by Marjorie Poor and Di Harms
Project Description/Creative Vision Statement
Voices [That] Haunt Us is a collection of 10 five-line centos on themes of loss, grieving, and solace by Marjorie Poor. Designed, printed, and assembled by Di Harms, the chapbook uses a flag-style page design that can also be displayed as a sculpture.
The Cento
The cento, otherwise known as the patchwork or collage poem, is a type of found poem that can be traced back to ancient times, where poets created entire poems using lines or even sections of poems often from a single poet, although they could also use lines from several poets, with the borrowed lines typically from classical figures like Homer and Virgil. Today centos usually repurpose single lines from a variety of contemporary poets to create a new poem, keeping the original lines intact, although changing the punctuation as deemed appropriate. The cento past and present serves to pay tribute to the poets whose lines are used. Centos appear regularly in literary journals such as long con magazine (Tanis MacDonald’s “Laker: a cento”) and Arc Poetry Magazine (Rona Bloom’s “Thanks: A Cento”) and in recent collections by poets such as Robert Colman, Aidan Chafe, and Christine Stewart-Nuñez. Perhapsthe most well-known Canadian example is Mary Dalton’s Hooking (2013), which is an entire collection composed of centos.
Di Harms has been making books from reclaimed materials for 15 years. She is a co-founder of ArtsJunktion mb in Winnipeg. This flag book structure is inspired by Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol, authors of The Art of the Fold: How to Make Innovative Books and Paper Structures.
Marjorie Poor is an editor and writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory. Her poetry has appeared i
