Comments on: anagrams in america

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:41:54 +0000

I just saw these further comments. Didn’t mean not to respond to Ange, but was probably on the road at the time. I just don’t know how to answer her interesting query. Some people certainly do use forms, sonnets especially, to almost magically contain strong events or emotions (as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I shall put chaos into 14 lines”). Rhyme certainly has a magical and superstitious element to it, especially in English, where the associations between rhymed words seems especially strong because otherwise arbitrary (not so much the case with more inflected language, where rhyme indicates a similar part of speech or gender or number as much as anything else.) Rhyme has its own magical-thinking logic to it. When people object to rhyme it is often precisely on that ground–that it gives the emotional sense of connection or closure–the connotation of closure, I guess, to follow Paterson–even when there is nothing logical to back it up.
I think sonnets actually belong to a different category of form, though, than sestinas or villanelles. Sonnets are almost Platonic–something like them would exist even if they hadn’t been invented in precisely that form. An awful lot of lyric poems from all kinds of times and cultures weigh in at around 14 lines and have a turn in them. Villanelles and sestinas, though, are entirely synthetic creations. Which isn’t to say they can’t produce great poems, or that they aren’t worthwhile. I’m all for artifice!
It’s weird, Don, I have just been rereading the Paterson Orpheus and his essay on versions–it’s next to me here on my absurdly-disorganized desk. Don Paterson is brilliant.
Maybe I should just do a post entitled “Don Paterson is brilliant.”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:57:53 +0000

Don Paterson's afterword to his Rilke "version," Orpheus, deserves a lot more discussion than it has garnered. But I bring it up here to see what you think of this excerpt, which relates to anagrams: "Lyric unites words primarily (though not wholly) through the repetition of their sounds; if you believe words to be indivisibly part-sound and part-sense, then lyric must also unite sense. Reciprocally, the words we choose to convey the most urgent sense automatically tend to exhibit a higher level of musical organisation. Lyric presents an additional strategy besides syntax to bind our words together. This, incidentally, has severe consequences for the Saussurian dogma of the arbitrariness of the sign, which most poets know to be sheer madness. (As did Saussure, deep down, who ended his days tormented by the demon of anagrams.) This arbitrariness would be fine, if words merely denoted - and since science uses language in a purely denotative way, linguisticians understandably tend to throw their weight behind that theory. Poetry is just as interested in what words connote, however, and the overlap between their connotative haloes, their common feel, is often strongly manifest in shared features of their sounds."

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:52:59 +0000

OK, here's the most American of American anagrammatical poems: "Washington Crossing the Delaware," a sonnet by David Shulman written in 1936 and, according to the poet, unsurpassed. The poem's title and subject refer to the famous painting by Leutze; each line is an anagram of the title! Here it is!

By: Ange

Ange — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:23:00 +0000

Alicia, do you think all formal methods consititute a spell or charm? Conversely, are anagrams, palindromes, sestinas and sonnets, well, forms of superstition? (Asking seriously, not snarkily.)

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 15:08:09 +0000

Speaking of typewriter testing, and not really in the category of acrostics, are George Starbuck’s SLABS, or Standard Length And Breadth Sonnets, now almost forgotten but overdue for re-examination!

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:23:11 +0000

a brief message from here at the ALSC conference… I just adore these New Sentences for the Testing of Typewriters, which first appeared in Literary Imagination. I suppose technically pangrams rather than anagrams.
Coincidentally (or not?), anagrams came up in my talk yesterday on Lucretius. He uses the alphabet, with the ability of its limited 20-odd letters to produce all the words in the language as an analogy for atoms and their combinations. Particularly he plays with ignis and lignis, to show how the same elements (elementum also means letter in Latin–in fact the folk etymology derives the Etruscan word “elementum” from L-M-N-tum… say it aloud…) can be common to both fire and wood. Anagrams, palindromes and acrostics were serious play to ancient writers–the alphabet having an almost magical power–casting a spell, as it were.

By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:10:26 +0000

Kasy is on the karma rag now (anagram work), currently off of the Sonnets (he is also a renaissance scholar and berates my misknowledge occasionally) — http://squirrelsinmyattic.blogspot.com/
Like wearing a strappy corset, it is very Ren. John Dee arcana, protoscientific knowledge, &c. As a scientist, I do a lot of anagrams, with maths, we’ve all grown up now as a culture but it still exerts a fascination. A lot of good-sounding language works anagramatiicaly on the syllable level, and even straight up anagrams throw up lots of spooky consonance and alliteration. Of all the poetry games I can think of, it generates the best work, both because of the sound patterns and because of a slightly acausal feel it has — what letter you get to use is in part determined by the letters you haven’t used yet, and there’s a sort of fulfillment of the Gambler’s fallacy.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:05:42 +0000

Ed Allen’s 67 Mixed Messages is all acrostics — the same acrostic, actually.