A technique that was old before it became avant-garde

Here is the description of the procedure in Steve McCaffery's "Dark Ladies" (nb link goes to a PDF download):

The Dark Ladies emerged from the deletion then reconstruction of Shakespeare's sonnets. Only the end-rhymes and their sequence are retained, italicized [except in at least one case] and embedded throughout the freely reconstructed poems. Each poem comprises two versions of each sonnet, [sic] the first, preserves the end-rhymes in reverse order; the second in their proper one. I allowed myself the liberty of removing some archaicisms and replacing them with their current synonyms; hence "thou" becomes "you" and "becomest" becomes "becomes".

One can question the aptness of the word "reconstructions" there, and also, I think, the interest of the reconstructions; after all, it's not too hard to write to a list, even if the items in the list have to appear in order. But the interest is diminished not only because the content of the reconstructions is so hodgepodge and is somewhat incoherent, but also because a very similar idea has been seen before, with niftier results, too.