Goodbye, DailyQuordlePoem - I think!

Joshua Ryan

Around April 2022 a tweet suggesting writing a Daily Quordle Poem appeared on Twitter (or X, if you prefer the simpler title). Whether the idea came from Kyle Edwards or David Wright, I’m not sure, but the aim was to take the four words that were the solutions to the Quordle puzzle of the previous day and use them as the first words on each line in a four-line poem.

These are the original rules as set out on Twitter.

This form’s rules:

Write a poem, lines starting with yesterday’s Quordle words (don’t “spoil” today’s Quordle for others).

In one tweet!

Use the #DailyQuordlePoem hashtag.

Have fun playing quordle.com to get the words!

Initially a bunch of people were involved. Some dropped off quickly, some stayed longer before vanishing, and a few remained until late 2023 or early 2024.

The form appealed to me, and I could play around with it since there was no big gatekeeper saying I couldn’t. So sometimes I used the four words at the ends of the lines. Sometimes, if I got a day behind, I combined the words from the two days into one poem, some at the front, some at the back, mixing and matching as it suited. (Which usually broke the second rule above.)

Some poets had used the Quordle words as part of another word, or in different ways played around in their use of them. I adopted most of these techniques as well.

Somewhere along the line David Wright (@ohthatwright@mas.to) set up DailyQuordlePoem.com, and would give us yesterday’s words onsite so that we didn’t have to go and find them. (Or do the Quordle itself to find them, which I found a bit time-consuming.)

By 2024 David would sometimes get behind posting the words, and we might get four or five days’ worth altogether. So I wrote several ‘long form’ Quordle poems, using all the words from those days in four line stanzas.

To challenge myself more with the four-line poem, I’d put the words in alphabetical order. When the long form ones came along, I’d put all the words in alphabetical order, thus forcing myself to be as creative as possible with a restriction. And it worked.

But by this time there was hardly anyone else writing the poems, and David had pointed me to a website where I could pick up yesterday’s words on my own. Occasionally he’d catch up and post two or three poems at a time, but obviously life took over and he became too busy. I carried on, only taking a break when I went overseas in April of 2024.

Finally it became a bit lonely being the only person visible on the site, and a couple of days ago, after trying to write a Quordle poem or two and feeling quite dissatisfied with them, I decided it was perhaps time for me to call it a day as well. Previously the restrictions of the form had inspired creativity. Now it just wasn’t working.

The good things about the Quordle poem were its short form, its given words as starting points, its flexibility. Working at one of the poems for a quarter of an hour was a good way to stimulate the brain for other writing work.

I’m sorry to leave, but there’s not really anyone else to talk to anymore. And seeing others being challenged by the words was stimulating. Maybe there'll be a revival at some point...