. Muensch footnotes the poem with her sources for the wolf poems: Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaux, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joyce Mansour, William Burroughs, Meret Oppenheim, Mary Low, Adrienne Rich, and Carl Sandburg.
Though centos are usually made from lines from other poems (and sometimes prose), they could be made from lines from anyone, such as a family member.
We added the apostrophe form to this cento call for submissions. Apostrophe poems are directly addressed to a person or thing that is almost always absent and cannot respond. For example, Wordsworth's sonnet "Milton" which begins "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour." "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg is addressed to Walt Whitman. But not all apostrophe poems are addressed to other poets or writers. Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is addressed to her deceased father, a dentist and professor, and Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" is addressed to his dying father, a grammar school teacher. A third father poem is Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," which is also addressed to his deceased father.
And apostrophes are not limited to people. Robert Burns' "To a Mouse" is addressed to a mouse -"Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie - but the famous closing is an apostrophe to the common man's fate - "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promis'd joy!" Shakespeare's Hamlet addresses the inanimate skull of Yorick, and Juliet addresses Romeo from the balcony, though he is not there at that time. And many an apostrophe is addressed to something abstract, such as love, fate, night, summer, etc.
We asked for submissions of an apostrophe directly addressed (usually in the title or first line) that is also a cento, using lines by other writers. In a sense, this will be a very specific kind of found poem. If you choose to write about a person who is not a writer that you can borrow lines from, use quotes best remembered from them, or at least in their style. (You might want those "quotes" to be punctuated or in italics?) If you choose an inanimate object, it is more challenging since you will need to borrow lines from poems or prose that relate. Optionally, you can footnote your cento with the sources which would probably be of interest to readers.
Simone Muench was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas and holds a PhD from the University of Illinois Chicago. She is the author of seven full-length collections, including The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), co-written with Jackie K. White, and Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry.
Muench is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry, the 2014 Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, two Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and other honors.
Simone is the writing program director at Lewis University, where she teaches English, creative writing, and film studies. She is the chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review and a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Chicago.
CONFIDING IN MY FATHER OVER TEA
I never could talk to you.
How can I speak of coffee and flowers,
the tongue stuck in my jaw?
And would it have been worth it, after all,
after the cups, the marmalade, the tea
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth?
It is impossible to say just what I mean.
Jackie Chou
(cento of lines from Sylvia Plath, Ha Jin, T.S. Eliot, and Anne Sexton)
THANK YOU MOM FOR ALWAYS HAVING THE WORDS
I'm writing this poem for you, Mom,
your love, a guiding light that shines through
guiding me through the darkest night.
Bitter words, like daggers, pierce,
in a teenage wasteland where dreams decay.
The words you spoke, both kind and wise,
"People will always tell you the negative things about you
much more than the positive."
Your embrace, a sanctuary of peace,
you encouraged and gave support.
"Your friends aren't good at everything,
they only do the things they are good at."
The mean one speaks with venomous tongue-
"Consider the source."
And nothing, nothing is going right-
"Those that do, don't talk; those that talk don't do."
You still felt 25 behind your eyes,
and sometimes I am that madcap person
clapping my hands and singing
"Today is the day the teddy bears have their picnic."
But, what about virtue?
"It is better to be thought a fool,than to open one's mouth
and remove all doubt."
I scribble that down in smeared blue.
What is essential is invisible to the eye,
like the fragrance of blossoming trees.
But your spirit lives on, forever by my side,
a love that will never cease.
Leslayann Schecterson
Cento Sources:Maya Angelou, Lauren Camp,Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Henry Hall,
Travis J. Harris, Ellen Johnston, Carole King, Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver,
Catherine Pulsipher, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Robert Louis Stevenson
TO MY AUDIENCE BEFORE THE CONCERT
A rough sound was polished
until it became a smoother sound,
which was polished until it became music.
There is a magic made by melody:
a spell of rest and quiet breath
and cool heat.
The music grows, flows,
grumbles and laughs.
I've made my song a coat
covered with embroideries
out of old mythologies.
Let not the worries outside steal
your inner joy and peace and song.
Music, when soft voices die,
vibrates in the memory.
(But) 'tis you that are the music,
not the song.
Susan Spaeth Cherry
Sources (not in order): Mwenyeji Spikes, Elizabeth Bishop, William Butler Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Apirana Taylor, Amy Lowell, and Mark Strand.
