A Magazine, a Plan, a Contest — Symmys!

Awards season isn’t over quite yet. On Sunday the winners of the first annual Symmys awards, for outstanding palindrome achievement, will be announced in Portland, Ore. The name of the awards is a palindrome, of course, and so is the date on which they’re being handed out: March 10, or 3/10/2013.

The finalists in four categories are impressive, even if they don’t approach the elegance and coherence of arguably the most famous palindrome: “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” These embrace the more nonsensical side of the art form, as in these finalists in the short palindrome category: “But as God lived to bore us silly, did a mad idyll issue robot devil-dogs a tub” And, “I made Rihanna hirsute, familiar, frail: I’m a fetus Rihanna hired, am I”

A higher grade of poetry is available in the word unit category, in which only the full words, not the letters, have to work forwards and backwards. An example: “You swallow pills for anious days and nights, and days, anxious for pills, swallow you.”

The awards are organized by the Palindromist Magazine, which bills itself as “the world’s leading palindrome periodical,” in case you’re looking to narrow your subscription choices.

The panel of judges includes the parodist Weird Al Yankovic (the lyrics of his song “Bob” are all palindromes, like “we panic in a pew”); the comedian Demetri Martin; John Flansburgh of the band They Might Be Giants; and Will Shortz, The New York Times’s crossword editor.