Speccie Anagram Hell
 

No. 2592: Mixed Messages
You are invited to submit a poem entitled ‘The Name’ (16 lines maximum) in which each line is an anagram of the name of a well-known (and specified) poet. Entries to ‘Competition 2592’ by 16 April or email: lucy@spectator.co.uk.

I don't find this quite clear. Does it mean sixteen differnt anagrams of the same poet or sixteen different poets supplying sixteen lines. Or a
Mixture of the two. I have asked for clarification and will pass on what I get to Sphereans. Whichever way it is, it's .... quite hard.

Yeah, I was confused too. Either way, I don't think it's the sort of thing I want to waste so much of my life on, only to be beat out by that Greenwell feller, not to mention all the other usual suspects. :eek:

There are anagram generators on the net that do some of the spadework. What you need are nice long names like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Algernon Charles Swinburne or even Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I'm working on a little poem based on a Greek myth, but to enter this competition you have to be a subscriber to The Literary Review. I have subscribed for two years; total outlay £60 and won £10 twice. So I am in the hole for £40. But this could change. The top prize is £300 and yes, people like Greenwell win it. Actually Greenwell seems a nice guy, fat with a beard and a hat. Pity I can't persuade him to become a Spherean. He could tell us how he does it. Lefty poltics but, hey, you can't have everything.

Yes, you can't have everything. Surely it's enough that he is fat and has a beard. The hat is just gravy.

They must want the kind of anagram that's a message.

You're right John, the longer the name the easier it may be. I'd say they want a different poet on each line. Argh!

Okay, everyone, what are your middle names?

Just kidding! You lose points for using poets Lucy doesn't recognize.

So what I really need to know is Bill Greenwell's middle name.

Middle Name of Greenwell
 

"So what I really need to know is Bill Greenwell's middle name."

Although I am, I agree, on the paunchy side, and have some stubble, Bill is my middle name, or rather a shorter version of it. The full moniker is Thomas William Greenwell.

I've done my entry, but if you guys are going to pile in, I had better do another. (Besides, getting the entry to make sense is a bit hard, and I think I have so far submitted some serious nonsense.)

Nice to have my name taken in vain around these parts!

Bill

Will give you my trade secrets if I win

When you win, Bill, when you win. I said fat. I take it back. I should have said about as fat as me but obviously taller. And you DO have a hat.

Good heavens above! The climate here (Queensland) is calming a little and as my brain returns I had hoped to relaunch into this Speccie business It's bad enough having John Whitworth to compete against but we've got the famous Gold medallist Bill Greenwell!!
Welcome Mr Greenwell.
Janet
John wrote:
but to enter this competition you have to be a subscriber to The Literary Review. I have subscribed for two years; total outlay £60

Alas. Our dollar has turned into fairy money. I'm out of here.

Wow! Bill Greenwell! Welcome! You realize, of course, that our grousing about that Greenwell Fella was pure, unadulterated envy. :D

Envy!
 

I feel your pain, or possibly Oily Faerie Pun, since I have been anagramming as badly as I can this afternoon. This has produced the unusable fact that Stevie Smith is 'I vet theisms,' and that Emily Dickinson is 'None. I’m idly sick.' - neither any use in The Name poem.

I hate anagrams. But I've had a go. My only secret is not taking holidays, and entering every week since 1978, so I am in the habit... But I have no idea why I am on the current roll. It happened in 1981, but not since, until now, despite entering under pseudonyms - ironically, usually anagrams.

The probable secret to winning is to suspect what everyone else is going to do, and then do something different.

Nice to meet you all. I discover that I have been a member since 2006, which just shows you how idle I really am.

Bill

Bill, I'm delighted you're one of ours! Even if I'm momentarily discouraged by the prospect that your verse has beaten the boogers out of mine NOT ONLY under the name "Bill Greenwell", but under anagrammatic pseudonyms as well...

