Wolf Centos

by Simone Muench

Overview

What is important is to avoid
the time allotted for disavowels
as the livid wound
leaves a trace leaves an abscess
takes its contraction for those clouds
that dip thunder&vanish
like rose leaves in closed jars.
Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
crystal bone into thin air.
The small hours open their wounds for me.
This is a woman's confession:
I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

Simone Muench is the author of Orange Crush, Lampblack&Ash, The Air Lost in Breathing, and Disappearing Address. She teaches at Lewis University in Chicago, Illinois.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936747887
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	08/04/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	444 KB

About the Author

Simone Muench grew up under the influence of Universal Horror films, Boone’s Farm, Southern Baptist sermons, and country roads. Recently the recipient of a 2013 NEA Poetry Fellowship and the Fall 2012 Black Lawrence Chapbook Award, some of her other honors include two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, a 2013 Lewis Faculty Scholar Award, and the PSA’s Bright Lights Big Verse Award. In addition to serving as an editor for Sharkforum and chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, she is the author of four full-length collections: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack&Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Disappearing Address, co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010). She is an Associate Professor at Lewis University in Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

Wolf Cento

I saw my life a wolf loping along the road—
a glint of bone, visible&then gone,
a landscape altered.
Ideas, hair, fingers
fall&come to naught.
A shirt blows across the field.
A shrug of stars as flowers go out on the sea.
Maybe the whole world is absentminded
or floating. The flower, the weather,
the room empties its mind of me,
the sea-pulse of my utterance.
I have stood for a long time
at the edge of a river, unknown, nameless,
hands groping for the shape of the animal.
Not knowing what all the music had been hiding.

Wolf Cento

Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf
at a live heart, the sun breaks down.
What is important is to avoid
the time allotted for disavowels
as the livid wound
leaves a trace leaves an abscess
takes its contraction for those clouds
that dip thunder&vanish
like rose leaves in closed jars.
Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
crystal bone into thin air.
The small hours open their wounds for me.
This is a woman’s confession:
I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

Wolf Cento

I transformed into this thing, this beautiful
black howl: wolves&storms
of white trigonometries
& along my veins sailor’s flutes are singing.
Body caught by knowing,
like an inflamed throat, the immense
perception of knees.
This is the weapon: knowledge
with its hundred corridors,
its dark orange trees.
I stop at the edge of my breath,
as if beside a door,
nobody comes, nobody weeps.
How beautiful: indifference at midnight,
light falling mute over the blue trucks.
& when the time comes to die there will be
only this syllable, this tongue
that can no longer pass beyond its husk.

Wolf Cento

Sea-blue, shot through
with the echo of a shadow
that sleeps after its voyage,

she sat with wolves&magicians
in a corner of an empty house
& saw someone coming

through the whirling snow
like a reflection from arson,
emitting sparks, shaking

the air as if to remind her
of the animal life.
A word, a whisper says this

in the dark: you are feverishly hot.
Forest stands behind forest.
Under your skins you have

other skins; you have a seventh
sense. Don’t you hear
the sky ping above your eye?

All of us are rain
under rain, noon spin
through bright meridian.

Mind drawn on, drawn out
like a little boat bringing
the flame from the other shore.

Wolf Cento

With flowers in their lapels, nine
howling wolves come hungering.
A surge of wet syllables
dangles from their mouths.
Children trace their liquid howl
built out of alien words like seeds
in black earth. A woman’s lock
of hair brushes their lips.
Their jaws open—coral
in the darkness. I do not know
who has opened the window.
They sing with their mouths full of earth.
The light is putting on gloves.
No blood is flowing. Just red birds.

