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.

An interview with Téa Obreht

For a while now I haven't been cross-posting with the Writers At Cornell podcast blog that I maintain--W6 deserves its own posts, I decided. (As a result, you might have missed interviews with Paul Muldoon and Billy Collins, among others, so do stop by there.) But I want to make an exception today for my former student Téa Obreht, whose novel The Tiger's Wife is due out in the spring, and who is the youngest member of this year's New Yorker "20 Under 40" lineup. The interview is sort of embarrassingly informal--honestly, I am a little bit in awe of my ludicrously talented student--but I'm delighted to get to file an early dispatch from what will doubtless be a mini-industry in Téa Obreht media coverage. The interview is about 20 minutes long, and should already be waiting on your iTunes if you are a subscriber to the podcast.

In other news, blogging on the iPad is a PITA. Fetching an image alone is absurdly time-consuming, and when you come back to your tab in Safari, all the forms have been refreshed. Blogger needs a tablet interface, eh?