The Sunday Poem: The Pangrammatic Fox

I’ve got an even harder challenge than what I suggested previously. Construct a poem, or perhaps a haiku, using only pangrams. That’s not the challenge though. The challenge is do that and make sense. I bet you US$1.00 that you cannot do this. It’s impossible for even a Master Poet. ;P

For those who do not know, a pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the alphabet. (A perfect pangram doesn’t even repeat any). I went with a pangram per line, and in the spirit of self-enumerating pangrams, made the poem about pangrams, and their most famous exponent:

The Pangrammatic Fox

The quick brown fox, they claim, jumped the lazy dogs, over and more, forever
cycling mad her quota’d alphabets, leveling Zipf, an indexed joker wild.

Unlucky vixen, pangram beast, spending q’s and hoarding j’s, the thrifty ditzy wench!
Why futz phonemes fro and to, when flow twixt verbs and jokes, the cogs of status quo,

Delights us so? Books bursting free the japes, glyphs, queries, catalexis, zeugmas woven
From words quotidian, to dazzle, vex, pry, illumine, beckon! Why judge letters equal?

Math must be seizing Reynard’s mind, values coffling waxing jabber, equations poking
Til nothing’s left except a pangrammatic sieve, quibbling z’s and k’s; hortatory, just, and swift.

Some annotations:

• The Zipf distribution is the distribution of words in languages. As it happens, the distribution of letters in the English language follows a similar enough curve that I thought I’d fudge it here.
• Glyphs are, of course, letters.
• Catalexis is when you leave a metric foot off of a line of metric verse.
• Zeugma is hard to explain, but basically it is when you use one verb or noun on two or more clauses of a sentence.
• To coffle is to chain up in a line. “Waxing jabber” can be read quite literally as “increasing talkytalk.” So, “numbers chaining up and confining increasing verbiage.”
• Reynard is of course the medieval European trickster fox.
• The sieve I am referencing is “sieve theory,” not the cooking implement, though really, same difference. 😛

Which brings me to how I wrote it. The answer is, with a little help. I wrote a quickie little program to scan sentences for me and tell me what letters were missing. 🙂