Ada Limon was our U.S Poet Laureate prior to our current Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. She writes poems and puts them in a drawer, returning to them later to see which ones seem to have bloomed. She tells writers who are striving to make a living off “just writing” that their poetry wants them to live and work and pay their bills. Limon lives in Lexington, Kentucky and is inspired by nature, and of course by horses, being so close to the Kentucky Derby -and if you’ve never read How to Triumph Like a Girl, you simply must click this link and devour every single line. Ada Limon is one of the two poets our dog Ollie loves best, as his chewing on the corner of Bright Dead Things reveals (I cropped the damage out in the photo below).
I’ve created a Cento poem by using existing lines from two of her collections and arranging them into new poems. The first poem is from lines in poems in The Carrying.
What a Day Is
The big-ass bees are back, tipsy, sun-drunk
The birds were being so bizarre today
that brute sky opening in a slate-metal maw
and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning
and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting,
But friends, it’s lunchtime.
Lines for my cento were taken from these poems, in this order: Dandelion Insomnia; Almost Forty; The Leash; The Visitor; Late Summer after a Panic Attack; The Light the Living See
I couldn’t resist TWO poems for today. Need I say that Ada Limon is in my top tier of favorite poets? Maybe even my very favorite. These lines for this cento were taken from Bright Dead Things.
Shower Dragon
I’m crying near the shower
changing swirl of hips and hope
part female, part male, part terrible dragon
But I want to be more like a weed
perched on the edge of euphoric plummet
of psychedelic-colored canaries: a cloud
of air, of water, of fire, of earth
of fast wishes caught by nothing.
Taken from, in this order: Cower, Play it Again, Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds; The Good Fight; Midnight, Talking About our Exes; Adaptation; The Whale and the Waltz Inside of It; The Plunge.
Common Threads 
Two wonderful new poems born of Ada’s words. Is it my imagination or is your process getting easier? I’d like to consider a cento project, but I’m daunted by the amount of time it seems to take, reading, writing, and rearranging lines.
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Margaret, it does get much easier once you have a good bank of Cento sticks to work with. For me, it’s like the crossword puzzle – – it’s that kind of thinking my older brain needs to exercise. If your project is for younger kids, they might like Jenga block poetry. I’d love to talk about it anytime. When a PreK teacher asked me to come and see what kind of poetry I thought the students could write a couple of years ago, I took Jenga blocks with colorful words from magazines glued onto them. They produced some poems of three and four words that they wrote themselves and illustrated – related to weather, spring blooms, and nature. It’s a great way to keep the kinesthetic creativity and the writing connected.
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I made a set of Jenga blocks for my classroom and I think I brought them home. When I worked one on one with a kid, the selection of words worked well for creating an interactive teaching moment.
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Kim, you are a wealth of awesome ideas. I was feeling like Margaret yesterday. But I’m glad it was Sunday at the start of Spring Break so time was on my side! And I had your great example. I love the idea of jenga blocks, too! I may try that next! I like how you are reminding me that poets play with words! Thanks you!
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Kim, great poems with so many layers. This week, I am drawn to your lines, But I want to be more like a weed, perched on the edge of euphoric plummet. The crazy part is that I am not sure if I want to just go of the craziness of life like a week, or fall over in exhaustion from the craziness of life!
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Kim,
Like you I love Ada Limon. I read her horse poems to Ken. She is so attuned to nature in all its incarnations. Her poetry aligns with Braiding Sweetgrass in my thinking. There is a lesson about life in each poem. Like Anita I’m drawn to the weed line. It resonates as a metaphor for how we treat some parts of nature and people. Sometimes I want to be the weed Limon describes. Other times I feel like the weed that’s pulled and tossed away. In the first poem the fat bees have my heart. I love watching bees work. Now I’m curious about who will culminate this cento celebration.
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