i think it was one or two months ago, i discovered anagrammatic poems. i’ve read the wikipedia article and saw the ISOTOPES2 published by Beard of Bees Press. (their publications are interesting, actually they are interesting as a whole. they use latex for typesetting and as their saying: Beard of Bees books are freely redistributable, and are produced with Free Software. that’s cool. though, i think they deserve a separate post.)

then, i tried to - at least a simple one - write an anagrammatic little poem. i found it really hard, especially the bookkeeping part of the letters. i thought, maybe i can write a simple program to make bookkeeping simple. my first idea was to write an emacs mode, actually. but, i’m not at all competent in elisp and emacs mode writing. i’ve started eventually writing an ncurses program in c. (i’ve had, understanding basic concepts of c, in my mind for a long time.)

it’ll be a simple program. user types the line to be variated and program prints it on the top of the screen. then, when user types a character that exists in the line, the program removes the character from the printed line, real-time. and when user sends backspace, we indeed, delete the rightmost character and restore it to its original place in the printed line. that is the core idea of the program.

one can add a few things to this, for example, handling new lines, or equivalently, working with multiple lines. that consists of

1. showing them on the screen at the same time
2. handling their states separately

anyways, i leave you this great example that i came across in my litte introduction to the universe of anagrammatic poems:

A POETIC SUN MAN
Up an’ atom, since
Up means action
A comet spun in a 
Teacup Mansion

Come, patina sun
An’ so pneumatic
Anaemic puns to 
Amuse not panic

No captain muse
As nice man pout
A sun poem antic
In, Spaceman, out!

Dan Snidely