Brad Pasanek, weary of pentominoes, envisioned a poem built from hexagonal pieces. He selected William Blake’s “Ah! Sun-flower” as a likely candidate, imagining solutions that worked from the center of a frame outward (or, contrariwise, from the edges in). By placing pieces in a spiral, the puzzle solver would build Blake’s troped, turning flower. As with all puzzle poetry, the point is to understand poetic form as shape by making a poem more haptic, materializing its semantics.
A protoype poem was cut from plywood, which flared and scorched when hit by the laser cutter. The surface of the puzzle took on irregular tints, stained by these Blakean flames of fire.