Welcome, Bill Greenwell, rebelling well. I've certainly taken your name in vain enough recently, especially when I don't even earn an h.m.

So, what's the consensus - a different poet for each line or the same one throughout? If the latter, thanks to Bill, I've already got:

I vet theisms,
Hives me tits!

Frank

Here's my educated guess, this time in detail: Speccie/Lucy (or any good writer) would not phrase the challenge as written above if each line needed to be the same poet's name. The challenge would have said something like "in which each line is another anagram of the same well-known poet's name."

Betcha!

I don't know. Any good writer would not have phrased it in a way that requires other good writers to discuss what was intended. Do you really think that we are supposed to write a poem where every line is an exact anagram of the same poet's name? Quite a tall order, I think. I do think the directions are entirely consistent with a different poet's name in every line.

Hoo-boy
 

Hoo-boy! Of course, Bob...major typo on my part. I've fixed the above post to state what I meant to say. No way they would want every line with the same poet's name [--as I had already said (thoroughly confusing, as you must have noticed) in my unedited last line in the previous post! Anagram hell indeed.]

Here is what the divine Lucy emailed back to me this morning.

Dear John
You are certainly not being old and foolish; the brief for the comp was not well expressed, and what is more there was a mistake (entirely my fault).
I meant to ask for a poem in which each line 'contains' an anagram of the name of a poet. (I was intending it to be anagrams of different poets' names but, as you say, it is ambiguously expressed and in fact any combination you suggest would be acceptable).
As I have already received a couple of entries, and won't have a chance to put in a clarification until next week's issue, I think that the fairest thing to do is to split the comp into two categories, with three winners in each. That is to say that those who wish to follow the original brief may do so (I predict there won't be many!) and those who prefer to do so can follow the revised brief.
I hope that's clear. Now I just need to find a more succinct way of explaining it.
By the way, I am so sorry not to have thanked you before for the comp idea that you suggested. It's a good one and is in the cupboard, as they say.
Best wishes
Lucy

What she suggests is a much better competition I think. Lines containing toilets and skate and hell yes stretch to infinity. I think I shall try this one.

I can't remember the competition I suggested. I hope I had the good sense to make it one I have a winner stashed away for.

I still don't get it. Does this mean that each line can contain, in addition to the letters of the poet's name, other letters as well? So, for example, if the exact anagram is:

BROTHER REC ETHER

you can turn the line into

BROTHER RECEIVED EITHER A LETTER OR A PACKAGE

or pretty much any line you like containing, at a minimum, the letters in the anagram?

What Lucy means
 

is that each line has to contain a poet's name, anagrammed, i.e.
AA Milne = A menial, so a line could be 'I once knew the name of a menial'.

I have to say this is a lot easier, damn it (I think I am the 'one or two entries so far') - it did my brain no good abiding by what I assumed were the original rules.

The hard part is getting the poem to fit the title, I think.

Bill

By my count, there are now four potential competitions:

1. One in which each line is an anagram for the same poet:
Alarmed, later, we
ladle warmer tea
[Walter de la Mare]

2. One in which each line's an anagram for a different poet:
Hog my enchilada,
Tamale war elder
[Michael Donaghy and WdlM]

3 and 4 are either of the above, but with extraneous letters and words allowed in each line. Why say, "in which each line is an anagram" then? I admit, I'd like to be able to make a possessive out of Fleur Adcock's name, to permit elk fads occur, which could produce something really topical and incisive.

But has anyone noticed that the Spectator posted the instructions for its "Mixed Messages" competition on April 1st?

Finally, I'd like to broach the possibility that each line may contain one word from the anagram of the same or a different well known poet's name, each anagram to contain as many words as the poem has lines, except that extra words and/or lines will be permitted.

Frank

To which I say, FEELING THE HOT GROWTH.

(That is, FORGET THE WHOLE THING).

