A Rag Man

Or, A Nag Mar. This and the title of today's post are two anagrams of the word anagram. (An anagram is a rearrangment of a set of letters into a new set of words. For example, the letters in the name Clint Eastwood can be rearranged to read Old West Action.)

Such wordplay seems a natural for use in poetry, doesn't it? Well, it never occurred to me to try it until I ran across some poets who already had.

My first experience with anagrams used in poetry was when I read Peter Pereira's Anagrammer, which you can read and listen to at the link, and I strongly recommend you do.

My next experience was with the many anagram poems in Kelli Russell Agodon's book Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room. Here's a poem of hers I found online, called Believing Anagrams, but you have to scroll down, click on the correct interview, then scroll to the middle of the interview to find the poem, and even then the formatting looks to be off. Anyway, you can get the idea.

So how does a poet come up with anagrams for poems? I can't imagine doing it myself, even though I'm pretty good with palindromes (words or phrases that read the same backwards as forwards, like the infamous Madam, I'm Adam). So it seemed to me like anagram poetry was out of the question.

However, I recently found out that there are online tools which create anagrams for you (not that I'm suggesting that the two poets above used tools like this; they may have worked them out with their heads--I don't know). Here's one online tool called Internet Anagram Server (and there are many others you can find using your favorite search engine). You just type in the word or phrase you want an anagram for, and the anagram maker spits out a list (you may need to be patient for a few seconds though). Sometimes a list of hudreds in fact. And here's a hint: I read somewhere that at least 11 letters are recommended for optimal anagram building.

You can even get anagrams for your own name. I just found out one for mine is Cajoled Egos If Owls.

Even with the help of online anagram finders, I still haven't managed to write an anagram poem. If you do, feel free to share your success with me here.