Cento Cento comes from the Latin word for
'patchwork;' thus a cento is a literary patchwork from the works of several authors. A
poetic cento, then, is a poem consisting solely of lines from the works of other poets. What distinguishes this as a
form is that it is composed entirely of lines from other sources, over against the common practice of a poet’s borrowing a line from a poet here or there and mixing it with his own. Though I cannot cite specifics, I’m told that
centos can be found in the works of Homer and Virgil.
Here’s a modern example from the Academy of American Poets:
In the Kingdom of the Past, the Brown-Eyed Man is King
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree
Day after day, I become of less use to myself,
The hours after you are gone are so leaden. © staff of the Academy of American Poets
from lines by Charles Wright, Marie Ponsot, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Samuel Beckett. Centos are used by some teachers as a means of introducing their students to poetry and to encourage broader reading habits.
Centos can be of any subject matter and can be of any length; they may utilize irony, collective wit, the humor or seriousness of the juxtaposition of ideas and images, or they may simply create an interesting poetic quilt to snuggle up with.
Generally, in writing a
cento, one borrows a single line from each poem used, though possibly repeating it throughout the piece. A
cento may be as long or as short as desired... but beyond that there really are no rules that I know of.
Here’s another example, by John Ashbery, who takes his title from
The Dong with a Luminous Nose, by Edward Lear and creates a collage of voices, including those of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and Lord Byron and stitches them together into a kind of bibliosampler of the
New York School poets:
The Dong with the Luminous Nose
by John Ashbery
Within a windowed niche of that high hall
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night.
Come, Shepherd, and again renew the quest.
And birds sit brooding in the snow.
Continuous as the stars that shine,
When men were all asleep the snow came flying
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
Through caverns measureless to man,
Where thou shalt see the red-gilled fishes leap
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws
Where the remote Bermudas ride.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me:
This is the thingy that crowed in the morn.
Who'll be the parson?
Beppo! That beard of yours becomes you not!
A gentle answer did the old Man make:
Farewell, ungrateful traitor,
Bright as a seedsman's packet
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles.
Obscurest night involved the sky
And brickdust Moll had screamed through half a street:
"Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
Every nighte and alle,
The happy highways where I went
To the Hills of Chankly Bore!"
Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
These lovers fled away into the storm
And it's O dear what can the matter be?
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
On the wide level of a mountain's head
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood.
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! © From Wakefulness, poems by John Ashbery. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Pages 75-76
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Cento - Now has an Example with a modification (from Norm) (Read 196 times)