ODE TO FAULKNER'S ADDIE BUNDREN
Addie, are you William Faulkner’s Hester Prynne
or Anne Carson’s Emily Brontë, who
“spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet …
It gave her peace.”
“Sad stunted life,
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
And despair.”
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
“Why cast away the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
The world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.”
I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say.
“On herself she had no pity.”
“Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,
pouring up the vents.”
My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin. I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.
I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he could not have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong.
*A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me
And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.*
Rob Friedman
Quotations Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”
Italics William Faulkner, from ITAL As I Lay Dying
Asterisks Emily Brontë, from “The Prisoner”
WINTER CENTO
Demeter, bring forth your sorrow once more -
Even now this landscape is assembling
The darkest evening of the year
So dawn goes down to day
All day the hoary meteor fell
When morning rose in mourning gray
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone
The desolate, deserted trees
The maples never knew
That you were coming -
A liquid moon moves gently
Among the long branches
Bone-pale, the recent snow
This is the land the sunset washes
No cloud above, no earth below
What are you waiting for
Come home, come home
And dream the days away
Terri J. Guttilla
along with: Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, Christina Rossetti, John Greenleaf Whittier and William Carlos Williams.
ODE TO GEOFFREY CHAUCER
A cento, reflecting on a visit to Canterbury Cathedral
Thou art too dear for my possessing
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flutter.
Yet ah! This air I gather and I release
You lived on; these weeds and waters,
These walls are what you haunted,
Who of all men most sways my spirits to peace.
In Beowulf before you, on your home ground, they knew and
Loved the open-handedness, the giving, the harp being struck,
And the clear song of a skilled poet. Times were pleasant
For the people there.
A few centuries later, a woman in a faraway land wrote of
Pleasing Things: Finding a large number of tales
That one has not read before. Or acquiring the second
Volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed.
These words echo the ancient love that bards of old
Enjoyed in you.
Look up at the stars! Look up at the skies
Oh, look at the fire-folk sitting in the air.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Some poets after you have said, art is wild as a cat
And quite separate from civilization.
But I agree with Yeats, who could have been describing you
When he asked, how but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born? You guided us
On a journey in April, when dawn is most beautiful:
As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint
Red, and wisps of purplish clouds trail over them. It was a
Pilgrimage of laughter, tears and soaring joy, as we heard lake
Water lapping with low sounds by the shore. And now, with
Sweet Keats, who died before his time, we ask you, our mentor,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream.
And dearest Ophelia who knew you too, entreats,
O look upon me sir, and hold your hands
In benediction over me.
Rose Anna Higashi
Chronology of Quotations
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 87”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Duns Scotus’ Oxford”
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris
William Blake “To the Muses”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Starlight Night”
William Wordsworth, “London, 1802”
Stevie Smith, “The New Age”
William Butler Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter”
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
John Keats, “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”
William Shakespeare, King Lear
TO BRIAN PATTEN
Yesterday
you were my favourite living poet,
there, watching and smiling,
now yesterday seems so far away.
So I wonder -
did you build your ship of death,
knowing you would need it,
or did you rage -
rage against the dying of the light
and not go gentle into that good night
when it was time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self
and falling skies.
With one quick call
dreams can be aborted
and become like a marooned whale.
Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul,
has her footing washed away, as age dark flood rises,
cold dash of waves at the ferry-warf - posh and ice in the river,
a gray discouraged sky overhead .. is there anything more?
So you should build your ship of death
for the long journey
towards oblivion,
knowing
a man can his own quietus make.
But still the heart of me weeps
to belong
where a slow, sad bird has flown,
only twilight now and the soft “she” of the river
that will last forever
as the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out into the house again
filling the heart with peace.
Lynn White
Lines from Laurence Lerner - Raspberries
Paul McCartney - Yesterday
D H Lawrence - The Ship Of Death
Dylan Thomas - Do not Go Gently
D H Lawrence - The Ship of Death
D H Lawrence - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Brian Patten - Now We Will Either Sleep, Lie Still Or Dress Again
Brian Pattern - Marooned Whales
Walt Whitman - To Think Of Time
D H Lawrence - The Ship Of Death
Brian Patten - The Translation
D H Lawrence - Piano
D H Lawrence - Bei Hennef
BEFORE DAWN, FOR DOGS I’VE LOST
Always on the point of falling asleep –
that was the first time you spoke to me dead.
