Private Cento Swap

A cento is a poem composed entirely of lines taken from already published poetry. The word "cento" means "patchwork," and you can think of a cento as a verbal quilt made up of fabric (=lines) from different sources sewn together.

You can read an example of a cento at http://herontree.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/purdy1pdf.pdf.

For this swap, each participant will create a cento of at least 8 lines and send it to the other. You can use lines from poems by all different authors, lines from multiple poems by the same author, or even lines drawn from different places in a long poetic work. In past rounds of this swap people have asked if song lyrics can count as poetry, and I say yes--so feel free to use lyrics if you want.

Try not to alter anything in the original lines except punctuation and capitalization, and please make sure you include a key to your cento in which you list the authors and poems from which your lines are taken. Also include English translations in your key if some (or all) of your cento is in a language other than English.

How you present your cento is up to you: typed, hand-written, bound into a booklet, etc. Do whatever feels right to you.