Wolf Centos contains lines and fragments by the following: Anna Akhmatova, Claribel Alegría, Yusuf al-Khal, A. R. Ammons, Tom Andrews, Guillaume Apollinaire, Yehuda Amichai, A.R Ammons, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Eugenio de Andrade, Antonin Artaud, W. H. Auden, Ingeborg Bachmann, Charles Baudelaire, Fritzi Harmsen van Beek, Mario Benedetti, Gottfried Benn, John Berryman, Johannes Bobrowski, Yves Bonnefoy, Jorge Luis Borges, Coral Bracho, Kamau Brathwaite, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Joseph Brodsky, Lucie Brock-Broido, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Burroughs, Dino Campana, Ernesto Cardenal, Anne Carson, Rosario Castellanos, Paul Celan, Aimé Césaire, Gu Cheng, Feng Chih, John Ciardi, Alfred Corn, Jean Cocteau, Julio Cortázar, Hart Crane, Sándor Csoóri, Bei Dao, René Daumal, Michel Deguy, René Depestre, Robert Desnos, Emily Dickinson, Ed Dorn, Christian Dotremont, Robert Duncan, Paul Eluard, Odysseus Elytis, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Marcelle Ferry, Jean Follain, Andre Frenaud, Allen Ginsberg, Albert Goldbarth, Ángel González, Nicolas Guillen, Ferreira Gullar, Paavo Haavikko, Nazim Hikmet, Brenda Hillman, Vladimir Holan, Miroslav Holub, Ted Hughes, Vicente Huidobro, Sara de Ibanez, Laurence Iche, Philippe Jaccottet, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Roberto Juarroz, Bhanu Kapil, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Galway Kinnell, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Kinsella, Greta Knutson, Edvard Kocbek, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rutger Kopland, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Li Kuang-t‘ien, Else Lasker-Schüler, Denise Levertov, Larry Levis, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mary Low, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Claire Malroux, Osip Mandelstam, Joyce Mansour, Robert Marteau,Vladimir Mayakovsky, Friederike Mayröcker, R. Meenakshi, Jeanne Megnen, Cecilia Meireles, Henri Michaux, Czeslaw Milosz, Gabriela Mistral, Enrique Molina, Kadya Molodowsky, Marianne Moore, Vinicius de Moraes, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Pablo Neruda, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, Henrik Nordbrandt, Ibaragi Noriko, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Meret Oppenheim, Olga Orozco, Heberto Padilla, Nicanor Parra, Pier Pasolini, Boris Pasternak, Octavio Paz, Benjamin Péret, Fernando Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnick, Vasko Popa, Miklos Radnoti, A.K. Ramanujan, Marcos Konder Reis, W. S. Rendra, Pierre Reverdy, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Marie Rilke, Yannis Ritsos, Amelia Rosselli, Muriel Rukeyser, Tamura Ryuichi, Carl Sandburg, Bert Schierbeek, Anne Sexton, Shakespeare, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Edith Sitwell, Edith Södergran, Philippe Soupault, Frank Stafford, Wallace Stevens, Jules Supervielle, Anna Swir, Wislawa Szymborska, Novica Tadic, Ryuichi Tamura, Nathaniel Tarn, Allen Tate, Ha Thi Thao, Dylan Thomas, Shu Ting, Melvin Tolson, Georg Trakl, Tomas Tranströmer, Maria Tsvetaeva, Tristan Tzara, Jean Valentine, Tomas Venclova, Derek Walcott, Dara Wier, W. C. Williams, C. D. Wright, Charles Wright, James Wright, W. B. Yeats, Wen Yidou, Andrea Zanzotto

Table of Contents

1.

[I saw my life a wolf loping along the road]
[Sea-blue, shot through]
[I transformed into this thing, this beautiful]
[Outside the new world winters in grand dark]
[Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart]
[When tenderness seems tired]
[Who will take the madness from the trees?]
[Stunned by gold, we see coming]
[In the space of a half-open gold door]
[We: spectators, always, everywhere]
[In moon-swallowed shadows]
[Under somber firs two wolves mingled]
[Desire discriminates&language]
[It was a desire rather than a boat]
[There are wolves in the next room]

2.

[I have lost my being in so many beings]
[A stranger’s coming past]
[Nothing remains of you. The city]
[From this bleak hotel,&at the bored]
[Like a blue-blooded corona, I knocked]
[All song of the woods is crushed]
[After the first snow has fallen to its squalls]
[No cause you should weep, Wolf]
[Here in this town, in a glass honeycomb]
[Everything in these parts is geared
[How long have I left you?—played the wolf]
[Beyond the baying of a snow wolf]
[Having erased all the past like a false eye]
[Cripple of light opening against my back]
[A year ago we all flushed a little brighter]
[The wolf licks her cheeks with]
[They promised me a silence]
[First frost blackens with a cloven hoof]

3.

[I have looked too long into human eyes]
[I dream you into being—mongering wolf]
[With flowers in their lapels, nine]
[November stands at the door.]
[You hear things. I see them. ]
[I watch my life running away]
[There is a wolf in me, sound]
[Everyone in the room wore white masks]
[All night the wolves danced]
[Shrewd wolf of dark innocence]
[In the yellow chalk of my diminishing bones]
[I want to be strung up and singled out]
[What do we leave, living]

Editorial Reviews

Muench's wolf is a bit like Ted Hughes's crow: menacing, weirdly sexy and open to interpretation, a sort of answer to malaise and alienation, to the everyday in which "whatever houses we return to / in this stuffed masquerade, / we are at a party that doesn't love us."

