While most “anagram poems” follow the rules I went into yesterday, with every line an anagram of every other, there are other poetic forms that play with ’grams in different ways.
Stet, by Dora Malech, is a collection of poems using anagram pairs and “triplets,” mostly putting them on the same line. The results can be challenging to decipher, but they’re full of evocative language and a strange kind of muis.
Reviewers sometimes use the label “anagram poetry” to describe lipogram/letterbank poems like those in the collection Impersonations by Mark Zimmerman. I already cited that collection here, but here again is the start of Zimmerman’s “Walt Disney,” which shows what can be said about the dream-maker using only the ten letters of his name, in no particular order and in copious amounts:
What’s the difference between a lipogram and a letterbank exercise? It’s kind of a “glass half-empty/glass half-full” situation: we call an exercise like this a lipogram when we’re thinking about the letters that aren’t there, but a letterbank describes which letters are there.
In that same link as above, I mentioned Christian Bök’s collection Eunoia, but I focused on the “Eunoia” poem taking up the body of the work. From a letterbank-y point of view, though, the short poem “VOWELS” was more interesting. Like “Walt Disney” above, it used only the letters in its title. You can read the eighteen-line poem here.
Next: Time for another micross!