What Do I Know?

I have been thinking about the cento lately, which means I’ve been thinking about Montaigne. The title of this essay is borrowed from Montaigne: “Que sais-je?” or “What do I know?” This was Montaigne’s motto, so beloved to him that he had it inscribed on a medallion to hang around his neck. “What do I know?” Montaigne insisted, when of course, he knew a lot. After all, for the first six years of his life he was raised to speak only Latin, he retired from practicing law at 38 to spend the rest of his days surrounded by books in his tower library, and perhaps for no reason other than wanting someone to talk to, he invented the form we now know lovingly as the personal essay. Montaigne’s essays are often filled with “lines selected from the work or works of some great poets and writers and thinkers of the past” (Princeton Encyclopedia 180), like Virgil, Horace, or Ovid. Because of this, Montaigne’s essays read like centos, a poetic form whose Latin origins translate into “patchwork,” though originally meant to refer to scraps of clothes put together to form a cohesive garment. Call him master weaver or master writer, Montaigne quilted together phrases and questions into reimagined pieces. Just consider how Montaigne incorporates Horace and Ovid seamlessly into his descriptions of chronic pain. He writes: 

Those [pains] that formerly would not even have scratched me, now pierce me through and through: so easily is my habit of body beginning to apply itself to illness. To a frail body every pain is intolerable [Horace]. I have always been sensitive and susceptible to pain; now I am still more tender and exposed on all sides: Anything cracked will shatter at a touch [Ovid].

— Montaigne 61, “On Some Verses of Virgil”

It’s possible that Montaigne turned to others in his writing so often because he wrote about everything and viewed literary borrowing as essential to intellectual freedom and self-expression. “I speak my mind freely on all things,” he wrote, “even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be within my jurisdiction” (Montaigne 48). 

His exquisite reading habits supported such tendencies: a lifetime of reading will provide a lifetime of ideas. Of the precision with which he read, Montaigne explains that as he aged, he “adopted the habit . . . of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived . . .” (Montaigne 44).

Montaigne’s essays functioned as places where his thoughts could intermingle freely with the philosophies, politics, and emotional fervors of other writers and thinkers, both living and historical. This way of constructing essays has a parallel in the cento. While there are varying ways to go about writing a cento, the general understanding of the form is that it assembles fragments from previously published work(s) into a new, cohesive whole. Like Montaigne’s essays, centos draw upon the works of others, creating a dialogue between the past and present, between the writer crafting the cento and the writers quoted, between the writers quoted and the reader, and so on.

Centos can be found throughout literary history, from Homer, who adopted lines of “Trygaeus in the Iliad and Odyssey as reported by Aristophanes” (Princeton Encyclopedia 180), to John Ashbery in “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” (lines reused include “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street” by T.S. Eliot). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics cites Virgil as “the most popular source for centos in later Roman times,” and they have been utilized by Peter Gizzi in Ode: Salute to The New York School 1950-1970 (a libretto of 100 books by New York School poets published between 1950 and 1970) and Simone Muench in Wolf Centos, which joins together lines from Anne Sexton, Octavio Paz, Carl Sandburg, and Adrienne Rich to create a web of cultural and historical dialogues. To quote Red Hen Press riffing on Gertrude Stein, “a cento is a collage is a mix tape is a video montage.”

Through the careful curation of lines that forming a cento requires, students can explore cultural memory, collective storytelling, language theory, and personal meaning-making.

For students, the process of crafting a cento has many layered benefits. The process will challenge their traditional notions of authorship, encourage them to explore the relationships between texts, and create literary connections across centuries. Students might ask, “Why am I allowed to take these words and make them into something new?” In raising such questions about the idea of a singular, original voice, the cento prompts conversations about linguistic ideologies, plagiarism, and the function of citations. Through the careful curation of lines that forming a cento requires, students can explore cultural memory, collective storytelling, language theory, and personal meaning-making. But perhaps most necessary for today’s students, the process of creating a cento helps reinforce the practice of close reading. 

Maybe it’s obvious to say today’s students read differently than students of previous decades. Sometimes the obvious bears repeating. Why do contemporary students have such a hard time reading? Well, for a whole bunch of reasons, but a common denominator often points to the use of video/electronic games and other animated and digital spaces that utilize rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Over time, studies have shown that RSVP retrains the brain to process words without natural eye movements, disrupting comprehension.

