This month’s Slices of Life are dedicated to the love of poetry. Each day of March, I’ll be celebrating a living poet by creating a Cento poem from the lines of their poetry, along with links to more information about each poet as three of my writing circles intersect this month: The Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers, Open Write with EthicalELA, and The Stafford Challenge.
I’m kicking off the celebration with Sophie Diener, who wrote Someone Somewhere Maybe. She’s a poet who teaches and resides in Ohio, and she started writing in journals from the age of five or six. She’s the friend so many of us would have had in grade school and kept for life. She keeps a strong social media presence on Tik Tok and Instagram. You can follow her on Instagram: @sophiediener and on Tiktok: @sophiediener.
You can read more by and about Sophie here and here.
Cento poems feature lines of existing poetry that are put together in new ways to create a whole new poem, a lot like a quilt. Or Frankenstein. Or one of those photography montages where all the photos are put together to look like Abraham Lincoln or something. As I create a Cento from each collection of poetry this month, I’ll add the titles of each poem in line order beneath the poem. If you’ve never written a Cento, you may wish to challenge yourself to try this form this month and see how fun it is to write! Here is a Cento I’ve created from several of the poems in Sophie Diener’s book Someone Somewhere Maybe:
Becoming
Things take time to fall into place
in this precious part of your life.
There are parts of you that fade with time
But oh, how beautiful.
Recognize how far you’ve come.
Lines taken from these poems, in this order: Have Hope; Don’t be a Stranger; Blue; A Heart with Legs; You are Safe.
Common Threads 