The Friday Influence

Well, it had to happen: we’ve reached the 200th post on this blog!

To celebrate, I decided to create a cento – a patchwork poem made by selecting lines from other people’s poems to create a singular poem (citing one’s sources, of course) – by going through all the posts published since I started this blog and selecting a line from every 10th post.

200 posts = 20 lines!

Eek!

Some finer points:

To stick strictly to the every 10th post guideline, I did find myself snatching a snippet or two from a post that had no poem in it. So a “line” was taken from a paragraph or two.

I’m happy to only end up in the piece a handful of times (and with good company, no less 🙂 ).

Also: I had a lot of fun putting this together. Blogging can feel like a mess sometimes, but the accumulative effect is fun. Approaching past posts for the archival potential was inspiring.

And then there’s all you good people who stop by, read, and comment! More than anything, I am humbled by the community this blog has put me in touch with. I started this off as a reader’s blog, and I’m happy to have a forum to share not only my own work but work that illuminates my world and that I hope illuminates yours. Thanks!

Cento for the 200th post

I must learn from the stars
To find out if I might love.
Under these, under our skies.
the colors of my living
will sometimes waft between my lashes
This unwelcome act of reducing
On those nights, the poet can say they tried, and did well.
to fall asleep
“I’m so tired of driving into the sky.”
I would like to step out of my heart
stumble, welcomed each day by
Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow.
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
selected to be
something imagined, not recalled?
rigid edges and all, and lines still show up
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
They slept just like the rest of us,
like sunken leaves in a pond,
quoted in the margins

***

Happy quoting!

Jose

p.s. Sources for the Cento:

1. Evening on the Farm – Bert Meyers
2. Brown Penny – WB Yeats
3. Willow – Anna Akhmatova
4. XIX (from The Wall) – Jose Angel Araguz
5. An Umbrella from Piccadilly – Jaroslav Seifert
6. Onions – Jose Angel Araguz
7. “on poetry readings” TFI post 2/15/13
8. The Devil on His Wedding Night – Jose Angel Araguz
9. “from the car: verse & such” TFI post 6/7/13
10. Lament – Rainer Maria Rilke
11. “Dog-eared” – Jose Angel Araguz
12. On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking About Tennessee – Charles Wright
13. Prosody 101 – Linda Pastan
14. “quick post: CantoMundo news!” TFI post 3/19/14
15. Epilogue – Robert Lowell
16. If They Hand Your Remains to Your Sister in a Chinese Takeout Box — Jamaal May
17. Sad Steps – Philip Larkin
18. Going Home – Phoebe Tsang
19. A Winter Night – Tomas Tranströmer
20. Evening in Matamoros – Jose Angel Araguz