Glossary of Poetic Terms

From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer. Centos had a resurgence in popularity with the rise of collage as a compositional device among Modernist writers and can be seen in works such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In “Lepidopteran: A Cento,” poet Linda Bierds weaves together lines and phrases from Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, and Alan Turing. See also “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” by John Ashbery; Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), by Simone Muench; and “on naming yourself,” by Jamila Woods.