Write word-centos of poetry by Megha Sood, Ronald
Bremner and Lali Tsipi Michaeli. A word-cento is
one of my invented forms of poetry. It is a rearrangement
of the words of a poem by a single author. I try to exhaust
every single word of the poem (though lately I’ve only
been doing some). I lose the structure of the original poem,
do not position any two unique words next to each other,
and the resulting poem is a response to or a continuation of
the original poem.

 

THE MOMENT

(a word-cento of Megha Sood’s
“Serendipity” *)

Rolling in laughter,
an empty sun
simmering sublime,
an unexpected smile
brighter than the day
a thousand-line poem
comes to a stop.

* Original poem by Megha Sood
published in Saraswati. Mar. 24, 2021.

NOTE: I added the word “line.”

 

ECHOING THE DOOR OPEN

(a word-cento of Ronald Bremner’s
“Barracuda Decision” *)

Echoing the door open
the hour of white walls,
silver tunes play the game
of bubblegum nowadays
draped in wit,
pausing sterile youth.

* Original poem by Ronald Bremner
published in Poets Online, July 2013.
Reprinted in Spillwords Press, Jan. 2019.

 

DRIZZLING SILENCE

(a word-cento of Lali Tsipi Michaeli’s
“Legend of the body” *)

Silence bleached open the world,
reverberation exploding answers

within a vacant body,
a colossal cave washed blood

devoid of a voice drizzling silence,
sealed over the soul of the world.

* Original poem by Lali Tsipi Michaeli
from Tractate of Faces (Hebrew: Ashav,
Tel Aviv, 2015). Reprinted in eratio,
English translation by Nadavi Noked.

NOTE: I changed “explode” to “exploding.”

 

SCREAMING THE FUTURE IS ANNIHILATION

(a word-cento of Lali Tsipi Michaeli’s
“My Olds” *)

A quiet future scribbled “later.”
Courage, my tiredness, now silence
is not enough to die.
Screaming the future is annihilation.

They bury “later” in a sea of life,
gripped by forgetfulness
rolling in their lives.

* Original poem by Lali Tsipi Michaeli
from The Mad House (Hebrew: Even
Hoshen, 2018; English: Adelaide, NYC,
2020). Reprinted in Spillwords Press.

 

Joshua Corwin, a Los Angeles native, is a neurodiverse, 2-time Pushcart Prize-nominated, 1-time Best of the Net-nominated poet and 2021 Spillwords Press Award for Poetic Publication of Year winner. His debut poetry collection Becoming Vulnerable (2020) details his experience with autism, addiction, sobriety and spirituality. He has lectured at UCLA, performed at the 2020 National Beat Poetry Festival and Mystic Boxing Commission Festival of Sound and Vision, read with 2013 US Presidential Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco, Michael C. Ford, S.A. Griffin, Ellyn Maybe, among others. His Beat poetry is to be anthologized alongside Ferlinghetti, Hirschman, Ford, Coleman and Weiss late this year (Sparring Omnibus, Mystic Boxing Commission). He hosts the poetry podcast “Assiduous Dust,” writes the weekly Incentovise column for Oddball Magazine and teaches poetry to neurodiverse individuals and autistic addicts in recovery at The Miracle Project, an autism nonprofit. Corwin’s collaborative collection A Double Meaning, with David Dephy, is currently seeking publication. He also has forthcoming collaborative poetry projects with Ellyn Maybe including Ghosts Sing into the World’s Ear (Ghost Accordion series 1st Wave, Mystic Boxing Commission). Corwin is editing and compiling Assiduous Dust: Home of the OTSCP, Vol. 1 (forthcoming April 2021, TBD) featuring 36 award-winning poets, all demonstrating a new type of found poem (OTSCP) he invented.