One of my favorite poetry forms is the cento, which is composed of lines from other poems or pieces of writing. Click here for a description of the form’s origin as well as sample poems provided by the American Academy of Poets.
One reason I like the cento so much is that I practiced it in a Poetry Lab workshop guest hosted by Natalie J. Graham whose writing and teaching style I so admire. In the workshop, each of us drew a number that determined the page from which we selected the line from the stack of books passed around.
Another reason the cento is a favorite of mine is that it works as an editing exercise, helping to develop surprising connections from disparate elements and forcing writers to cut and rearrange until lines fit together. In a subsequent workshop, I was amazed by how much each poet’s cento sounded like the poet even though all of the lines were written by others.
For this prompt, gather a stack of ten or so books. It is probably easier to use all poetry books for the first time, but you can include novels of any genre, collections of short stories, memoirs, or even textbooks if you wish. For these as well as for poems with longer lines, especially prose poems, you will need to cut the line down so that it fits with the other lines chosen.
Roll dice to determine the page number (try to choose a number that will generally fall between a table of contents and the acknowledgments). If one book is much shorter than the rest, choose the last page with a poem, and if a particular page is blank or only has a section heading, choose the next closest page containing a poem.
Make sure to record the poem (author and book too) so that this can be included for later publications. Some editors may want to verify that the lines come from multiple sources, and you should include this information in your own acknowledgments section.
Some poets create entire collections out of centos, often under one unifying theme. I haven’t been able to find an available copy Diana Arterian’s Death Centos, composed of people’s last words, but I absolutely loved Simone Muench’s Wolf Centos, especially the poem below:
