—————–
“Let’s reconsider and test a basic linguistic principle.
Language is a theory, an attempt to represent all
aspects of life in something other than life. It is used
to mutually describe and facilitate living. When it is
off, as happens for all kinds of reasons, its capricious
structuralism emerges. Ideas build upon distortion,
pounce such chaos.
Too much time, however, has been given to prove
this fallibility, highlight risks that determine the
chance of thought.
The theoretical principle of language recognizes
how all words fulfill this catalyst job of facilitating
life by always shifting. Anagrams embody this
nomadic functionalism.”
from If Language
by Greg Betts
BookThug, 2005
—————–

If Language consists of 56 poems, each one of which restricts itself to a fixed array of 525 letters found only in a scholarly paragraph by the poet Steve McCaffery, who writes:
“If Language Writing successfully detaches Language from the historical purpose of summarizing global meaning, replacing the goal of totality with the free polydynamic drive of parts, it nevertheless falls short in addressing the full implications of this break and seems especially to fail in taking full account of the impact of the human subject with the thresholds of linguistic meaning. It is at the critical locus of productive desire that this writing opens itself up to an alternative ‘libidinal’ economy which operates across the precarious boundaries of the symbolic and the biological and has its basis in intensities.”
Betts illustrates the poetic theory outlined in this paragraph, “improving” the style of McCaffery by altering the combination of such letters, rearranging them exhaustively 56 times (a value equal to the number of appearances of the letter I—the most common letter in the paragraph itself). In doing so, Betts manages to explore the potential of this described, “libidinal” economy, with its inadvertent expressions, all ungoverned by the originary intention of McCaffery himself. Betts uses these 525 letters to recount stories about the history of anagrams and the poetics of language—and he even goes so far as to conduct a correspondence with McCaffery, who gamely follows the constraint in his replies.
Betts demonstrates that these 525 letters contain a possible, unspoken “universe” of poems, all discrepant, but nevertheless correlated, if only because they share the exact same alphabetic repertoire. He suggests that we might begin to imagine language itself as a kind of “multiverse” of such repertoires, each one occupying its own anagrammatic, cosmological world of expression, but completely isolated from some other proximate, alternate reality, whose alphabetic repertoire differs perhaps by only one letter—and thus, despite the efforts of great poets, a thought in one such universe may never find itself expressed in the letters of the other. I might suggest that poets have only barely begun to explore the contents of these linguistic dimensions that, in the future, await our exhaustive comparison….
I might also note that, when blurbing this book for the author, I have repeated his constraint:
Greg Betts is writing anagrams. Is his project zany? You bet it is. If language can be nihilistic in its wit, if language can be simplistic in its fun—then this book truly uncovers all the “abracadabras” hidden deep a million ages ago within even the most unmagical of all grammatical limitations. You can pop open the shod catch on this locked coffer, and voilà, you can find it full of rococo stuff. You can see all these words churn in the fitful grasp of their coiling rope. You can see all these words defer to the artful rules of their hellish game. Even the most philistine critics admit that this feat appears impossible—still its delights persist….

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