A cento is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from other poems.
Method 1
One night, while standing up too quickly from a chair, your kneecap slides out of its groove. The next morning you are unable to walk and unable to train for your first marathon. You scoot on your butt down the stairs and hop between the couch and the table on your good leg. As you avoid going to the doctor, you feel trapped. Bored. Restless. Frightened.
Step One || Pick a poem
One of your favorites, maybe the first poem you remember reading when you were younger.
Step Two || Memorize it
Sit at the table before anyone else is up and whisper it to yourself over and over again until you own it.
Step Three || Recite it from memory
Speak it to a willing family member–a daughter? the dog, perhaps? To the mirror? Into your smart phone?
Step Four || Repeat steps 1-3
The next morning, find another poem to memorize. Find, memorize, recite. Keep doing this until you have about a dozen poems or you feel better or you finally make an appointment with a doctor.
Step Five || Write a Cento
Working mostly from memory, pick out your favorite lines and turn them into a new poem.
My Poem: Unmixed attention is Not Will
Method 2
You read a lot of poems. Some you mention on your log. Some you copy and paste into a document that gets buried in a file folder. Most you forget, or only vaguely remember.
Step One || Pick a poem
One that moves you in some way. Find it by looking through the poems of the day at poets.org or poetry foundation.org or slowdownshow.org. You can also look up search words related to your mood, the date, or something you paying attention to beside the gorge. Or find one on twitter.
Step Two || Read the poem
Out loud, if you can. If possible, listen to the author read the poem. Read it slowly and several times.
Step Three || Post the poem
Post the poem in your log entry. Include a few sentences with your reactions to poem and/or favorite lines. Add in a question for further reflection. Tag the entry with “poem”.
Step Four || Make a list of all the poems
At the end of the month or the year, find all of the poems you posted in your logs through your tag. Create a link list of the poems. You could add each poem to the link list after you post them, but then you wouldn’t have to go through the laborious task of finding them again later, which gives you another chance to think about them and read them.
Step Five || Find your favorite lines from the poems
Carefully and slowly reread the poems. Pick out a few of your favorite lines from each poem and put those in a separate word document.
Step Six || Print, cut, and spread out the lines
Streamline the favorite lines document to a reasonable length and then print them out. Cut up the individual lines and spread them out on a table.
Variations: I’d like to try writing out the lines by hand instead of printing them, or putting the lines on the wall or the refrigerator. (How) would this change/enhance the experience?
Step Seven || Play with the lines
Experiment with arranging the lines for a few weeks. Have fun creating different combinations.