[Susan McLean]

Bruce Bennett:
I received only one terzanelle, but it’s a good one, and seemed like a poem I should share. For one accustomed to villanelles, the terzanelle takes a little getting used to, since at first it doesn’t appear to be doing what it’s supposed to. One’s ear anticipates the a b a rhymes, and doesn’t get them. The trick, of course, is to think terza rima. But one can still be surprised when that second line turns up, with whatever variations, as the final line in the succeeding stanza.


Everything He Knows He Learned from Crossword Puzzles (terzanelle)

His head is full of odd and useless facts
from working crosswords in the Houston Chronicle
and gleaning trivia from almanacs.

Twelve-letter DNA is “mitochondrial”—
Cold Case Files supplies the latest terms
for working crosswords in the Houston Chronicle.

Forensic evidence each night confirms
who killed the banker’s sexy secretary.
He’s lost the plot, but memorized the terms.

His day is dull; his routine doesn’t vary,
and by tomorrow night he won’t remember
who killed the banker’s sexy secretary,

although he watched it five times in September.
But when he needs a word that ends in L
for DNA tomorrow, he’ll remember.

He knows the hill where Boudicca’s army fell;
he knows that Lizzie Borden took an “axe.”
The History Channel serves him very well,
along with trivia from almanacs.


“Everything He Knows He Learned from Crossword Puzzles” is fairly gently satirical in the way it puts down the unnamed “he” who is obsessed by trivia as he leads a humdrum and wholly predictable existence. We learn essentially everything there is to be learned about him from the title and the first three lines.

He watches the same tv program over and over, but with no interest whatever in what it depicts about “life,” however tawdry or melodramatic. Yet he gets out of it what he watches it for, so in that sense it serves him and he can be said to have a passion: he does appear to derive genuine satisfaction out of working his crosswords and being a solitary master of esoteric knowledge. He is himself, the poem dispassionately suggests, a “cold case,” but he seems not to know it, which may, or may not, make his existence that much more pathetic. Or isolated, anyway.

I have one quibble: surely everyone, not just masters of trivia, already knows that Lizzie Borden took an “axe” (which seems even more obvious after the obscurity of the allusion to “Boudicca’s army”). This particular fact would not be one an aficionado of the arcane would take pride in knowing. So, it did occur to me as one reader seeking an answer: is it possible that the point here is the violence? After all, this anonymous loner does incessantly watch replays of real-life murders and is fascinated by “forensic evidence.” Is there just the very slightest hint being dropped that one day, goaded or compelled by who knows what, our silent connoisseur of the crosswords and history channel reruns is going to cut loose from his “dull” days and unvarying routine in a way that none of us would wish to be around for? I have to add that I don’t believe this is intended, but it would explain Lizzie Borden to me.

Perhaps the author has a sequel terzanelle in mind? Tune in next week!