A cento is a form of assembled poem. All the lines have been gathered up from other works and placed reassembled. The name is Latin for a patchwork garment. Cloth has cut out from many sources and was then sewn together into something new. It is a form of poetry that is at at least 1500 years old. Ausonius compiled one from Virgil in the fourth century. Falconia Betitia Proba rewrote the life of Christ entirely in Virgilian lines. The rules are simple. Every line must be verbatim. Nothing is changed, added, edited or invented.
This generator makes centos from randomly selected song lyrics. Songs are already verse, so each line already has a certain pace and rhythm. But pulled out from their melodies, they become strange and sometimes (every so often) more interesting than they were. Click any line in the poem to swap it for another from the same source. The attributions for the original sources are included below. You can copy and save your new poem (this will include the source of each line and the attribution for their sources).
It all sounds a bit muddled but there is something oddly compelling about trying to get the individual lines of random lyrics to try and work together.
Lines are drawn from whichever songs the source returns at the moment you generate. The same button pressed twice will produce a different poem from different sources.
On the cento
The classical cento came with a set of specific rules. Each line must be complete, they must be verbatim from their source, and the seams where one source meets another should ideally be invisible. The ideal cento reads as if it were written that way. Ausonius, who composed a wedding poem assembled entirely from Virgil, included an apology in his preface for the impudence of the exercise — even though he was quite clearly pleased with it.
The form fell out of fashion with Romanticism where there was an emphasis on original expression. It is hard to claim authorial sincerity when your poem is, literally, someone else's words. The form has had quiet revivals in the 20th century, particularly through Oulipo and conceptual writing movements that followed. These authors regarded the self-imposed form of constraint as a generative inspiration rather than a limiting feature.