Five Pangrams
Hello friends,
Five pangrams this week. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing either my omnibus edition Knit Ink (and Other Poems) or something from my store.)
Alternatively, buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi!
A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is arguably the best-known example. An isopangram, or perfect pangram, is a text that uses every letter of the alphabet once and only once (these are, alas, impossible in English without resorting to abbreviations or initialisms).
Below are a few of my pangrams and pangram variants.
PANGRAM-HAIKU
My pangram-haiku:
Letters squeezed inside a box.
A refractive jewel.GREAT FIRE OF LONDON (Pangram-Haiku, Chronogram*)
Great Fire of London.
A ruby fox weaves jasper
among shacks of quartz.
(*I + V + X + L + C + D + M = 1666; that is, adding the Roman numeral values of the haiku's letters gives the year of the poem's subject.)JAZZ BAND (Double Pangram*-Cinquain**)
Jazz band.
Quicksilver drums.
Warping chords. Lively flux.
Baroque fretwork juxtaposing
rhythms.
(*containing every letter of the alphabet at least twice)
(**2-4-6-8-2 syllables per line)This pangram, a variant on the isopangram, uses every letter of the alphabet only once — apart from a, which appears six times:
My jackdaw flaps, heaving a quartz box.
And finally, my best attempt at an isopangram, accompanied by an appropriate jpg (a photograph of my handmade crwth!):
Crwth.jpg — Vex, quiz my folk bands!
Brilliant as ever! And it made me think about another restrictive verse form that, as far as I know, you've never attempted: The Scrabblegram. Not sure what else to call it, but in Scrabble competitions, it's very important to check and make sure all the tiles are there, and there are a few poems people have written to help, using every letter in the game (and, of course, both blanks). A guy named David Cohen has been writing them for years, and his first one won a Games Magazine Scrabblegram contest in 1997:
A clown jumps above a trapeze,
Arcs over one-eighty degrees,
Out into mid-air,
Quite unaware
Of his exiting billfold and keys.
(The blanks here are E and S.)
Because all Scrabblegrams are, by definition, exactly 100 letters/tiles long, they're pretty easy to share on social media, and I think that was David Cohen's entire output for a while. Anyway, I'd love to see what you do.
I feel strongly judged by your Pangrams.