Writing Tips: Playing with Palindromes

    A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards: kayak, civic, mom, noon, etc.  A mirror poem reads the same forwards and backwards, often with a word in the middle serving as a bridge between the two reversible halves.
    The most famous and complex reversible poem is “Star Gauge,” embroidered by Su Hui in the fourth century.  Her poem is composed of a 29x29 block of Chinese ideograms whose meanings can be deciphered in any direction.  The description of her poem in The Golden Thread began my fascination with palindromes.

    English is less flexible than Chinese in terms of multiple meanings, yet poets have created a wide variety of reversible poems.  A palindrome poem can be a line-by-line reversal, like the excellent “Lost Generation” by Jonathon Reed which has entirely different meanings depending on the order the phrases are read.
    Other powerful examples of word order completely “reversing” a poem's meaning are the too-timely composition “Refugees” by Brian Billston (the video recitation is profound), and the haunting poem “Doppelganger” by James A. Lindon.
    “School is Hard” by high school freshman Kya Hixon is another exceptional reversible poem.

    More challenging is a letter-by-letter palindrome poem, “Dammit I’m Mad,” by Dimitri Martin, which opens and closes with two contained palindrome phrases (Dammit I’m mad and Evil is a deed as I live), which read the same forwards and backwards, letter by letter.  The rest of the poem has the same order of letters forward and backwards, but arranged into different words and phrases, many of which are nonsensical.

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    I’ve played with my own simple word-by-word palindromes, featured in my July 2025 Newsletter.​ 

   “Firefly Palindrome” celebrates the lightning bugs that fill the evening skies in summer and reads the same forwards and backwards (word by word):  “Fairy Light Shine Bright Shine Light Fairy.”

   My second word-by-word palindrome poem, “Lament,” went through several iterations; the first draft included the words “fluid heartbeat.”  Here's the final version from the newsletter:

    These two simple mirror poems lack the impact of the complex palindrome poems opening this blog, but they gave me a sense of the construction process.
    I wondered if I could construct a block poem with a simpler structure than a full 29x29 grid of Su Hui's “Star Gauge,” and decided to try a 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe-style format.  Like the game, the poems can be read forward and backward vertically, horizontally, or on the corner diagonals.  They’re not as elegant as a freestyle poem, but aren’t entirely nonsensical either:

    Start in any cell reading up/down, forward/backward, or diagonally to create three-word poems:
    Fast spring light. 
    Fast dusk dark. 
    Fast now slow.
​    Slow now fast. 
    Slow autumn dark.
​    Slow Dawn Light.

Eight-word poems can also be constructed by reading the periphery forwards or backwards:

Fast spring light,
 dawn, slow, autumn,
 dark dusk~

Dusk-dark autumn, 
   slow  .  .  .  dawn  .  .  . light
   spring fast--

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    I discovered the box poems needed a central pivot word to function: “now” for the poem “Mutable,” and “into” for the following poem, “Moonflower,” which uses words that can be either a noun or a verb depending on context:

    Vertical, horizontal or diagonal three-word poems (forwards and backwards) include: 
    Whisper moon dance.
    Whisper into bloom. 
    Bloom flower charm. 
​    Shadow into cloud.
    Dance into charm. 
    Charm into dance.

The eight-word periphery poems might read:

Moon whisper cloud;
Charm flower--
  bloom shadow dance~ 

Bloom flower charm: 
  cloud whisper .  .  .
  moon dance (shadow).

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    Finally, I wanted to try a box poem with palindrome words and simple phrases (that read the same forwards and backwards).  This time I used a palindrome (never ever) as the pivot word.
    Again, three-word poems can be read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally (forwards and backwards): 
    Avid diva never even dumb mud.
​    Eke never even toot.
    Gold log never even lion oil.

Eight-word periphery poems might read:

Avid diva deified lion oil, eke dumb mud.
Dewed gold log—toot!

Gold log dewed dumb mud.
Eke lion oil deified avid-diva toot~

Lion oil, deified avid diva,
Toot gold log, dewed.
Dumb mud .  .  .  Eke!

   I find “Box Poem of Palindromes” the least effective of this group in terms of poetic meaning, though they might work in a children’s book for the nonsensical sounds:  Toot!  Eke!

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    Simple 3x3 box poems are far from the sophisticated 29x29 grid of Su Hui’s embroidered “Star Gauge” poem that can be read in any direction, but they were fun to create. 
​    One of the benefits of this exercise was “thinking” in palindromes—the more I played, the easier it became to sort and shuffle words within the 3x3 grid to get the most effective poetry.  

    This thought process reminded me of a lecture by Steven Caton on the improvised oral poetry tradition of Yemen, where poems are used for political conflict mediation, requiring the poets to speak spontaneously in an intricate meter of short and long syllables.  Like a poetry slam happening in real time, except the tribe’s fate dependent on their poet’s performance.  The poets think and speak in poetry throughout the mediation process.

   I hope you enjoyed this exploration of box poems and palindrome poetry.  Perhaps you’ll be inspired to write a mirror poem of your own  .  .  .  

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Read skillful poetry in You Better Be Lightning and Not a Princess
Read my published poetry: “Singularity Storm,”  “Inanna Eclipsed,”  “I Love the Ball Park,” 
“Summer Amusement,”  “Home from the Wizard’s War,”  “Forest Heart,” and “Night Communion” 
Browse poems from my newsletters

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