Regruntled.com

Somehow I had “sudoku” and “poetry” in my brain at the same time.  I was going to take nine words and rearrange them into a nine-line poem according to a sudoku.  But which nine words?  When the going gets tough, the tough start googling.  You just never know what you’ll find.

KoolAid Report has a haiku:

Cursed sudoku!
Vile number matrix from hell!
Addict me no more!

Julian from Sydney tells a great story about delivering this poem at an open-mike night:

“Sometimes it feels like you are trapped in a cell, bound by constraints…
surrounded by squares.

You can almost feel the eyes watching you, scrutinising you with care…
working out your position…
your value…

It may help you to know that there are others out there like you -
equal to you.
Oh, sure, they are kept away from your vicinity,
away from your line of sight…
but they are there, and they indirectly influence you,
just as you… indirectly influence them.

Every day there is a new problem!
Every day… a new solution to be found.”

Rob Mackenzie from Edinburgh published this one:

Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen

I sit down opposite. She doesn’t blink

or cough, her pencil-scratch the only noise

beyond the train’s dull chit-chat. Teenage boys

slouch up the centre-aisle, unleash the stink

of Lynx. She keeps on scrawling to the brink

of suffocation. I admire her poise,

open windows, plumb my brain for ploys

to start a conversation. I can’t think.

Our eyes squint out of sync. Although I stare,

I don’t dare interrupt her concentration

and when she finally completes the square

I focus on the floor. One hesitation

begins a chain. I set up solitaire.

The train heaves on, already past my station.

FM Vorassi at Deviant Art took a sudoku and replaced the ones with one-letter words, the twos with two-letter words and so on.

Butcher’s bloody cleaver hangs high on a varnished peg;
Here am I: primitive; pierce and sever, decimate, debauch
Carve and subjugate, leaving a bloodied bovine or lamb.
Yet I rekindle broken lives; resurrect mangled dead, or
Recompose, mincing.  Do they see, I cleverly create steak,
Shanks, chops – meat! - an abattoir maestro and I transcend
‘Artisan’.  Thickhead cattle I up – prime beef now triumphs -
A conquest!  Ruler and unequaled King of farmer’s market;
To them, who provides quality, brings exquisite taste?  I.

Oulipien Dax Bayard-Murray uses sudoku as an aid to generating poetry.

Colored Heart from Quezon City has a poem  about Sudoku Fever.