From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer. Centos had a resurgence in popularity with the rise of collage as a compositional device among Modernist writers and can be seen in works such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Enjoy these contemporary examples of the cento form.
Simone Muench, “Wolf Cento” from Wolf Centos (2014)
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.
Linda Bierds, “Lepidopteran: A Cento” from Poetry (2017)
Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy
In … the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net,
in time of the breaking of nations,
and in elementary arithmetic,
the lichen-gray primaries
keep in sufficiently close touch
as to impose one part of a pattern onto another.
The vibrational halo
of the string figures
passing from flower to flower,
border to border —
night-moths of measureless size,
circling
among the young, among the weak and old,
hawk-moths at dusk
hatching
the war-adept in the mornings —
the vibrational halo
near the great wings
is not the judgment-hour,
only thin smoke without flame
written on terrestrial things.
I confess I do not believe in time.
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness
is an imitation game … filled with
the mysteries of mimicry … But
when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp
and a deadly cipher
flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
what is our solution?
Peace on earth and silence in the sky?
I think that is not
the faith and fire within us … Still,
I look into the depth of
each breeding-cage,
each floating-point form
cleft into light and shade,
hoping it might be so.