Friday, Feb. 20 — The Cento

John Ashbery, a waterfowl

Our investigation of collage forms will continue on Friday with a look at a very specific form with a long history: the cento. As Ron Padgett reminds us, "The word cento comes from the Latin word meaning 'patchwork,' as in 'patchwork quilt.' The cento is a poem made entirely of pieces from poems by other authors." He continues: "Centos go back at least as far as the second century. In the fifth century a cento was written on the life of Christ, with every line borrowed from the Greek poet Homer, whose work was created at least 900 years before Christ! Centos continued to be written up until the seventeenth century, often by churchmen, who could read Latin and therefore use the classics handed down from Roman times." I'll add that I've heard it apocryphally said that the form's name originates in the Latin word for "one hundred," with a proper cento containing that many borrowed lines.

While, as we've seen, both collage and appropriation are techniques that have captivated modernist and postmodern authors, it's rarer to see them come together in a contemporary approximation of the form that includes only borrowed materials mixed together. We'll look at a few examples for Friday:

• Ron Padgett's write-up of the form from The Teachers & Writers Guide to Poetic Forms (includes John Ashbery's "To a Waterfowl"): [PDF]; read Roseanne Wasserman's annotated version of Ashbery's poem here, and listen to Ashbery read the poem here: MP3
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "Draft 36: Cento": [PDF] / MP3
• Peter Gizzi, "Ode: Salute to the New York School 1950–1970": [PDF]
• Kate Fagan, four centos from First Light: Ten Centos in Jacket2: [link] / MP3
• David Lehman writes about the cento in The New York Times and offers up his own "Oxford Cento" [link]