Assigned Plagiarism

In all my courses on poetry and all the books I've read on writing poetry, I had never run across the term centro until yesterday. Apparently a centro is a type of poem constructed entirely of borrowings from other poems. My current creative writing assignment is to write a centro based on borrowings from assigned readings of Adrienne Rich, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Plath, Wole Soyinka, and Amiri Baraka. Before yesterday, I was familiar with only Rich and Plath. As a white woman, I identify most closely with their voices.

This is an interesting assignment because I need to arrange the borrowed words, phrases, or lines of five words or less in a manner that creates a recognizable self. The poem must include the word "I" at some point.

I've mined the most gold from Rich, although I've loved some of Plath's lines for years. I discovered some lovely lines in Soyinka, three good consecutive lines in Baraka, and valuable religious references from Brathwaite that I intend to lift entirely out of context and use for my own purposes.

All of which seems remarkably like assigned plagiarism.

Comments appreciated on this result:

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens

I am a galactic cloud,
An instrument in the shape of woman,
Going like a fat gold watch,
Trying to translate pulsations
Of a dialect called metaphor;
Scanning the didactic storm,
Making the air wince,
Fighting a career of pain,
Moldering like wedding-cake,
Eating crumbs of my life,
Remaining a distant profile
Of intimate revelation;
Reading while waiting
On the whatnot of life
In Babylon’s boom town.

Strewn in sunlit shards,
Fragments and rough drafts glitter
Like frozen geodes
Showering down in the grate.

Faith-flimsy wings
Distort true vision
Of bright, bright baubles;
Blue like bubbles and light,
Blue balloons of peace
Filling up the heavens.

Dies Irae:
Savior of the broken herd,
Grant me mercy at thy word.

I want to stand
Prancing, proud and unafraid
On the rare selective heights
Of every sacred mountain,
Praisin’ the glory of the Lord,
While a far sea moves.