Damaged Cento

New poem by Kim Moore

A copy of the wonderful magazine The Stinging Fly landed on my doormat last week. I' am very happy to have two poems in the magazine - “Damaged Cento” and “Three Little Pigs”. Thanks to the fantastic poetry editor, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, for taking these poems for the magazine.

I would like to share “Damaged Cento” here - but also urge you to go and get hold of the magazine because it is full of amazing poets from across Ireland and beyond.

I couldn’t pose the magazine next to the fish pond today because it is raining outside and it is way too beautiful to get wet! So it’s sitting, rather less adventurously, on my desk.

Before you read any further, I will just give a content warning for discussion of domestic violence, and domestic homicide in the poem I’m going to talk about.

This poem is not just a cento, but a damaged cento. A cento, according to the American Academy of Poets is a “poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets”. My cento uses lines (or fragments of lines) by other poets. These poets are listed at the bottom of the poem, but these lines are spliced with images and ideas taken from the research of Jan Monckton-Smith. She examined hundreds of cases where women were killed by their male partners. From reviewing these cases, she identified an eight stage timeline of events which was common across nearly all of the cases before the homicide took place. You can read the original research paper here.

DAMAGED CENTO

I wanted to write a cento about light – 
full of enchanted streetlamps 
and the slipping of light against the hills 

but I’m reading about the eight stages 
of relationship development 
before domestic homicide takes place 

and so nothing comes out right – stage 1 – 
the man always has a history of abuse 
or stalking – the moon, cracked every which way 

pushes steadily on – stage 2 – a commitment 
whirlwind begins – thought followed thought, 
star followed star – stage 3 – the relationship 

develops – is love not this? gripping a fence 
in the sky – stage 4 is the trigger – leaving, 
pregnancy, illness – when the blossoms are wilting, 

I cut the stalk – stage 5 is escalation - 
shot through with stars, fluttering with sparrows 
and quails – stage 6 is a change of heart – 

you are in the dark, in your car, watching 
the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed – 
stage 7 is planning – the sun and the hole 

vie for attention – stage 8 is homicide - 
the moon, cracked every which way, pushes steadily on. 

*italicised sources – David Morley, Carola Luther, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, Rachel Long, Sharon Olds, Moniza Alvi, Claudia Rankine, Moniza Alvi, Adrienne Rich. 

I think this timeline should be taught in schools and in work places, taught to anyone that will listen, but especially to young people so they might have a better chance of recognising unhealthy relationship behaviours. Monckton-Smith (quoting Fisher, 2004 and Borochowitz and Eisikovitz 2002) refers to these common discourses, particularly (but not exclusively) around heterosexual relationships  where jealousy and possessiveness is reconfigured as love, and an all-consuming grand passion is seen as romantic. These damaging messages around romance contribute to warning signs and red flags in relationships being missed by victims. Then the damage is further compounded when perpetrators come to be sentenced, because this discourse is of course, prevalent in our society, and our judicial system is made up of people who live in that society. These ideas around passion and an all-consuming love are seen as mitigating factors, and they also mask risk, meaning that victims who are really in danger might not be identified by the people like police and social services who are there to protect them.

---

In All the Men I Never Married No. ___ I wrote about my experience of being stalked by an ex-boyfriend when I was 17. 

                                          That year of A-Levels, I got myself a stalker
and the police said aren’t you flattered? In the station there was laughter

at the forty phone calls every day for weeks.

In that police station, not taking no for an answer was flattering, was evidence of a grand passion that I should be grateful for.

It took me years to find the language to articulate what happened to me.

One thing that we can all do is to know those eight stages, to know them off by heart. Not because all men are capable of violence, or even that all perpetrators of domestic violence will turn to murder, but so that we know the warning signs. Any day we might be called on to support a friend or a family member who is a violent relationship. That is the least we can do.

On the 19th June at 7pm, I’ll be talking to the novelist Abigail Tartellin on her podcast Writing Coercive Control. Abigail has been hosting a series of podcasts talking to different authors about how to write coercive control. I’m really looking forward to talking about how poetry in particular has helped me examine what happened to me, and process it, and perhaps especially how form has helped me do this.

As I’ve been preparing for this interview, I’ve gone back to my first collection, and found so many connections between my first and second collection, a kind of circling around themes and concerns, a returning to certain images and ideas so that I can excavate them further. I hadn’t realised these connections before, so it has already been a joy to think about this.

If you would like to book a free ticket for the podcast, you can get one here

If you’d like to buy a copy of The Stinging Fly, you can do so here

Thank you to all of our subscribers for supporting us here!

If you are in an abusive relationship, or think you might be, Refuge might be able to help, and at least will be able to give you more information