How (and why) to write a Cento
This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate, and maybe Advanced poets too!
The cento is a strange beast: a poem that’s made up entirely of lines from other poems (or other texts).
While this may seem like an odd way to make your own poem, the cento (pronounced “chento”) has a long pedigree—it goes all the way back to Roman times, when the first centos were made of lines taken from great poets like Virgil or Homer.
It’s also alive and well today, and if you read magazines and journals you will occasionally see new ones cropping up.
So how does a cento work? And why might you want to make a poem that uses only someone else’s language, not your own?
That’s what the rest of this article will discuss!
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What is a Cento?
The basic idea of a cento is relatively simple: you take lines or phrases from another poet, or multiple poets, and you “stitch” them together to make a new poem.
(In fact, the word “cento” comes from a Latin word meaning “patchwork,” so you can see where the idea came from in the first place.)
For example, here is the beginning of Trish Hopkinson’s cento made from lines by a single other poet, Laura Hamblin:
Think how loss pulls language from us until
it swallows everything,
like undiagnosed cancer,
the accumulated past—
less eye, less mouth, less heart…
What you probably notice straight away is that Hopkinson has made these lines into something that is definitely shaping up to be her own poem.
These 5 lines were taken from pages 25, 9, 58, 40, and 61 of Hamblin’s book The Eyes of a Flounder, so they were not remotely connected in the original book—but Hopkinson has cleverly woven them together so that they not only make sense, but make a fascinating new poem.
This is the art of the cento: taking lines that were never intended to be together, and melding them into a new piece of poetry that has its own intrinsic merit and interest.
And you don’t have to stick to lines from just one poet.
You can also use lines from several poets, as Jon Ashbery does in this cento:
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.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night.
These lines are taken from Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S Eliot, Tennyson, and Shakespeare.
So the creative joy of the cento is taking lines that no one before you has imagined together, and turning them into your own new meaning.
In fact, according to some folks, you don’t even need to borrow from poems.
Some widen the definition of the cento to make it a poem made from a patchwork of language from any other sources, poetic or not.
For example, here’s the opening of a cento of mine, made from speeches given by Rudi Guliani and and Joe Biden on Nov 7, 2020 (Guliani is on the left, Biden on the right—ironically!)
If you have nothing to hide
take off your mask.
With all my heart.
(A decrepit machine.)
How were you chosen?
Joy, hope, renewed faith!
That is unheard of.
I hope you get the idea. Now you know what a cento is, let’s move on to a more fundamental question:
Why would you want to write a cento?
On the face of it, a cento may seem an odd thing to write. Instead of having a chance to say something that’s in your mind and heart, you have to confine yourself to words that come from other people.
Why would you do that?
Here are some possible reasons.
1. To pay homage to a poet or group of poets that you love
This is a common reason for writing a cento. Trish Hopkison made her cento from Laura Hamblin’s lines because Hamblin is both a friend of hers and a poet she admires, and she wanted to show her affection and admiration.
Similarly, Peter Gizzi made this cento, called “Ode: Salute to the New York School, 1950-1970,” to show his veneration for the New York School poets.
So if you have a poet or poets that you particularly love, you might want to show your feelings by making a cento!
2. To explore a topic where you don’t want to introduce your own voice
Sometimes we want to write personal poems, to give our own perspective on a subject—and then again, sometimes we really don’t.
You might, for example, want to write about a very sensitive topic, and you feel that you don’t have the personal connection with the topic to make an authentic contribution.
Or you might want to highlight someone else’s language, good or bad, rather than your own.
Or you might just feel that you don’t know what to say about a topic, even though you feel drawn to write about it.
A cento allows you to do all of these things, without having to make up a word of your own!
At the time of the US presidential election in 2020, I made a whole series of centos from the words of others—speeches, interviews, articles. I wanted to record and comment on that momentous time, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it! Centos helped me solve that problem.
3. To create a poem when you don’t feel inspired or confident
Another awesome benefit of the cento is that it allows you to keep creating poems even when you don’t have any ideas, or—worse!—when your confidence in your own words is low.
There was a time in the first year of my MFA when I had realized that I wasn’t happy with my old way of writing poems, but I also hadn’t found a new way to attempt it yet. Feeling blocked, but still wanting to write, I turned to centos. Over a few weeks, I produced several of them, and they helped free me up.
I was still using my creativity, still in touch with language, still making new objects from words, and that eventually opened me up to write my own stuff again.
So, any time you have a block, try a cento!
4. To explore, invent, experiment, and learn
Centos are a wonderful form for trying things out: setting yourself challenges, learning new stuff, and just having fun.
For example, if you took two texts that were completely different—in style, tone, and theme—could you make a coherent cento out of them?
This was a task I set myself one day at UNH, when I had been given two pieces of writing on campus—a Gideon’s New Testament and a flyer about veganism—and I decided to see if I could turn them into a single cento! The resulting poem was a ton of fun to create, and made it into my MFA thesis. More importantly, it taught me a lot about how two entirely different registers of language could coexist in a poem.
Another challenge I've set myself is to make a cento from the poems in an issue of a magazine—maximum one line from each poem.
By doing these kinds of challenges, I also learned a lot about how very different types of language can play off each other in really interesting and useful ways.
This, I would say, is one of the best reasons for making a cento: you get to learn a lot more about ways that language can fit together.
And in particular, because you’re using other people’s language, you get to go outside of your own usual patterns and approaches, and stretch yourself into types of utterance that you wouldn’t normally put into a poem. This can open the door to other ways of thinking about making language for poems.
Then you can take that learning and use it in other poems, if you choose.
5. To give yourself a new way of working with your own poems
Finally, once you’ve made a few centos, you’ll start to look at drafts of your own poems in a new way.
Instead of seeing the poem as an indivisible whole, with a meaning that runs continuously from beginning to end, you’ll start to see your poem as a collection of lines that can be moved around, chopped, changed, and generally messed with!
This new flexibility will make it much easier for you to do more sophisticated things with your own poems, such as disrupting the flow of ideas for effects, putting lines next to each in surprising juxtapositions, even leaving out beginnings and endings.
So, there are many reasons why trying a cento is a great idea, and I hope you’ll give it a go.
Next Steps
Here is one way to create a cento.
Go through each text you want to use, looking for lines or phrases that seem as though they might “say something” if taken out of their context. Language that starts echoes, I suppose you can call it.
Write all of those phrases in a word processing document, one under the other. (And keep track of where you found each phrase so that you can attribute your sources when you’re done.)
Find a phrase or line that seems likely to make an arresting opening—something that will “grab.” Make this the tentative first line.
Look through the word processing document for another line that seems as though it will follow on from that first one.
As you do this, remember that some lines connect well because they follow on logically—but other lines work well together because they are contrasts. So be prepared to search for both kinds.Keep adding lines like this until you run out of steam.
Then decide: Is the poem done, or can it start again with a new section or stanza?Keep working with the phrase-bank in your word processing document until the poem seems complete.
Before leaving the draft, just revisit your original texts and see if there are other phrases that your didn’t notice first time round, but that seem useful now.
If a section isn’t working, abandon ship: put all phrases back in the document, and start over!
