Finally made sense of name of poetry form, the Cento Jill

[jill stockinger]

All I could think of was the meaning "one hundred."

I finally read today that in LATIN, the word cento means PATCHWORK!

The verse form is MEANT to resemble "a quilt of discrete lines stitched together to make a whole." 

The ancient Greeks assembled centos in homage to Homer, the Romans in homage to Virgil.

From "Introduction" by David Lehman in the book THE CENTO: A COLLECTION OF COLLAGE POEMS:

         "Ever since T.S. Eliot raided Elizabethan drama and 17th-century poetry for "The       

           Waste Land," the collage has held a strong attraction for modern poets. The cento

            as contemporary poets practice it is a specialized form of the collage: an anthology 

            poem from diverse sources. I still remember John Ashbery did one called 'To a 

            Waterfowl" in 1961 . . . I still remember one couplet by heart: 

            "Calm was the day and through the trembling air,

            coffee and oranges in a sunny chair."

     

             The first line is by Edmund Spenser, the second by Wallace Stevens, and the combined

             effect is the magic of Ashbery."