We live in a fast-paced, attention-deficit culture, a culture in which people of every generation enjoy binge-watching or swiping through more content than our brains can process. Notifications on our phones demand attention. Audiobooks are consumed at 1.5x speed. Students can churn out grammatically correct essays on ChatGPT in under a minute. Generally speaking, we’ve become a culture willingly surrendering our time to think, so it’s easy to understand why close reading feels so unnatural to students. There are seldom moments in their academic and personal lives when they are being asked to slow down. When I consider the impacts of RSVP technologies and evolving reading habits on 21st-century learners, I begin to see that part of my role as an educator is to help retrain their eyes to reread. The cento offers one small, effective method of accomplishing this.

The structure of the cento demands that students read and reread—slowly, deliberately—the texts they are drawing from, with a sustained focus on selecting, sequencing, and recontextualizing lines. Because the cento uses already existing language, the pressure students feel in creating original work and starting from scratch diminishes, a benefit to many students but most of all to those who experience anxiety about writing. Similarly, the cento invites nonlinear, associative thinking, a cognitive strength often linked to neurodivergent learners. And whether done collaboratively or individually, building a cento encourages students to use quotations not just as citations but as inherent to the conversation, just like Montaigne.  

Before asking students to start writing their centos, I think it is important to provide the scaffolding so they get the most out of the assignment. This starts with a discussion of the form’s literary history and a class reading, which can include a selection of essays, poems, a novel, or short stories. A cento can be made from any genre but having a few poems or pages or chapters to choose from will serve the lesson better than focusing on one shorter text. For the next few classes, we continue to read these selections with care and focus. Sometimes this means students are reading aloud in class, other times it means I am reading to them, encouraging them to annotate. While traditional annotation serves fine, I often ask my students to keep a notebook of quotations from the texts that have struck them as beautiful or puzzling, as relevant or off-putting. Sometimes this request is given as a homework assignment, other times I ask students to do this after we’ve read the selection out loud for the first time together in class. When the time comes to write their centos, this notebook becomes a space of memory and play. Before asking students to write a cento on their own, I would give them the opportunity to write one together collaboratively as a class using the following 10 steps: 

1. Ask students to take out their notebooks of quotations and engage in a “turn and talk,” sharing the phrases and quotes they have accumulated over the past few class sessions in small groups of two to three people.
2. As they share, have students come up with a list of their top five quotes, the ones they feel are most rich. (If there is a quote that more than one student chose, that quote should make it into the top five.) 
3. Have each group write down the quotes they have chosen on the board or on a shared computer screen. There may be around 25 quotes/lines on the board/screen. 
4. Once all lines are collected, invite the class to whittle the list down. Ask them to look for variety in syntax, theme, symbol, and language. If there are 25 quotes, edit them down to 20; if there are 20, edit to 15; etc. This models the art of concision. It sometimes helps to have students do this together in small groups, with neighboring groups sharing the list, then bringing their edits back to the larger class discussion.   
5. Once the class has revised the list of quotations and phrases for concision and length, reread the list aloud to seek a narrative. What line should come first? How should the cento end? Perhaps you have a course question already at the core of your discussions. In any case, work through the rearrangement process together on a shared screen to demonstrate the messiness of the generative writing process.
6. Once the lines have been “properly arranged,” read the poem aloud.
7. While reading out loud, look for minor edits. When appropriate, make such edits in real time. 
8. Once students are satisfied with the poem, ask the class to come up with a title. Relay the importance of including the word “Cento” in the title as it signals to readers that the lines within the piece have been borrowed.
9. After the students have completed the cento in class, ask them to take five to seven minutes to write a reflection on this collaborative exercise that considers the transformation of lines, ideas, and moments. Ask students to think about what they would have done differently if they were not working with a group and what they plan to do differently when they write their own cento. 
10.  Challenge students to come up with their own cento based on the day’s lesson. 

Done with intention, creating a cento is not only about producing a poem but about cultivating awareness of how exploring the thoughts and words of others is essential to the process of critical inquiry. Effortlessly weaving another’s words into our writing—whether we are working on an essay, an academic paper, a cento, or another literary form—is a skill many of us hope our students will learn to accomplish. It’s a trait often associated with curiosity and intellect. Consider Montaigne, who read whatever he could by whomever he could whenever he could; Montaigne, who popularized the art of thinking aloud. The cento, like Montaigne’s essays, invites a return to dialogue, to borrowed wisdom, and to slow, curious thought. And maybe we could all use a little bit of slowing down these days. Then again, what do I know?

Read more by Abriana Jetté in Teachers & Writers Magazine:
• Flexing Our Rhyming Muscles: Introducing the Ghazal
• Alternative Strategies for Artificial Intelligence in the Writing Classroom: An Educator Asks ChatGPT How to Use the Online Chatbot in Writing Classrooms

Featured image: Michel de Montaigne (par Leroux) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons