About the Editor

David Lehman is Poetry Coordinator of the New School Writing Program in New York City. His most recent books of poetry are The Evening Sun and When a Woman Loves a Man. He is the author of five books of critical prose, including The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets and The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection. He founded The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues to serve as general editor of this prestigious anthology. He also edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and co-edited The KGB Bar Book of Poems, based on the reading series he and Star Black directed in New York's East Village.

Cento

What is a cento? According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, a cento is “a literary work made up of quotations from other authors.” David Lehman has skillfully pulled together 48 lines of poetry from 43 different poets featured in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. These separate pieces are cleverly stitched together to form a patchwork poem of their own. Test your knowledge of poetry by trying to figure out where each line originated!

The Oxford Cento
by David Lehman

If the sun shines but approximately 
	
Only where love and need are one, 

Who in this Bowling Alley bowled the Sun? 

Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die 

Younger than their kids – jeans, ski-pants, sneakers. 

And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes 

Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them. 

And so it was I entered the broken world. 



Good morning, Daddy! 

Every woman adores a Fascist, 

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart. 

When I am slitting a fish’s head, 

Would he like it if I told him? 

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened,

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.” 

There are no flowers in Hell.



Give all to love, 

A burnt match skating in a urinal

That never lost a vote (O Adlai mine). 

What you get married for if you don’t want children? 

And because it is my heart, 

Above, below, around, and in my heart, 

Blessed be God! For he created Death! 

And rock-grained, rack-ruined battlements. 



One’s sex asserts itself: Desire 

And that White Sustenance –– 

Despair – in a Sahara of snow, 

As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort.

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,

Weep for what little things could make them glad. 

They do not give a shit for wit. 

And I wish I did not feel like your mother. 



Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, 

There is nothing lowly in the universe.

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, 

The sea in a chasm, struggling to be 

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, 

On this green bank, by this soft stream, 

Where strangers would have shut the many doors, 

Except the one she sang and, singing, made. 



Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park,
           seen by the light of day, 

What is yours is mine my father. 

What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do. 

And this is not as good a poem as The Circus 

Especially the lines that are spoken in the voice of a mouse. 

He opened the car door and looked back 

And clapped his hands and shouted to the birds. 

And that was the whole show.