Fashion

Geof Huth, "calme" (14 April 2017)

Even an activity as small (in so many ways) as the creation of pwoermds is controlled by fashions. One pwoermdist finds a new way to make such a poem, and the rest of us start experimenting with that technique.

My overall technique is to try to do everything possible all at once, thus totally accepting and totally abolishing the vagaries of fashion as I move through various modes.

But, in the end, we are all just who we are. We make in our own particular ways, and we changes via those same constraints. Yet there is something bigger than us (not quite a movement), maybe just the practice of a practice, that joins us together in this odd pursuit to make a tiny poem.

One fashion in the western world is to measure the least and most of everything. The heaviest man, the shortest person; the winningest coach, the rejectedest writer. But I have yet to see the Guinness Book of World Records to recognize that the shortest poem (a four-legged m by Aram Saroyan) is actually a pwoermd: a one-word poem, though the poem is nothing but a letter enhanced.

I might, after a fashion, quibble with their choice, since I'd claim this (I think, quite successful) pwoermd of mine is actually the world's shortest poem:

Ï

I mean, mine is three legs shorter than Aram's.

pw(o'er)md