My current book project consists of very short essays that add up to a novel. Between the essays, I’m thinking about inserting supplementary “ingenuities” — doodles, mindmaps, maybe a limerick or two. Anything goes.

I woke up this morning thinking I’d take a page from the avant-garde and put together a “poem” through the random selection of lines written by famous women poets -- kind of a writerly I Ching. I got out my Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and my random number generator and put a selection method together. I had written down my title about 2 AM; then when I officially got up my "machine" came up with lines by Margaret Atwood, Ann Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Clampitt, Josephine Miles, H.D., Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Toomer, and Louise Bogon.

The result follows:

Where Were You When I Could Have Used Some Inspiration?
but whose is this vapid face
but suicides have a special language
He is splendid. With a place to stand
Upon her Mat–-
This is the time of year
The fragrance of the quinine trees
the less there is for memory to take hold of,
Keeping the night carefully, it was undone.
If I could stir
that makes indignity, makes the brute
In wells a hundred feet below the ground–-
Those creatures both corrupt and proud,

Yikes. The result certainly made me think, certainly stopped me in my tracks as I was looking for strong women writers and role models and what emerged was this sort of depressing swoon. Maybe it was just as well that I was nurtured by take-charge Irish women who told me to put down my books and go out and experience the world. Maybe it was just as well that I was educated by ambitious nuns who taught me that literature was about heroic night journeys and picaresque roadtrips (even if they were all written by men). Just a thought.

Has anyone tried this before and/or am I just a total troglodyte when it comes to women's poetry?