Monday, April 20, 2015
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Announcing 1
I have spent my weekend organizing my supplies. I hold onto all kinds of paper and objects and tools and pigments under the illusion that I'll someday make something with these things. And maybe I will. I have spent all of International Pwoermd Writing Month so far searching for objects I could use to make object pwoermds.
As I've done that, I've made good use of some interesting objects I've been holding onto, but I've also realized that I had insufficient order to these sometimes naturally disorderly things. I've spent the weekend creating that order and remembering what it was like to be a maker, to make tiny publications and mail them around the world.
So I'm announcing the launch of a small occasionally zine of pwoermds under the title 1. For the first issue, I'll choose work posted on line during InterNaPwoWriMo, and that issue may even come out this month. "May." After April, I'll accept submissions via email at geofhuth@gmail.com. I'll be very picky, and I might turn down 100 pwoermds to find one to use. But I also won't care if you've already published the pwoermd on line previously.
1 will follow the format of my previous zines, which is to say that each issue will be formatted entirely differently. And I will give each poet published in an issue at least two copies of that issue. The print runs will be small, probably no more than fifty, and there may be as few as two pwoermds in some issues. Still, it may prove of interest to those most interested in pwoermds.
For the time being, the zine will be open only to textual pwoermds, ones I can create entirely by hand. That may change, but not immediately.
pw(o'er)md
As I've done that, I've made good use of some interesting objects I've been holding onto, but I've also realized that I had insufficient order to these sometimes naturally disorderly things. I've spent the weekend creating that order and remembering what it was like to be a maker, to make tiny publications and mail them around the world.
So I'm announcing the launch of a small occasionally zine of pwoermds under the title 1. For the first issue, I'll choose work posted on line during InterNaPwoWriMo, and that issue may even come out this month. "May." After April, I'll accept submissions via email at geofhuth@gmail.com. I'll be very picky, and I might turn down 100 pwoermds to find one to use. But I also won't care if you've already published the pwoermd on line previously.
1 will follow the format of my previous zines, which is to say that each issue will be formatted entirely differently. And I will give each poet published in an issue at least two copies of that issue. The print runs will be small, probably no more than fifty, and there may be as few as two pwoermds in some issues. Still, it may prove of interest to those most interested in pwoermds.
For the time being, the zine will be open only to textual pwoermds, ones I can create entirely by hand. That may change, but not immediately.
pw(o'er)md
Response to a Pwoermd from Hâle and/or Gökhan Turhan
she moved prohibiscushily against him
pw(o'er)md
pw(o'er)md
The Antagontheist
There once was an antagontheist who lived a loud life. He would rail against the world around him and its cArNAL excesses. He would urge all men to curb their indirerections and think only thoughts of the ideal and the pure. After years of arguing with nothing and no-one, he met a man with an encyclopoetic mind, one who could respond in return to any word set against him. For years, the two men debated their issues, neither ever changing a letter of their own thoughts. One day, one of the men died and all arguments ended. On that day, both men, the one who had died and the one who had continued to live, became part of the frogrotten, two men forgotten forward into the future, their having been forgotten being the only relic of their existence.
pw(o'er)md
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Friday, April 17, 2015
eyeyeye
In the end, Aram Saroyan is the only pwoermdist. The rest of us are nothing.
He created two well known pwoermds, the two best known:
which is famous for its greatness but also for the controversy it stirred up in the U.S. Congress when it won Aram a few dollars in payment from the U.S. treasurey, and
which is, to me, one of the few perfect pwoermds.
I have spent so much of my life trying to replicate and extend "eyeye" that all I can say is,
I have wasted my life.
pw(o'er)md
He created two well known pwoermds, the two best known:
lighght
which is famous for its greatness but also for the controversy it stirred up in the U.S. Congress when it won Aram a few dollars in payment from the U.S. treasurey, and
eyeye
which is, to me, one of the few perfect pwoermds.
I have spent so much of my life trying to replicate and extend "eyeye" that all I can say is,
I have wasted my life.
pw(o'er)md
Thursday, April 16, 2015
The Theatre of the Outre Othre
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| Suzanne Mercury, Theatout're |
Sometimes, people aren't perceptive enough to see the differences in the smallest things. Not all pwoermdists write alike. None do. Pay attention, and you'll see the differences.
Suzanne Mercury has a few elements to her style. She favors initial capital letters--something quite rare in a pwoermd--she is working with a heavy French influence, and she loves flair, curves, ostentation.
She's made a couple of tiny books of pwoermds, lovely things. I have to buy the second from her now that I've known for a week that it exists. She is a maker of things tangible. She makes books. She puts strings of letters on glass. She looks at them against mirrors.
She makes poems like
Theatout're
which we might translate into English as "all that theater could be."
And when I think about this, I recall a pwoermd I wrote in Cambridge, Massachusetts, years ago, and I think that I would make a different pwoermd, with a different meaning, if I'd had a slip of the inspiration she had for this one, and that mine would be
théâtoutré
and why?
Because every pwoermdist is different. Because even if you work within the space of individual words, you will create something unique.
Because Suzanne, as all of us do, puts her intellectual and esthetic DNA into each of her pwoermds.
We call that "art."
pw(o'er)md
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Take This Word
Take a word, a single word. Imagine it has been created by Michael Helsem, whose mind is a churning word-hoard. Take this word:
You have now finished reading the word. It didn't take you long. It is itself not long. Maybe you are moving on right now. You saw a word, you read it, you understood it at some level: certainly at the level of sound.
