Mark Saltveit is the reigning World Palindrome Champion A true renaissance man, he has held jobs from movie location manager to manual laborer to computer programmer He founded and ran a computer training company for 9 years, worked as a barista, office temp and professor of English in China, and writes about football and Taoism Let's also not forget standup comedian, skimboarder, and dad He is responsible for creating and publishing the
Palindromist Magazine and the Skeleton Close website Sources say he Debate: go nab Utah's art?
Mark Saltveit, editor of THE
PALINDROMIST journal, and Vince Clemente, a documentary film maker, sent me information about a wonderful new project they are working on, a project that will raise the back-and-forth linguistic magic of palindromes to greater heights than ever.
Though the palindromic phrase goldenrod-adorned log was probably known to wordplayers of the late 19th century, we moderns can go them one better with elaborations of goldenrod-adorned logologists: A drunken
palindromist at a logologists' convention loudly announces his decision to retire for the evening:
I also subscribed to (or exchanged Word Ways for) journals such as Logophile, Verbatim, Maledicta, Cryptologia, Semagames (a Catalan journal of palindromy), Wordsworth, and The
Palindromist. I found many out-of-print books in used bookstores, and my collection was substantially augmented by review copies sent me by various publishers.
But since analogy is slippery, the
palindromist often placed exact similitudes or exact dissimilitudes at appropriate spots to assure seekers that they were on the right track, because he wanted them to succeed in finding the central place, especially when this was a religious exercise
Also Cyrillic script provides almost exact sound-to-symbol representation, which is not the case for some other Slavic languages using Latin script, were dygraphs representing single phonemes often form stumbling blocks for a
palindromist. The best Ukrainian writers viewed palindrome as a vehicle to travel into sublime linguistic levels, and, quoting M.
This has been confirmed by Mark Saltveit, '
Palindromist' magazine and website, who has been researching the origins of palindromes for around 20 years.
This type of "palindroming by pairs" was introduced to me by
palindromist poet Anthony Etherin.
Whether or not it is correct to call Howard Bergerson the world's first impressionist
palindromist, the interesting question remains of just what it is that makes his palindromic poetry so immediately identifiable.