A vocabularyclept poem is a poem which is formed by taking the words of an existing poem and rearranging them into a new work of literature.
Vocabularyclept poetry was first proposed in 1969 by Word Ways editor Howard Bergerson. He took his little-known 1944 poem "Winter Retrospect", put all the words in alphabetical order, and challenged readers to arrange them all into a new poem. [1] An extract from Bergerson's original poem:
Blow, blast. Whirl through the dusk, snow,
Downward swirling, then into the trees go.
Short is the gloaming, long thy soundless driving.
Coat the tinsel icicles under my eaves.
Hurry your failing glow to my window-pane.
Build up the slow ache in me that rain
Cannot. Only the snow the soul of winter is riving,
Only the snow the soul of me. Only the snow weaves
That watery crystal floss filled with dusk
And sends through the walls that bland and watery musk. [2]
The challenge was taken up later that year by J. A. Lindon, who, without having consulted Bergerson's original, produced an entirely different poem also titled "Winter Retrospect". [2] [3] Both poems are 24 lines long and contain 478 words, and have been subject to several literary and statistical analyses. [4] [3] [5] Extract from J. A. Lindon's version:
Night sends me this whirl of snow.
Under the low trees the watery glow
Of your lamp looking through the dusk—my
Thoughts are still that it must die.
Upon these walls the snow is driving.
Grow with the wind's lonely music, my soul, riving
Bland aspirations split with the blast up in the eaves,
And I shall remember only that the mind, though failing, weaves
Tinsel in darkness, memory a kaleidoscope, floss
That soundless flies, musk rose, and all that nearly was, [2]
Many vocabularyclept poems by Lindon and others appeared in later issues of Word Ways. These and others are collected and discussed in various wordplay books by Bergerson and David Morice. [6] [7]
A variation on the idea of rearranging an existing vocabulary into a poem was independently discovered by Dave Kapell. His Magnetic Poetry kits consist of individual words—often related to a particular theme or topic—printed on small magnets which can be creatively arranged on a refrigerator or other metal surface. [8]
An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word anagram itself can be rearranged into the nonsense phrase "nag a ram"; which is an Easter egg suggestion in Google after searching for the word "anagram".
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as madam or racecar, the date "22/02/2022" and the sentence: "A man, a plan, a canal – Panama". The 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias, is the longest single-word palindrome in everyday use, while the 12-letter term tattarrattat is the longest in English.
Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
Willard Richardson Espy was an American editor, philologist, writer, poet, and local historian. Raised in the seaside village of Oysterville, Washington, Espy later studied at the University of Redlands in California before becoming an editor in New York City, as well as a contributor to Reader's Digest, The New Yorker, Punch, and other publications.
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.
Michael Keith is an American mathematician, software engineer, and author of works of constrained writing.
Dmitri Alfred Borgmann was a German-American author best known for his work in recreational linguistics.
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.
"Ah! Sun-flower" is an illustrated poem written by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. It is one of only four poems in Songs of Experience not found in the "Notebook".
Logology is the field of recreational linguistics, an activity that encompasses a wide variety of word games and wordplay. The term is analogous to the term "recreational mathematics".
Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics is a quarterly magazine on recreational linguistics, logology and word play. It was established by Dmitri Borgmann in 1968 at the behest of Martin Gardner. Howard Bergerson took over as editor-in-chief for 1969, but stepped down when Greenwood Periodicals dropped the publication. A. Ross Eckler Jr., a statistician at Bell Labs, became editor until 2006, when he was succeeded by Jeremiah Farrell.
Dave Morice is an American writer, visual artist, performance artist, and educator. He has written and published under the names Dave Morice, Joyce Holland, and Dr. Alphabet. His works include 60 Poetry Marathons, three anthologies of Poetry Comics, The Wooden Nickel Art Project, and other art and writing. He is one of the founders of the Actualist Poetry Movement.
Howard William Bergerson was an American writer and poet, noted for his mastery of palindromes and other forms of wordplay.
A panalphabetic window is a stretch of text that contains all the letters of the alphabet in order. It is a special type of pangram or pangrammatic window.
James Albert Lindon was an English puzzle enthusiast and poet specialising in light verse, constrained writing, and children's poetry.
Magnetic Poetry is a toy and creative writing aid consisting of individual words—often related to a particular theme or topic—printed on small magnets which can be creatively arranged into poetry on a refrigerator or other metal surface. The informality and spontaneity Magnetic Poetry has endeared it to educators in creative writing.
Palindromes and Anagrams is a 1973 non-fiction book on wordplay by Howard W. Bergerson.
Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities is a 1965 book written by Dmitri Borgmann.