Animals converse with humans
and I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
in which there is no other meaning, itself
a glossy animal with a quick temper,
full of earth's old timid grace.
Trekking stubborn through this season
I carry your heart with me (I carry it in
air and light and time and space,
April, and the last of the plum blossoms
gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground.
What falls away is always. And is near,
a dead dog's toy—valueless, unforgettable.
Taylor Graham
lines from John Haines, Jean Valentine, Maxine Kumin, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Mary Oliver, William Butler Yeats, Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings, Charles Bukowski, Philip Levine, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roethke, and Donald Hall.
OH, TIME; OH, LOVE
a broken sonnet
You devouring, bloody tyrant
leaving nothing beside remains!
Please, run out thy race!
At my back I always hear you.
Even Love, makes much of Time,
gathering rosebuds and not being
Time's fool within his bending sickle.
Love alters not with his brief
hours and weeks, but bears it out
even to the edge of doom.
Perhaps, time present and time past
are both present in time future.
Yet, old Time is still a-flying.
Your wingèd chariot hurrying near
Lily Hana Hayashi
together with Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Marvell, and Herrick.
O LIFE!
These are the days that must happen
to you. We do not suffer by accident.
Sometimes good things fall apart
so better things can fall together, and
remember its [the body’s] redemption
in suffering and in love. In every color
and circumstance, may the eyes be open
for what comes. If you hit the wrong
note, it’s the next one that determines
if it is good or bad. Fortune love you.
May you not lack for water. And
may that water smack of Cana’s wine.
Jo Taylor
Line 1. Walt Whitman
2. Jane Austen
3A. Marilyn Monroe
3B. Wendell Berry
4. Ghalib, translated by Jane Hirshfield
5. Miles Davis
6. Shakespeare
7, 8. Richard Wilbur
INVOCATION: AN APOSTROPHE TO LOUISE ERDRICH
Louise, I search for you in shadows,
behind brass edges of a jacklight’s collar
flickering beacons of burning oil
strip your apprehension, lure you—
a breathing doe—into familiar clearings,
make you pause on frozen fields,
consider existence as my spiritual wife.
Reverent desire transforms my essence
into a pining vegan windigo destined
to come for you and haunt your
compassionate impulse, pierce
that breastplate of clawed, roped bark
shielding your soul from sexual longing,
keeping my transcendent love medicine at bay.
Smoke masquerades as change on the horizon,
redefines roles blur into various reversals…
whisper to me, Louise, remind me why I matter
renew my cunning redressing weak fortitude;
an urban hunter, I’d embrace your misery
welcome new paths to wander, never curse
hurtful thoughts you birthed inside my being.
Advising actions, nurturing decisions,
you bless me with freewheeling courage
to hop freight trains in a runaway romance
bound to derail within hours or days whence
I’ll acquaint myself with your familiar loneliness
as mysteries connecting solitary spiritual bodies
cease to stroke our corporal relativity.
since shedding my icy coat, rising-up a Wakinyan,
you feed on my thunder, press your white buffalo
moccasins in snow freshly fallen—lifelines I
follow never questioning your mystic tracks—
no longer a pillaging Fleur, nor a beet queen,
now touch me with your silence, Louise,
gift me the purity of your windy kisses.
Now, we raise our heads, smell the breeze,
hoping to capture lingering fragrance of sour barley,
sage, and patchouli oil—earth mother’s tracings
we’ll carry with us, give face to the invisible, recall
in a heartbeat on mornings we wake in separate beds;
unphased by distance—always apart yet united—let us
bewitch each other like antelope messengers "ad infinitum."
Sterling Warner
O AMERICA
America!
Land created in common, dream nourished in common
The people do not always understand each other Langston Hughes
Nothing is simple anymore
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross purposes Billy Collins
none of us know how to deal with those other people James Baldwin
If the day ever comes when they know who
They are, they may know better where they are Robert Frost
The night has been long, The pit has been deep Maya Angelou
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose
I love what I do not have Pablo Neruda
What might have been an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation T.S. Eliot
In the mirror I see a frail man dreaming e.e. cummings
mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic acts Virginia Wolf
But tell me, Why can't I outrun my shadow? Gordon Parks
My silences had not protected me
Your silence will not protect you Audre Lorde
O I believe there is nothing real but America and freedom! Walt Whitman
I have a dream today to stand up for freedom together Martin Luther King
I do not believe that any of us would exchange places
with any other. Let us go forth to lead the land we love. John F. Kennedy
help us to move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light Dwight Eisenhower
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out James Baldwin
all that we have known and cared for,
will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age Winston Churchill
in an eternity the heat will not overtake the light William Carlos Williams
For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it Amanda Gorman
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.