Well, I think this fulfils the requirements for the revised competition. It also addresses the problem Bill Greenwell mentioned about making the poem fit the title. It has the drawback of being libellous (though I am told you cannot libel the dead) and I particularly regret the calumny on Gavin Ewart, but I am sure his shade will forgive me. If anyone spots that any anagram is wrong, be a dear and point it out.

The Name

Shelley, hell yes, what a rude boy!
Hopkins gets to screw posh kin.
Auden wants to stroke a nude boy
Keats takes sex-crazed lodgers in.

Enright likes one nighter sport.
Shadwell (welsh lad) buggers boylets.
Porter is of bad report.
Eliot (T.S.) lurks in toilets.

Arnold rogers Landor’s daughter.
Rochester thinks her corset hot.
Ewart’s name was writ in water.

Shakespeare’s name was not.

Thanks for the help and the inspiration John, this is what I'm putting in;

The Name (hate men)

While Seamus Heaney, aha, eyes menu,
Lewis Carroll sees crawlies roll it,
Alfred Lord Byron forlornly badder, knew
it was he and TS Eliot stole it.

I'm sweaty Lily,moaned Willy Yeats, and what
a caloric dump!, Padraic Colum agreed,
Ay, a scrotal twister, said Sir Walter Scott,
we eat rubber bison said Robbie Burns, indeed.

As C.S. Caverly lets calves cry,
Charles Causley casually cheers
letting Sylvia Plath (a vital sylph) buy
dinner, Ogden, a hen’s gonad, Nash, leers.

“Timely vandals!” says Edna St V Millay,
then lechery yelps came from Percy Shelley.
Turn cartwheels Tom asked Charlotte Mews, OK?
When Romeo Moore, cried not on your nelly!

Great stuff Jim, particulary a hen's gonad. But, alas, the woman is Charlotte Mew, so you'll need to fix that.

Yipes!

Do a cartwheel Tom, begged Charlotte Mew, OK?

Should do it eh? Many thanks John.

BTW I've asked the adorable Lucy ( I can suck up too) which half of the competition Bill Greenwell entered and to put me in the other.

Didn't Bill Greenwell say he was in for the whole nine yards, the difficult bit. But of course he could do one of the others too. You can actually put in additional entries, under your own name or using a pseudonym. Maude Gracechurch, who used to win regularly, was actually a canal barge belonging (I think) to E.O. Parrott who won even more often.

I swore I wouldn't waste time on this.
I'm hopeless. :eek:


Emily Dickinson, iced, solemn, inky;
Robert Burns, why are your rubbers torn?
DH Lawrence, darn lech! We find you so kinky!
Dylan Thomas, sadly, a month now you mourn.
TS Eliot--ole Tits! Are you wearing a bra?
Reveillez-vous, Baudelaire! L'aube delira!

....................--Sari Hormone

But what about Hughes? He hugs.

Marion, no time could possibly have been wasted that produced Robert Burns rubber's torn. Just think. It was there all the time until you uncovered it but NOBODY KNEW IT. I suppose Lord Byron Lor! Dry nob! is simply rude.

Are you by any chance suggesting that I haven't entered both halves?!

Nell L. Wregible

You can say that again. He was Maud (sic) Gracechurch, A. Boteman, Wayne Sidesaddle, B. Mooring and a whole host of others. I went on his barge once. It was dominated by a huge projection screen (he was so short-sighted he was registered as blind) so he could see what had been sent him. He also, and I know this not politically correct, but it was comical at the time, mistook Fiona Pitt-Kethley for a hat-stand, and gave her chase for a bit round the local pub.

But the bigger winner was Martin Fagg. It was said that he had once won every entry in a Spectator Comp under five different pseudonyms. I can't remember them all, but he was certainly Molly Fitton and Rufus Stone (a Dorset village), and there were at least twenty of him.

