Wordless One-Word Poems

Karri Kokko, Untitled Vispwoermd (April 2015)

Sometimes a poem that is a word long has no word in it at all.

Sometimes writing isn't readable.

Sometimes a word looks but doesn't speak.

Karri Kokko, the King of Finnish pwoermdy, and one of the kings of English pwoermdy, has been writing pwoermds this month in a single line, pwoermds about handwriting and loops, pwoermds about irregular structures, pwoermds about unbroken lines.

What makes these pwoermds is that they do not open a space between any of the inexact and ambiguous characters. Each written object is a single word.

But the word is unknowable, more than cryptic, not quite here, but not yet ready to go.

Karri Kokko, Untitled Vispwoermd (April 2015)

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huth

Last year, at the very end of April, in Manchester, England, my friend Karri Kokko gave me a card with a simple typewritten pwoermd on it, a pwoermd that demonstrated both Karri's command of English and his extreme ability to pun (both good things). In this pwoermd, a gift to me, I am the hu^th item in a sequence, though it is impossible to tell if that ordinal number falls at the end or the beginning of that conceptual list of things. This is one of my favorite pwoermds, and of course one of the most personal to me.

 

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mespellings

The incomparable Karri Kokko—a Finnish poet and probably the best punner I've ever known, and that is while working in English, a second or third language for him (I'm not sure if his Swedish preceded or followed his English)—has, just now, sent me a note (via Facebook) entitled "mespellings," which is an interesting now about the art of pwoermdy and its possible effect on real life:

An observation: Putting a lot of time and effort into coining pwoermds--ofttimes by deliberate distortion of common utterances--makes one, strangely enough, hesitant or unsure of the correct spellings in one's everyday vocabulary.

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Eine Kleine Accomplishment

The month of April ends today, and with it ends the first NaPwoWriMo (National Pwoermd Writing Month). My contributions to the month ended up being 45 pwoermds, 50% more than required by the NaPwoWriMo coordinating body (my consciousness).

The other participants were Karri Kokko, who repurposed his existing pwoermd blog, Sanaruno, into a reason to declare this month InterNaPwoWriMo (and to write a little more frequently he poems in English instead of Finnish); and Matthew Lafferty, who similarly repurposed his own M'log into a site for a little pwoermd-making and who remains five shy of his goal of thirty with ninety minutes to go. (We'll let him finish later if he wishes.)

All in all, a hugely successful first year, since I never expected anyone else to join in at all.

I assume this blog will lie dormant now for a year, but for this month it kept making me think how to fashion an individual word into its own poem, which is the status every word deserves.

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Why Not InterNaPwoWriMo?

Of course, some ideas are so obvious as to escape notice. Why are all of our writing months (for novels, for poems, for pwoermds) focused entirely on the United States of America? Why don't we try for a little international brotherhood and encourage, simply, anyone anywhere to participate?

It seems to me that the goals of such months is to encourage creativity, so why put a drag on that creativity by restricting it to a slim sliver of humanity? (Especially since even a slimmer sliver of that body of humanity will ever participate.)

But how did I come to this realization myself? Only when my friend Karri Kokko (a Finn) sent me a note saying, "Taking part in (Na)PwoWriMo, though, is a bit late for me. I have plenty to do trying to come up with one 'normal' poem per day."

To be fair to myself, I opened the call up to all poets, noting no geopolitical boundaries—"Poets of South Ossetia, please participate"—but the "National" in the title does suggest my nation.

So, from now on, the International Pwoermd Writing Month is the International Pwoermd Writing Month (InterNaPwoWriMo), though I'm not going to bother to change the name or URL of this blog just yet.

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