Questions and Answers

: Three hundred and sixty two thousand, eight hundred and eighty poems. These permutation poems were created by acclaimed art historian and poet, John White CBE, over half a century ago. They exist physically as a hand-carved box. Like puzzles, the lines of each can be rearranged and placed in any order giving hundreds of millions of possible unique poems that take on new meanings with each arrangement.

This website was made by Jess Mae to share the joy of the ‘poetry box’ with a wider audience for the first time since its creation. Click the titles to automatically generate random permutations or drag and rearrange individual lines to manually explore the virtually limitless combinations.