Bill

Thisis all a bit in the English reminiscence mode, but why not. These competitions may be one of our most lasting literary monuments. 1. Was Martin Fagg in fact a Shrewsbury schoolmaster? 2. It's true: Fiona Pitt-Kethley did (does?) look a bit like a hat-stand when you would have thought she'd look like the blowsy version of Diana Dors. She gave me marsala and fruit-cake once and proved to have a very sound classical education. Her house in Hastings had the Pompeii mosaic of the dog with cave canem set into the hall floor. For our transatlantic readers, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, as well as being a competition winner (as was her mother Olive, with whom she lived) enjoyed a certain brief but considerable fame as a priapic poet and quarrelled publicly with the Faber Martian poet, Craig Raine, about whether he had, or had not, actually read any of her poetry collection 'Sky Ray Lolly' before turning it down. I interviewed her for a Sunday newspaper and used to possess her notorious book, but I seem to have lost it. It sold very well, better than any of mine and, I suspect, better than any of Craig's too, but mine was (I stoutly aver) a review one. As a poet she was (I thought) over fond of the unrhymed iambic pentameter. She edited a book of dirty verse and prose which was (again I thought) not as good as mine. 3. I met Roger Woddis (another doughty comp winner) in a London bookshop, a dissatisfied man. Perhaps it was his failure to make it with the TLS crowd. Perhaps it was just his politics.

Not sure, but he did teach at a private school. He lived in Chichester Cathedral, but maybe that was when he'd retired. I've remembered another of his pseudonyms: Tim O'Dowda.

And another of EO Parrott's: Harrison Everard.

And Roger's pseudonym was Naomi Marks.

Bill

Isn't this the same person who turned up as Felicity Shagwell at the Ossuary book club in Kilkenny dressed in a tutu and a green bandana, or was it a green tutu and a banana? My memory hasn't served me well since I floundered ashore from the Lusitania and was brought up by the nuns in Swastica House in Cork. But I digress- I never met a man with a barge, it must be a moving experience.
Do women have them?

Lord, Rig us live chat, prayed Vergilius, then
After Dante had anted an ode and pressed “send”
Ah, Pops, IMs Sappho, I’m soooo not impressed,
Uh, moans Housman, discreetly, it’s far from your best,
I’m afraid, twits Ruth Pitter, It’s rather tripe, truth,
Arch-Hyena Turd! flames forth from Hayden Carruth,
And, tweets Andre Breton, it is so barren-toned,
scumming, types Cummings (who’s probably stoned),
Pure boor trek and drek, texts irate Rupert Brooke,
Didn’t ogle! crowed Coleridge, Not worth a look!
Rote stench cables Chesterton, full of dismay,
It’s a sham, arty go, skypes in sad Thomas Gray,
It was lavishly caned by a loud Vachel Lindsay,
Deemed insipidly hep by Sir Philip Sidney,
Sniffed James Merrill, obliquely, A smarmier jell,
Asked for help, Ogden Nash just gnashed, No, go to Hell!

Hugh Jest-Hampton

Hayden Carruth is unknown to me, and possibly to everyone else, but, that being said,I should say this one has a jolly good chance of thirty quid which is not quite as many dollars as it was not long ago. I should send it along, if I were you. I shall google Hayden Carruth.

I have done so.THIRTY books! I take it all back.

Congratulations to
 

'Frank' (are you Hugh or Frank?) and to John. So that's a 60% strike for Eratosphereans on the Speccie Anagram Hell, since I am in the mix, too.

I foolishly write a daily blog, so I've fulfilled my promise about showing my workings - if you go to

http://billgreenwell.wordpress.com/2...m-competition/

you can read my failed entries!

best wishes

Bill

Thanks for the announcement, Bill, and congratulations to you and to John Whitworth.

I hope the memo on my ₤25 check reads "Notorious Anagram Competition" - I'll frame it.

'Hugh Jest-Hampton' was a botched attempt at an English-sounding nom de plume, with a nod toward Captain Hugh Jampton.

Frank

Ooh! Rah! Gutsy garcons!
(Hooray! Congrats guys!)

--A Minor