The New York Times Book Review - Craig Morgan Teicher

08/18/2014
Muench (Orange Crush), a winner of the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry and 2013 NEA Fellowship recipient, successfully restricts herself to the cento form in her fifth collection, repurposing the lines and fragments of other writers. "Every transformation is possible," Muench writes, eschewing narrative obligations to create poems in which each iteration of the wolf adds something intangible to this complex world. The words, gleaned and repurposed from over 200 sources, have an exponential emotional impact; Muench manages to amplify her own creative power through the megaphone of literary history as she cobbles together a series of modern, sensual, and urgent short poems that howl about self, desire, and song. "In the space of a half-open gold door/ your body's animals want to get out," Muench names a still-present, lurking, unnamable wildness. She uses old words to point to a still contemporary connection between poetry and the primal, demonstrating the consistent importance of language, despite all obstructions: "Night in all things: in corners, in men's eyes—/bees in a dried-out hive. Thus we forget/ that only words still stand like tar fires in the woods." Thus, Muench advises: "Sing with big blue tongue,/ sing until it breaks the night—/ black champagne, a lamentation." (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Muench’s brief fifth collection, composed of short poems all titled “Wolf Cento,” would not be out of place beside “True Blood,” “Twilight” (or Team Jacob, anyway) and other popular fantasies of escaped inner monsters. Muench employs the cento, a poetic form in which all the language is taken from other poets’ poems. . . . Muench’s wolf is a bit like Ted Hughes’s crow: menacing, weirdly sexy and open to interpretation."
—New York Times Book Review

"Simone Muench’s Wolf Centos possesses near-invisible sutures and an uncanny smoothness in its fusion of parts. With an ear tuned to a minor key, Muench creates an integral and potent voice that sings of the 'wood-world’s torn despair.'"
—Boston Review

“Simone Muench has stitched together a new creature out of scraps and vital organs she gathered in the boneyard. It lives. It leaps. It bounds. It’s at your window tonight. Too late for you, sweetheart.”
—Daniel Handler

“Simone Muench’s poetry has always had about it a kind of personal urgency, the sense that image and lyric fully realized offer the self its best landscape. . . . Her wolf is complex and protean, a familiar, whose howl inhabits and enables the articulate explorations of these powerful poems.”
—Michael Anania

"Reading this book, I wanted cento to mean what it means in quattrocento. I wanted the book to last a century, a cycle. But also to name a period of social and aesthetic transformation. Perhaps we “played the wolf or the witch”; perhaps we were punished for these things, for the ways we had of being against the social. This book’s cunning is that it makes this idea in the most social way, from the storehouse of language. But I hear in it the realization that we must be against the social absolutely, if this present world is ever to pass away; we must go forward into the wolf century, and I want this book with me."
—Joshua Clover

"Muench . . . successfully restricts herself to the cento form in her fifth collection, repurposing the lines and fragments of other writers. . . . [she] manages to amplify her own creative power through the megaphone of literary history as she cobbles together a series of modern, sensual, and urgent short poems that howl about self, desire, and song."
—Publishers Weekly



"Muench’s brief fifth collection, composed of short poems all titled “Wolf Cento,” would not be out of place beside “True Blood,” “Twilight” (or Team Jacob, anyway) and other popular fantasies of escaped inner monsters. Muench employs the cento, a poetic form in which all the language is taken from other poets’ poems. . . . Muench’s wolf is a bit like Ted Hughes’s crow: menacing, weirdly sexy and open to interpretation."
—New York Times Book Review

"Simone Muench’s Wolf Centos possesses near-invisible sutures and an uncanny smoothness in its fusion of parts. With an ear tuned to a minor key, Muench creates an integral and potent voice that sings of the 'wood-world’s torn despair.'"
—Boston Review

“Simone Muench has stitched together a new creature out of scraps and vital organs she gathered in the boneyard. It lives. It leaps. It bounds. It’s at your window tonight. Too late for you, sweetheart.”
—Daniel Handler

“Simone Muench’s poetry has always had about it a kind of personal urgency, the sense that image and lyric fully realized offer the self its best landscape. . . . Her wolf is complex and protean, a familiar, whose howl inhabits and enables the articulate explorations of these powerful poems.”
—Michael Anania

"Reading this book, I wanted cento to mean what it means in quattrocento. I wanted the book to last a century, a cycle. But also to name a period of social and aesthetic transformation. Perhaps we “played the wolf or the witch”; perhaps we were punished for these things, for the ways we had of being against the social. This book’s cunning is that it makes this idea in the most social way, from the storehouse of language. But I hear in it the realization that we must be against the social absolutely, if this present world is ever to pass away; we must go forward into the wolf century, and I want this book with me."
—Joshua Clover

"Muench . . . successfully restricts herself to the cento form in her fifth collection, repurposing the lines and fragments of other writers. . . . [she] manages to amplify her own creative power through the megaphone of literary history as she cobbles together a series of modern, sensual, and urgent short poems that howl about self, desire, and song."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher