10 Centos that Come Together Perfectly
Cento poetry is a favorite topic of ours at The Poetry Lab. Centos combine lines from other poems to create something new from those pieces. “Cento” comes from the Latin word for “patchwork”, as cento poems are often described as a collage or quilt in poem form.
As I read a cento, I’m looking to be surprised by how the lines create new meaning. And often, this is satisfying even if I don’t recognize the lines from their original context. That’s the beautiful thing: the reader knows that the writer was working under the constraints of using others’ words, and wants to see how much of a punch they make.
Traditionally, centos were composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets, but of course, contemporary poets create centos from lines pulled from anywhere, not just poetry.
Below are ten centos that weave together language from other poets—and also from Freud’s journals, Google search results, and more:
1) “Wolf Cento”
Simone Muench
“Wolf Cento” uses lines from Dylan Thomas, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and others to create a shifting narrative. She opens with the “quick” and “intense” wolf image, and then extrapolates to explore time and aging before re-centering the poem on the concept of wildness: “I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.”
The poem is part of a collection of centos by Muench that unite through the use of the wolf motif. Muench also has a free online reading guide for her book, with cento-specific writing exercises!
Read🐺 Wolf Cento
2) “Cento Between the Ending and the End”
Cameron Awkward-Rich
This cento by Cameron Awkward-Rich has a natural flowing progression from one line to the next: Awkward-Rich uses shorter lines, with no end-stops (no lines that end with a period), moving the narrative forward seamlessly through the imagery of light and stars (“gold light so velvet-gold”, “like constellations”, “honeyed light”, “distant & flickering”), imagery of the body (“a new one inside my body”, “the body whole bright-”) and of openings (“a white door opens”, “bloom how you must, wild”).
3) “Cento for the Night I Said, “I Love You”
Nicole Sealey
“Cento for the Night I Said “I Love You” by Nicole Sealey tells a story broken into sections and speaks directly to the reader, creating a seamless tone throughout. Some sections explore the overarching narrative suggested in the title—the speaker’s saying “I love you,”— through somewhat abstract images pieced together, while others sections are more direct, reading as a love poem:
“I love you, I say, desperate
to admit that
the flesh extends its vanity
to an unknown land”
Further emphasizing the use of the cento form, the spacing between lines encourages the reader to linger longer on each one—or at least, it does for me—and slows the pace of reading, allowing the poem to unfold slowly.
4) “Cento in Which the Narrative Precedes the Lyric”
Malcolm Tariq
In stark contrast to the cento by Awkward-Rich, this cento by Malcom Tariq is composed of long, end-stopped lines. The speaker begins with descriptive fragments that introduce the subject(s) of the poem in an instructive or journalistic tone:
“A cento is a poem composed from the lines of other poems.”
The slave narrative is an account of bondage as told by the enslaved or the formerly enslaved.”
Tariq uses tone and fact-presentation to explore the meaning of “slave narrative”, and the creation of a narrative more broadly. The poem explores how narrative and meaning-making intersect with the act of writing a poem:
“Most of the enslaved were forbidden to learn to read and write.
In this case, the enslaved were forbidden the right to poetry.”
5) Your Mother's Maiden Name is Not a Secret
Erin Murphy
This cento by Erin Murphy (from her free, downloadable chapbook of centos, Fields of Ache, published by Ghost City Press) begins with an epigraph taken from the New York Times: “Many security questions ask for biographical information that is publicly available, whether in open records or via social media.”
The cento is based on the article of the same name, and Murphy takes lines from Gregory Pardlo, Yves Bonnefoy, Tina Chang, and many other poets to create something entirely new under the context of the article, focusing on birthplace (“I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air,”, “I was born on a mountainside”, etc.) and conveying a sense of nostalgia.
6) The Oxford Cento
David Lehman
David Lehman wrote “The Oxford Cento” while editing the new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Lehman’s cento is filled with lines from classics of American poetry included in the anthology, from Sylvia Plath to Langston Hughes to Walt Whitman.
It makes sense that, in assembling poetry classics, Lehman was inspired to pick his favorite lines and try putting them together in a new context. Maybe it helped him to look at those poems with fresh eyes. In any case, Lehman’s prefacing explanation (included in the article above) suggests centos aren’t just about rearrangement, but they’re about joyful and dedicated reading—even if it’s work you’re already familiar with.
Read ➡️ The Oxford Cento
7) Freud’s War
Emily Berry
In “Freud’s War”, Emily Berry doesn’t identify the specific origins of her lines, but it’s implied they come from Freud himself. The speaker (as one might expect from Freud) is melodramatic and harsher in tone than much of the material made into cento poetry:
“She screams and screams without any self-control
Ravaged by the heat and the blood-&-thunder melodrama”
Berry has another cento drawn from Freud available to read, “Freud’s Beautiful Things”. In both centos, which also function as persona poems, Berry paints a portrait of a speaker that’s wholly trapped in his own narrative, and though not particularly empathetic, the strong voice that shines through demonstrates the power of writing in Freud’s own words.
Read ➡️ Freud’s War
8) Google Cento
Danielle Mitchell
This cento by Danielle Mitchell takes its lines from Google search results for “Kim Kardashian body”. The first lines introduce the idea of our cultural obsession with women’s bodies by swiftly directing the focus to Kardashian’s physical form:
“If you know nothing else about Kim Kardashian,
you know that she is an actual woman, a physical body”
and it goes on to state her specific measurements “5 feet 2 inches, 130 pounds, 38-26-42, 34D”.
By pulling from headlines in Google search results, Mitchell employs a matter-of-fact, journalistic, and sometimes callous tone that ultimately draws the reader’s attention to the “voice” of something much more nebulous: the echo chamber of the internet, and how that medium intersects with societal ideas, curiosities, and judgments about women and their bodies.
Read ➡️ Google Cento
9) Ohio Cento
Maggie Smith
In this place-based cento, Maggie Smith personifies nostalgia (portrays the concept of nostalgia as a person) as the speaker reflects on how nostalgia “arrives, year after year” and “Looks like a troublemaker”. The narrative branches out to include lines about the “material world” giving “a cutthroat sign”, drawing a contrast between what’s material and, like nostalgia, what’s immaterial.
A credit list isn’t provided for the lines, so the reader doesn’t get to know whether there’s additional meaning in the context of the source material—it remains a mystery.
Read ➡️ Ohio Cento
10) Invitation Cards
Mary Dalton
Mary Dalton’s cento “Invitation Cards” is unique in that Dalton added an additional “rule” in composing it; in her own words: “Each piece was constructed from the same point in the line sequence of each poem I was incorporating into the collage, e.g., “Invitation Cards,”... is made of the second line of each of the twenty-four poems quoted from.”
By challenging herself to use a particular line per poem, Dalton adds more constraint to her writing process. This is an example of how you can impose rules as guidelines to catalyze your curiosity. Forms can serve as guides through the poem you’re writing—and you get to make up the rules, if you want to.
Read➡️ Invitation Cards
For more reading on centos, check these Poetry Lab resources:
This article was posted on March 7, 2023. Written by:
