Crossword Poetry
My interactive, digital crossword poems were created in collaboration with computer science interns at the New College of Florida in 2020.
When you “play” the crossword poem, you generate an original poem that you can save and print.
When you “play” a crossword, you scan for answers, the clues you think you “know.”
When you “play” a crossword poem, you scan for questions, the clues that can’t possibly have answers.
Sample Poems
Artist Statement
The crossword poem™ is an experiment in coincidence and the quotidian.
My goals with this experiment are six-fold:
- to craft a poetic form in which the reader actually, actively participates in the making of meaning, choosing her/his own reading experience;
- to re-envision art-making as an interaction that happens between author and audience (as opposed to literature as a pre-conceived object the audience, simply, consumes);
- to redefine the kinds of knowledge that are privileged in the crossword format;
- to explore the possibility of poetry as game; and
- to catalyze collaboration on the threshold of (un)continuity, where the edges of disciplines (poetry and computer science) meet.
The crossword poem™ is a space in which the scientific can spark the lyric and vice versa, the lyric can spark the scientific; in which the real can activate the fabulous and the fabulous can activate the real; a space where wonder and knowing, intuition and intellect, can be in good company; and a space that creates space, that makes space for leaps of the mind and the imagination.
Inside the crossword, language turns in spectacular and unexpected ways as the words in the answer grid connect, like right-angled snakes, shedding their skin and slipping on new selves.
Consciousness connects to fortune and the elaborate system of status. Innuendo to death and the only enduring legacy of our species. Sentimentality to the wind and a reverse fountain of youth.
Donna Haraway and Miles Davis swap some DNA, go their separate ways; Rikki Ducornet sashays through some Sigmund Freud; Bernardi and Bouillier exchange sideways glances, keep walking into separate futures, like strangers on a Parisian street.
Like a jazz solo: both improvised and rehearsed, spontaneous and choreographed.
These are the kinds of opportunities experiment affords.