mappletrey

bibliobilirubbinical

poempty

exhustion

exaust

xunt

The Pwoermds of Rachel Defay-Liautard

Rachel Defay-Liautard has created a clutch of pwoermds for International Pwoermd Writing Month and has asked me to post them, so here they are. They are interestingly strange. A couple are simple portmanteaux, but most are strange little objects of disturbing and insistent beauty.

minicept

compôlepostition

dbldbldbldbl-chiasmeïos

hugly-dfuckling

blogastard

gonetocroatanist

nonamaddic

pw(o'er)md

teeeeth

earthquache

s/ight

What Grows out of Death

It seems that Easter—a reworked pagan holiday celebrating the advent of spring, and thus, symbolically, about birth and growing, and so also about rebirth and rising from the dead, as if the dead, not death, were something to rise from—seems like to remember what would have been one of the greatest pwoermds of all times, if it were only isolated as a single word instead of buried within the riptide of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: cropse.

The Wake is filled with thousands of words that could be great pwoermds, so maybe I should collect the best of these into a book sometime and use it to show the power of pwoermds and how they can stand well on their own. Yet one of the best remains "cropse," which is a reworking of "corpse" into "crops," a reworking of death into growing, and clearly an Easter poem, which I celebrate with this brief essay, headed by a faux-liturgical text that takes us through all the spellings "resurrection" has had in English.

Happy International Pwoermd Writing Month.

pw(o′er)md

dee(pe)rwards

lionloin

splanterings

fallus

enwrapture

foetish

transjaculation

illusive