Anagrammatic poetry

Anagrammatic poetry is poetry with the constrained form that either each line or each verse is an anagram of all other lines or verses in the poem.

Scan of the poem "Anagram" from the 1633 edition of George Herbert's The Temple

A poet that specializes in anagrams is an anagrammarian.[1]

Writing anagrammatic poetry is a form of a constrained writing similar to writing pangrams or long alliterations.

List of anagrammatic poems

• Archive of Literary Anagrams:[2] Hundreds of long anagrams of poetic and literary subjects by over 50 contributors, including the longest literary anagram ever created.
• Eight Poems in the Manner of OuLiPo, by Kevin McFadden, http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-1/mcfadden.htm
• Oh Damn! Must I Refrigerate?:[3] Anagrammatic poem by Cory Calhoun of the title and first eight lines of Shakespeare's sonnet "The Marriage of True Minds."
• Dianagrams, Monica Lewinsky[4]
• Rishi Talks to Katie:[5] a dialogue between two high school students: a text's sentences are rearranged, then its words, then its letters
• In the French poem Ulcérations by Georges Perec, every line is an anagram of the title.
• The book Permutation City opens with an anagramatic poem.
• In the poem Washington Crossing the Delaware by David Shulman (1936), all 14 lines are anagrams of the title.
• In the online book, ISOTOPES2 [6] by Daniel Zimmerman, each line of the 14 line poems anagrams a 4 x 4 word square.

See also

• Vocabularyclept poem
• Magnetic poetry

References

1. "Tea with Kevin McFadden. An Interview by F. David Mencken". Archipelago. Volume 6, number 2. http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-2/recommend.htm
2. anagrammy.com
3. wordsmith.org
4. archive.org
5. spinelessbooks.com