Challenge
 

A friend of mine occasionally creates challenges for me, such as writing an anagram sonnet [each line of which is an anagram of the title] a la David Shulman's (pretty awful) "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1936). It (and a fatuous critique of it by Douglas Hofstadter) can easily be Googled; mine, relatively more successful, though I make no great poetic claims for it, was published in WordWays. And Kevin McFadden's "It's Smut" in his collection Hardscrabble is a poem in which each of its 14 lines anagrams "I know it when I see it."

Prompted by John Whitworth's recent example in General Talk ("A form using bold"), I offer this more reasonable one posed by said friend. Those of the Cantor school will likely find it masturbatory, a mere exercise in filling in the blanks, but others might enjoy the technical challenge.

Write a follow-up to E. A. Robinson's "Richard Cory," in which his money is inherited by his brother, a Tibetan monk with a sense of humor. Each line in your response must begin and end with the same words as the corresponding line in "Richard Cory." He did not specify IP, though in my response I retained that form.

Word Ways. Don't see your name on their current table of contents. My subscription lapsed a little while ago, but the current issue shows glints of light.

Added: the Contents one finds via this link is for the November 2010 issue.

Could someone talk to me about Word Ways? I looked on their website, but it's not very informative. What kind of poetry do they accept? It seems anything with word play, but I'd like to know more.

The most recent issue, August 2010, p. 217. Table of Contents lists:

......217...... An Anagram Sonnet ............ J. Hodge

For reasons that escape me, on the page itself appears a photocopy of the page as I submitted it (their usual practice for the publication) with two changes: the reproduction of the Botticelli painting is understandably in B&W rather than in color, and the editor saw fit to rechristen me and in the process perform gender modification. Instead of "Jan D. Hodge" (the name I wrote not only on the article itself but in all correspondence I had with them) I am renamed there "Janet D. Hodge." Oh well . . .

Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.....That accurately reflects its focus. Though there is quite a bit of "light verse" and semi-nonsense, the interest isn't on poetry as such, but on word play: a potpourri of anagrams, puzzles, palindromes, "ungrams" ("which are much like Anagrams, except less so"), obscure puns, word squares, "Spoonertoons" (e.g. sentences like "The Lock Hurter" captioning a cartoon of a bandit blowing up a safe), "Numerical Charades," etc., etc.

It is based in and produced at Butler University in Indianapolis. Pages are photocopied 8.5" x 11" sheets, from originals submitted by contributors. Style is therefore quite inconsistent.

I submitted my anagram sonnet to it specifically because I ran across Shulman's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in a New York Times review of Ross Eckler's Making the Alphabet Dance, and Eckler is on the editorial board of Word Ways. In a letter to NYT responding to that review, Shulman wrote: "after waiting 60 years, I find that nobody so far has equaled or surpassed [his anagram sonnet]. I even tried to, but I failed." So I was aiming for a very specific audience with a very particular interest.

Tibet or Not to Bet
 

Hi, Jan. I'll bite:

Tibetan Cory

Whenever Richard’s brother came to town
We rolled our eyes and sneered at him.
He was Tibetan, a monk from sole to crown,
Clean shaven head to toe, extremely slim;

And draped in brown was piously arrayed,
And made a mess of English when he talked;
But cracked a crooked grin each time he said,
“Good Grief!” when we followed where he walked.

And Richard’s heir had riches of a king
And even thought the poor like us had grace;
In fact, he said that we’d have everything
To help us rise up to a glorious place.

So, flattering him, we thought his mind was light
And he a fool to give away his bread;
And we became the fools one summer night,
Went nuts to learn his wealth was in his head!

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