My article investigates the use of wordplay in contemporary poetry, and considers the possibilities of serious wordplay, especially in the context of experimental poetics. The term wordplay refers here not only to puns, as paronomasia (a play on words which sound alike), but also to such letter-based wordplays as palindrome, anagram, spoonerism, and paragram. Unlike puns, these can be seen also as constraints in the way the term has been used in the parlance of OuLiPo, the French group concentrating in rules and structural methods of poetry. Besides this Oulipian context of repeatable rules or procedures, the wordplay is shortly scrutinized from the viewpoints of play, poetic intention or communication, and literary marginal. Typological groupings of the phenomenon are considered, before going into the gist of the article: readings of texts that use anagrams and spoonerisms in literary, poetic, serious (i.e., non-humorous) setting. I argue that anagrams and spoonerisms share structural, methodical and poetical similarities, which separate them from palindrome, paragram, and pun. They both utilize source texts and apply material permutation systematically to the units of verbal manifestations, namely letters or syllables. In the readings I trace the "limited autonomy” of language, the common effect of wordplay: the feeling that language itself has something to say, and, eventually, its connection to the writer's role in the unforeseeable emergency of wordplays.