Random poetry idea generator

A quickie for you this morning: my undergraduate workshop was having trouble getting inspired to write poems, and asked me to give them some kind of exercise.  So I made this.

It's pretty simple--just a bit of javascript that chooses one item apiece from three lists: an action, a subject, and a method.  The interesting thing is, I was planning on stopping at fifty items per list, then couldn't stop.  It's up to 273 each now, which means there are more than 20 million possible combinations.  It got to feeling like writing, and I belatedly realized that's what it is.  It's writing!  I am just sacrificing control and sense for the pleasure of constant amusement and inspiration.

If you have some ideas, let me know, I'll add them in the next round of updates.

Also on the web, by the way: the young geniuses at Electric Literature have made a web app that allows you to record stories and pin them to a map.  It's cool, check it out.  And now that my former student Téa Obreht is super famous, you might want to listen to the interview I did with her last year, on the Writers At Cornell blog.

Mini Quiz

This post finds its inspiration in a task I always assign to my writing class--a whim I got from a book, a long story, its origin a Gallic quill. An author--call him G.P.--spins a yarn from which a particular thing is missing. Long months past that day, a guy ports it cross-Atlantic, and you can now buy it in a bookshop. This story isn't bad, but what's amazing about it is its form--by limiting his tools, G.P. shows us how to hack unusual paths to innovation in lit. Now and again, a pupil, in doing this task, will whip up a fablous paragraph or two, stunning this prof with truly groovy wordsmithing. OK, OK, it's all a bit stilty, I'll grant you that. But what can you ask for, what with this limitation at hand?

I think a Ward Six fan can probably crack this conundrum, right? For this post is actually a child of this particular task, if a kinda crappy stab at it, anyway. If you know who G.P. is (this task outlaws my saying who), what his book is known by, which country G.P. was from, and what is missing, post it!