Let a people loving freedom come to growth
a beauty full of healing ... be the pulsing in our spirits
Let a race of men now rise and take control Margaret Walker
Frank Kelly
HMS AURORA, 1939-1945.
In Loving Memory of Francis Robert Botterill 1917-1986
*...from out of darkness, cometh light…
Dear Dad
I remember well your naval joke
Which prised me from my night-time slumber,
Words I dreaded, as I groggily awoke,
Rise and shine! The morning’s fine!
Heave ho! Heave ho! Heave ho!
Lash up and stow…”
But we, who are left, have grown old,
And this is the story of war you never told.
*From regions of sorrow, in doleful shades,
The carnage, the mayhem, the loss of men,
Was this why your smile was worldly wise?
For there was *never such innocence again.
The sadness in your sea-blue eyes,
Which had seen too much, too much, too young,
You looked and saw the sky on fire,
As on the haunting flares you turned your back,
Did you crawl through the mess decks,
Newly blackened with soot,
As you took up the quarrel with our foe?
And found, on deck, a dismembered foot,
From a comrade who’d stood, once, by your side!
Here Peace and Rest can never dwell!
These were the stories, Dad, you did not tell.
In my memory you stand as a Prince amongst men,
But never with such innocence again.
John Botterill
References in bold: 1. Naval Sea Shanty? 2.For the Fallen by Binyon. 3. Paradise Lost by Milton 4. MCMXIV by Larkin 5. Dulce et Decorum est by Owen 5. Dulce et Decorum est by Owen 6. In Flanders Field by McCrae 7. Milton {as above}. 8. Larkin {as above}.
PETE
You lived simply, working with your hands,
Following a trade like our dad, raising two,
A boy and a girl, staying in our small town.
“The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed.”
You knew you were not the brightest
As your brothers moved away, went to
College, worked as engineers, teachers.
“So dawn goes down to day.”
You found your love two blocks away,
A lively girl, laughing all the time, raising
Your children, then working as they grew.
“The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn.”
But your kids grew and moved away,
And then, unexpectedly, being ten years
Younger, she caught a cold and died.
“Stop the clocks, cut off the telephone.”
You retired at sixty-five, living alone
In an empty house with a small dog,
Watching every spring turn into winter.
“He hath put away his labor.”
Your last years were livened by grandchildren,
By an older brother who had returned
After retirement as our mother grew old.
“The Dews drew quivering and Chill.”
But your son died of that year’s flu,
Grandchildren scattered, leaving
You all alone in an echoing house.
“Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.”
You died alone on a winter’s day,
Your little dog barking for her food,
As your life drained onto the floor.
Rob Miller
TO BRIAN PATTEN
Yesterday
you were my favourite living poet,
there, watching and smiling,
now yesterday seems so far away.
So I wonder -
did you build your ship of death,
knowing you would need it,
or did you rage -
rage against the dying of the light
and not go gentle into that good night
when it was time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self
and falling skies.
With one quick call
dreams can be aborted
and become like a marooned whale.
Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul,
has her footing washed away, as age dark flood rises,
cold dash of waves at the ferry-warf - posh and ice in the river,
a gray discouraged sky overhead .. is there anything more?
So you should build your ship of death
for the long journey
towards oblivion,
knowing
a man can his own quietus make.
But still the heart of me weeps
to belong
where a slow, sad bird has flown,
only twilight now and the soft “she” of the river
that will last forever
as the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out into the house again
filling the heart with peace.
Lynn White
Lines from Laurence Lerner - Raspberries
Paul McCartney - Yesterday
D H Lawrence - The Ship Of Death
Dylan Thomas - Do not Go Gently
D H Lawrence - The Ship of Death
D H Lawrence - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Brian Patten - Now We Will Either Sleep, Lie Still Or Dress Again
Brian Pattern - Marooned Whales
Walt Whitman - To Think Of Time
D H Lawrence - The Ship Of Death
Brian Patten - The Translation
D H Lawrence - Piano
D H Lawrence - Bei Hennef