Sylvia Jones

The cento and the bop offer poets two radically different ways to make language communal, musical, and newly strange. Through close reading, discussion, generative exercises, and brief sharing, participants will explore the cento’s collage of borrowed lines and the bop’s movement through argument, refrain, and release. We will consider quotation, attribution, sonic pattern, cultural memory, ekphrasis, and the productive tension between influence and originality. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have drafted either a complete cento or the central architecture of a bop, along with strategies for revising it. No preparation is required, though participants may bring a favorite poem, song lyric, artwork, or small collection of language they would like to work from.

The proposal builds directly from the attached materials’ treatment of the cento as a composite of previously written lines and the bop as a 23-line form organized into three stanzas with recurring refrains.
The materials also frame both forms as methods of historical looking, cultural recombination, and resistance to narrow ideas of authorship.