According to Untermeyer, The Waste Land’s pleasures were “the same sort of gratification attained through having solved a puzzle, a form of self-congratulation.” A crosswordy poem, in other words, is merely a game, meant to be solved and not felt.Īnd not only is “crossword” a dirty word when it comes to writing literature, the idea of reading like a crossword is even more gauche. Eliot and James Joyce as “crossword-puzzle-school” writers, relying on pure formal pyrotechnics rather than emotion. In this manner the universe is assembled––rather like a crossword puzzle.” (It wasn’t a compliment.)ĭuring the 1920s, critics like Louis Untermeyer damned T.S. and his friend arrive at their ideas of the afterlife by using a Ouija board a teacup moves from one letter of the alphabet to another as Ephraim speaks. Though the book won that year’s Pulitzer, the Ouija experiments got mixed reactions.

In 1977, James Merrill published Divine Comedies, which contained “The Book of Ephraim,” a long poem documenting the start of his experiments with a Ouija board. When a poem gets labeled “crosswordy,” it’s usually synonymous for a certain kind of masturbatory difficulty, too clever by half. Poetry in the puzzle is a bonus, never a detriment, but not a necessity.įor a poem itself, being described as a crossword puzzle is––historically speaking, at least––a huge diss. You could just as easily swap in something about modern art, say, that hangs painting titles along a Guggenheim-shaped spiral grid or an astrology theme that puts letters in the shapes of constellations. That is, using poetry as a crossword theme is subordinate to the overall puzzle’s logic. In a crossword, poetry is a theme rather than a substantive aspect of the medium. Constructor Frances Hansen composed an original quatrain for the centerpiece of a 2002 Christmas-themed puzzle: Some constructors have even used the crossword as an opportunity to test-drive original doggerel. But the real star of Gordon’s Dickinson puzzle isn’t in the grid itself––Gordon clued every answer in double dactyls: “Oompah-pah instrument” “Speak indecisively” “Footwear with lozenges” etc. (The clues: “Start of a question is…” / “More of the question is…” / “End of the question is…” / “Here’s what the answer is…”). “The Homer that Never Happened,” a 2014 crossword by the late, great constructor Merl Reagle, features a grid shaped like a baseball diamond when solvers complete the puzzle and “run” the bases clockwise from home plate back to home plate, the squares spell out the last lines of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s 1888 classic “Casey at the Bat”: THERE IS NO JOY IN MUDVILLE MIGHTY CASEY HAS STRUCK OUT.Ī 2017 crossword by Peter Gordon features the following theme answers: WHAT FAMOUS POET / HAS A NAME THAT’S / A DOUBLE DACTYL / EMILY DICKINSON. Constructor Jacob Stulberg embedded a whole William Carlos Williams poem through one puzzle. Poems have a delightful history as crosswords. Using poetry as a crossword theme is subordinate to the overall puzzle’s logic. You could just as easily swap in something about modern art. Even though crosswords seem related to poetry on the surface-minute attention to language! love of words! precision!-poets and critics often bristle at the idea of the puzzle, and use it as a metonym for all things that a poem should not be. How is a poem like a crossword puzzle? feels like the start to a bad joke. And sometimes I do the puzzle.” (By “sometimes,” I soon learned, she meant sometimes in both English and in French, and sometimes just in French, when the English one is too easy.) The international New York Times, which I detest now but I buy it anyway, read it, write. “It involves getting up, having coffee, checking the news, either going jogging or not. “I will do one every single night here in my apartment,” Notley said. There was something very vivid about doing them.” While cleaning her father’s house, she found a collection of diacrostics, a particularly fiendish variety in which you have to fill in a quotation at the center and the name of the author and book title around the side.

“I associate them with grief,” she told me. Notley started doing crosswords when her father died. “If I want to relax, I have to be working with words. “I have a completely overactive mind,” she told me. It was snowing in Brooklyn (on my end) and in Paris (hers) I pictured Notley looking out from a balcon as city lights began to twinkle. “I think I don’t care about whether I do the puzzles or not,” Notley declared when I spoke to her, but the more we kept talking about them, the less I believed her. So begins Ted Berrigan’s poem, “Small Role Felicity.” “Alice” is the poet Alice Notley Anselm and Edmund are their sons. Chatting Alice is doing the Times Crossword Puzzle.

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