Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

When my children were small, we only went to the movie theater a few times a year—it was a rare treat. One of those times, when my son must have only been four or so years old, sticks in my mind. We were getting ready to leave the house—meaning I was probably reminding him for the umpteenth time to put his shoes on—when he said, “Let’s get there early. I want to see the scraps of other movies.”

That phrase stopped me in my tracks: “the scraps of other movies.” Previews! He meant previews. I still jokingly use this phrase with him, though he’s now a middle schooler. It's funny how metaphors are so baked into our language that it’s completely reasonable for a small child to use a term for fabric—or paper—to describe something he didn’t have the word for.

Across mediums, for centuries, scraps have been useful, even beautiful. For example, there’s the cento, an Italian form that is collaged together from the lines of other poems. A cento is a poem sewn together using the scraps of other poems. I love working on a cento when I’m stuck, or uninspired. I don’t need to write anything new to be writing. I can take a visit to my bookshelf, or the library, or the enormous treasure trove of poems on the internet, finding lines that I put together to form a new whole. Something I get to call my own.

Today’s poem is a cento composed from lines from poets Justin Phillip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Ari Banias, C. Bain, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall. And I admire this poem because, although it was made from scraps of language, it makes WHOLENESS its business. To me, this poem is about the power of community, and the necessity of friendship for our collective survival, collective freedom, and collective joy. It’s about the ways we can make the world more habitable, and more HOSPITABLE, for one another. In times that feel divisive and fragmented, this poem is a reminder of what we can do and BE together. It’s a reminder of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Cento Between the Ending and the End
by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Sometimes you don’t die

when you’re supposed to

& now I have a choice

repair a world or build

a new one inside my body

a white door opens

into a place queerly brimming

gold light so velvet-gold

it is like the world

hasn’t happened

when I call out

all my friends are there

everyone we love

is still alive gathered

at the lakeside

like constellations

my honeyed kin

honeyed light

beneath the sky

a garden blue stalks

white buds the moon’s 

marble glow the fire

distant & flickering

the body whole bright-

winged brimming

with the hours 

of the day beautiful 

nameless planet. Oh 

friends, my friends—

bloom how you must, wild

until we are free.

"Cento Between the Ending and the End” by Cameron Awkward-Rich from DISPATCH © 2018 Cameron Awkward-Rich. Used by permission of Persea Books.