Media: Website, Experimental Poetry

Title: The Eternal Cento / The Cento of Babel

 

I want to go full circle and make another project about poetry like my first one on Memory. The idea behind this final project is a cento that never ends. A cento is a sort of “patchwork” poem in which every line is sourced from a different poem. My artpiece will be hosted on a website called ‘The Eternal Cento’ or ‘The Cento of Babel’, it will scroll through three million lines of poetry sourced from a website called Project Gutenberg, where literary works in the public domain are stored. The Eternal Cento is not necessarily eternal, but it will take several hours to scroll through these three million lines. The lines will be randomized and no line will be repeated. The theme of my poem, just like my first project, will be about memory. In this case, the never-ending cento will represent the accumulation of memory as long as we live, how we create stories from these memories and how those are shaped from different contexts, the interconnection of our memories, and how our memories cease once we eventually die.

 

Research:

https://libraryofbabel.info/: A website containing every possible permutation of letters. Every work that was ever written is on this website, somewhere.

Various Centos, Jade’s Cento: Various centos on a poetry website, a cento I’ve written.

Reconstructions: Infinite computer generated poem by poet and programmer Allison Parrish.