Finish

Geof Huth, "snurl," "swurl," "twurl," "u," and "whurl" (10 April 2017)

Deadline poetry is a danger to the human spirit, yet I encourage people to write poems one word in length every day for the month of April.

The reason for is to promote my kind of poetry and to undermine the other writing months of April (poetry, haiku, novel, whatever) by putatively writing poetry but by merely writing individual words isolated from other words. I do this because it seems easy to write a single poem of one word a day.

Yet the need (let's say, the requirement) to write a pwoermd a day becomes a burden, an impossibility. There are a few reasons for this. The most important is that the fact of the requirement makes a natural act difficult because the natural act of creation is transformed into the unnatural act of being forced (by one's will or outside expectations) to create. Another is that the requirement doesn't allow for rest, so one becomes tired of actively trying to make.

For me, the third is that I make the process progressively difficult every year. This year, I required myself to produce tend pwoermds or pwoermdbased pieces of writing (such as this essay) a day--one for each year of International Pwoermd Writing Month. The process of complying with the requirement has become complex enough for me create a checklist to make sure I create each pwoermd I am forcing myself to make.

So creativity becomes struggle becomes burden.

Yet there is some advantage to this process. Inspiration can be forced, and inspiration (even in small doses) can make one's day. So I surprised myself today with a few pwoermds (especially visual ones) that I actually like.

Maybe none is good enough, but there are, at least, enough of them, enough to allow me to sleep.

pw(o'er)md