Thesis statement: The hypercento is a form of hypertextual poetry which I have invented, based upon the cento, a form of found poetry. The hypercento allows the poet to hyperlink, annotate, and rework and original text beyond what is possible in a traditional cento.

Project Description: The hypercento is made up of several different layers of text, which all combine to create one interactive hypertext. The first layer is a cento, a poem made entirely of lines taken from other texts. The second layer consists of longer excerpts of quoted text. Each line selected for the cento gets its own lexia, which gives the reader deeper insight into the original text and credits the original author. The third layer, accessed through hyperlinks in the second-layer excerpts, allows the poet to annotate the text, expand upon an argument or a poetic image, or subvert the original author’s message.

The hypercento will also contain a bibliography, which will include a list of lines grouped by author and ordered alphabetically. This bibliography will serve as a second poetic arrangement of the selected lines. The poet must allow the style requirements of the form to dictate how this part of the poem is arranged. This will represent the role of the archive in collecting and storing meaning for the future.

My first hypercento will be made of lines from the readings from this class, plus others which helped inspire the form. It will touch on themes such as the archive as a cemetery or a place of worship, religious worship and erotic worship, books as objects of fetishistic importance, and the sacred and profane acts of desecration required to make books and bookwork.

Medium: Twine, Harlowe: Free, easy to learn, easy linking system, customization tools, hypertextual, “twine”: thread connecting separate texts (textiles), link to “cento,” from the Latin for “patchwork garment”.

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Annotated Bibliography:

1. Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1931, pp. 59-67.

• I want to dive into Benjamin’s framing of book collecting. He claims that people collect books because of the meaning they hold for the collector, not because of the text within them. The cento is a similar kind of collection. It allows the poet to create a collection of lines which hold a meaning that only the poet can really understand. The hypercento allow the poet to share this meaning in greater depth.
• Line choice: “These books arouse”: leaning into the erotic nature of books, as my classmates in Form & Theory of Poetry suggested.

2. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” 1941, https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf and https://fall2025-ecl596.jessicapressman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf.

• I’m using both of the translations on the class site. Mostly to pilfer lines. Also going to bring religion into this, obviously. Something about worship in a religious sense and worship in an erotic sense.
• Line choice (first link): “pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations,”
• Line choice (second link): “kiss their pages in a barbarous manner”

3. Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

• The cornerstone of the class. My poem will be about what makes a book and why we make books. Obviously, The Book must be in it. I will be focusing on passages related to electronic literature and bookwork.
• Line choices: “trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing,” and “refuse the book’s function while interrogating its form.”

4. Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2019.

• The main excerpt I’m citing claims that “a single collection can potentially refashion an entire field’s underlying architecture.” I don’t know if the hypercento can actually do all that, since it’s not that revolutionary of an idea for hypertext, but I think it can change how I write poetry.
• Line choice: “Whitmanesque multitudes”

5. Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

• Citing mostly for Drucker’s commentary on “the book as an electronic form” (14). There are also a few lines I want to pull from the footnotes.
• Line choices: “an infinite and continually mutating archive of collective memory and space,” “the continuity of the sheet across the gutter,” and, “I would have to
• include every poet”

6. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Postmodern Culture,

• The hypercento is short for hypertext-cento, and so hypertext-specific analysis will be necessary in describing its place in hypertext poetry. In this article, Hayles gives a list of characteristics specific to hypertexts. This will also allow me to go on about Patchwork Girl, and I Will Go On About Patchwork Girl.
• Line choices: “digital texts cannot escape fragmentation,” “spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines,” and, “complicate that sense through flickering connectivities, re-working it into something rich and strange.”

7. Marino, Mark. Marginalia in the Library of Babel, 2007, https://markcmarino.com/diigo/i_blog.htm.

• It was vital to include this work, as it’s a hypertext based on annotating existing text. It is clearly one of my major inspirations for the hypercento. I particularly want to reference a few of Marino’s notes on the Babel Fish translation of Borges’ story.
• Line choices: “Babel’s Fish does not know the meaning of hope,” and “those grains unto which we might all pass.”

8. Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” Refiguring the Archive, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

• I wrote a blog post on Mbembe’s comparison of the archive to temples and cemeteries, places where magical rituals are happening. I’ll be using these motifs throughout the poem and my commentary.
• Line choices: “the nature of a temple and a cemetery,” or “rituals that we shall see below are of a quasi-magical nature”

9. Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020.

• Focusing on the framing of the book as an object which holds meaning outside of the text it contains. Particularly want to use the motif of book as fetish object. This adds more connective tissue to the religious worship/erotic worship theme.
• Line choices: “a poignant artifact and fetish object,” “an act of rebellion, self-construction, and hope,” and “a physical thing of beauty, complexity, and fascination.”

10. Stewart, Garrett. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

• The original title of this poem was Bookwork, and it was mostly about bookwork and book objects. The poem, as it is now taking shape, is more generally about our class, but it still refers quite a lot to bookwork. And if I’m referring to bookwork, Stewart must have at least one line in the poem.
• Line choices: “denied, violated, or evacuated in content,” “But the loop isn’t a facile short-circuit,” and “making the traversed space of their own content metaphoric.”