Pertaining to hair / WED 1-21-26 / Classic P.O.W. movie starring Steve McQueen, with “The” / Polarizing punctuation choice / Transaction on an online marketplace / German steel city / Inflation measures, for short / Like government bonds and Uber drivers / Spar on a sailing boat

Constructor: Ginny Too and Avery Gee Katz

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Across the Pacific — clues form a poem about someone named Lee going about his day—parallel poems, actually: one on the left (west) side of the puzzle, and one on the right (east). On the left, the clues indicate that Lee lives in China (or maybe Taiwan); on the right, that he lives in North America. Dividing the two poems, appropriately: the PACIFIC OCEAN.

Theme answers:

• Lee has a hot bowl of ___ to start his day (14A: CONGEE / 15A: OATMEAL)
• Says ___ to his neighbors, then heads on his way (37A: NIHAO / 39A: HELLO)
• With gossip and beer over Friday’s ___ game (65A: MAH-JONG / 66A: BRIDGE)
• Life across the ___ is much the same (17D: PACIFIC OCEAN)

Word of the Day: PILAR (32D: Pertaining to hair) —

: of or relating to the hair or a hair : hairy (merriam-webster.com) 

• • •

Great idea, disappointing execution. I just can’t deal with the corny poem. The very concept of the poem doesn’t work that well from a solving standpoint, because solvers don’t always (or even usually) solve in a regular top-to-bottom fashion; so what ends up happening is that you run into “verses” all out of order. This wouldn’t be so bad—certainly themes often unfold in top-to-bottom order—but in this one, the poem starts in the Acrosses but finishes in the Downs, which is super-awkward, as that “final” Down clue starts way up where the beginning of the poem is. So I’m looking at the revealer, the final line, the “punchline” of the poem before the poem even has a chance to unfold. It’s all very awkward, from a poetic standpoint. But more than the awkward layout, it’s the poem itself that is the problem (for me). It doesn’t work as poetry. It rhymes, but it doesn’t scan At All. It has none of the regular rhythm that rhyming poetry usually has. Plus, the poem depicts the most arbitrary “day” anyone has ever had. OK,  you get up and eat breakfast and head out for your day, saying hi to your neighbors along the way, that makes a kind of sense. But then … the only thing you do for the rest of your day is play MAH-JONG / BRIDGE? Also, BRIDGE??? That’s your definitive “(North) American” game??? Actually, I don’t think anything right-side Lee does is particularly “American.” I know that the demands of grid symmetry can be onerous, but you gotta find a better, more plausible way to fill out this guy’s day. The fact that the poem seems like a child wrote it, that it doesn’t even have “roses are red”-level rhythm to it, and that it’s awkwardly laid out, all these things diminished my experience of the theme, despite the fact that conceptually, structurally, visually, I really admired it. Using the PACIFIC OCEAN as a divider like that—ingenious.