sudoku poems

So in the spirit of Oulipo, I've created a poem-generating process that puts my addiction to sudoku to use. First step is that I solve a sudoku. Then I basically use it as a phonetic scheme. I take a text whose language I really like and I take nine words that don't sound too similar, and then assign them each a number.

Then, nine words to a line, and nine lines long (like a sudoku), every time a number is given as a clue, I use the exact word for that number. Then everywhere you had to supply the number in order to solve the sudoku, I use a word that rhymed (or slant rhymed or meant the same thing) with that number's word. So now I have nine lines of nine words, and none of them are repeated in the same place or same line.

Then I link the words together into a poem. It's really a way to spur writing and bury some rhymes. I can't say how well it's worked, but it's fun.

I don't know if this makes any sense, but here is one:

AN ANCIENT GAME
a conversation between Ashbery, Diogenes and Heraclitus



A swift river - flow of red leaves, bushes brown with dust.
Mouths half-open: gates along the trail the Nobles took,
holding symbols of fire. Their words have changed to cobalt;
they laugh. As I ramble I feel their third eyes,
these woods made dark by smoke.

They've changed to water inside a spit of fire,
bubbling around stale mirrors, lit jumping red,
hovering above crumpled papers, stale puddles almost dried.

An odd growth of truth: crowds of birds walk up the hill
seeking truth the gods wired down (I swear: lowered down on leaden wires).
They lash my ears with ribald cries to earth.
The truth of our fate - bodies and sounds
hinge on symbols They permitted to touch down on the hill,
which gushed light at sunrise.

Leaning on their staffs, fathers have heard
the spaces at the bottom of the hill. Our mothers
aspire to reveal symbols, cobalt-black silences
emanating from below, lit red by late sun
fallen into bushes below - I'll not go down.

Both gods and Men laugh miles away down the road
while the flowers beget new gods in silence.
I no longer walk away. Things change: fire on rafts of truth,
the hobbled birds drunk from stale symbols of the forest,
fermenting dark spaces, water climbing hills
(boding ill of re-creation), speeding up of Fate.

Birds and birds stake themselves on the fate
of a truth that lashes from sick riddles
badly cast with a feather, not rods or switches.

Stumbling hounds seek hell, eyes charged,
and spit fire while glowing symbols float toward the hill,
heralds mate and grist, lofty fathers of the Unwise.

Cabled bodies drop like four flowers arranged
- two truths, two gods -
to find new stashes of unstale water.

Gods, Men, they rustle as they shake off, dry
down, down to opalled edgy spaces, skin glazed.

The petals fatten waiting under bushes where eyes,
orange from the tense flow of light, finally split
and drop their shells. Free of fear
of gods changed to bushes, their wills are frail.

The ample fire flows - it's stirred by what they've found:
a youth simple yet ornate, body the color of cobalt,
new god with no father, laughing vitally, rising to the top of all hills.
She guffaws bubbles of new creation to meet an empty, watching sky.