But what else?
You see--we will imagine--the word "crypt." You hear the creak from opening the door to that crypt. The sound is in the word; it is all of creaking: quiet, cracking, hard sounds of stone push over and across stone, sharpnesses.
This isn't just a poem about a crypt, though. You see that right?
Read the word out again. Read through it. You read it the first time in a glance. Your eye gulped it in without thinking. You didn't linger. You need to linger. Lingering is what makes the pwoermd. It's not the poet so much as the lingering. And you are the lingerer. At least you're supposed to be.
So linger:
Okay, so you made it through the whole word while paying closer attention. What did you see this time?
Sure. The word has two syllables. That's a start. What else? Yes. It sounds just like another word: cryptic. And it's almost spelled the same.
Right. The word is merely the word "cryptic," with its i replaced by a y.
Not genius? Why do you say that? Don't you understand the meaning of "cryptic"? Difficult to understand, bewildered, coded into secrecy. And the y enhances that.
How? Many ways.
Take how that y changes the visual feel of the word, and gives is some balance. Each y is the third letter in from one of the ends of the word. Two y's at each end; two c's at each end. Somewhere in those letter is the answer to the code.
So now we have the word "cryptic" made more cryptic. But what else has changed?
Yes, the word stands alone, but that's not enough right now. You didn't notice it? Remember that the sound of the word did not change when the y was slipped into the place of the i. But it didn't change when the second change was made:
An h is added to the end of the word. Two spelling changes are wrought upon this word, yet its pronunciation has not changed at all.
But the word has.
The h also balances the word: with it, each syllable of the word has four letters. But is that the only reason for the h?
You're right. "No" is the correct answer, but maybe not an elucidating one. The h is crucial.
The h, totally silent here, give the word an echo of another word. "Triptych." A painting or other visual work arranged in three pieces, three leaves as it were. A kind of evenness, balancedness.
And, yes, the answer here throws us off. The h is the aporia. It is essential to make the word work, but it also undermines the meaning of the word--which was pushing us into a mysterious twoness, but which now has left us with a threeness.
The word this word reaches for cannot be made. The word vacillates between the binary and the trinary.
It cannot stop flickering at us. Its meaning is never secure.
The word retains and extends its cryptic nature.
It is wholly itself and perfect, but being fractured between possible meanings and anything but perfect.
pw(o'er)md
cryptych
You have now finished reading the word. It didn't take you long. It is itself not long. Maybe you are moving on right now. You saw a word, you read it, you understood it at some level: certainly at the level of sound.
But what else?
You see--we will imagine--the word "crypt." You hear the creak from opening the door to that crypt. The sound is in the word; it is all of creaking: quiet, cracking, hard sounds of stone push over and across stone, sharpnesses.
This isn't just a poem about a crypt, though. You see that right?
Read the word out again. Read through it. You read it the first time in a glance. Your eye gulped it in without thinking. You didn't linger. You need to linger. Lingering is what makes the pwoermd. It's not the poet so much as the lingering. And you are the lingerer. At least you're supposed to be.
So linger:
cryptych
Okay, so you made it through the whole word while paying closer attention. What did you see this time?
Sure. The word has two syllables. That's a start. What else? Yes. It sounds just like another word: cryptic. And it's almost spelled the same.
Right. The word is merely the word "cryptic," with its i replaced by a y.
Not genius? Why do you say that? Don't you understand the meaning of "cryptic"? Difficult to understand, bewildered, coded into secrecy. And the y enhances that.
How? Many ways.
Take how that y changes the visual feel of the word, and gives is some balance. Each y is the third letter in from one of the ends of the word. Two y's at each end; two c's at each end. Somewhere in those letter is the answer to the code.
So now we have the word "cryptic" made more cryptic. But what else has changed?
Yes, the word stands alone, but that's not enough right now. You didn't notice it? Remember that the sound of the word did not change when the y was slipped into the place of the i. But it didn't change when the second change was made:
cryptych
An h is added to the end of the word. Two spelling changes are wrought upon this word, yet its pronunciation has not changed at all.
But the word has.
The h also balances the word: with it, each syllable of the word has four letters. But is that the only reason for the h?
You're right. "No" is the correct answer, but maybe not an elucidating one. The h is crucial.
The h, totally silent here, give the word an echo of another word. "Triptych." A painting or other visual work arranged in three pieces, three leaves as it were. A kind of evenness, balancedness.
And, yes, the answer here throws us off. The h is the aporia. It is essential to make the word work, but it also undermines the meaning of the word--which was pushing us into a mysterious twoness, but which now has left us with a threeness.
The word this word reaches for cannot be made. The word vacillates between the binary and the trinary.
It cannot stop flickering at us. Its meaning is never secure.
The word retains and extends its cryptic nature.
It is wholly itself and perfect, but being fractured between possible meanings and anything but perfect.
pw(o'er)md
Response to a Pwoermd by Rose Franken
in anticeptation of the event, he washed his hands time and time again, yet the blood would not all slip away
pw(o'er)md
pw(o'er)md
p@x
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| Empty Box |
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| Bottom Layer: "g:o" |
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| "j're" |
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| "acun" |
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| "ift" |
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| "sk.l" |
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| "?y!" |
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| Top Layer: "v(" |
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| Box Closed: "p@x" |
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| "p@x" Box in a Box |
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| Cover on Box "p@x" Box is In |
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| The First Fifteen Object Poems of the Month in a Box |
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| The Box of Boxes Closed (Fifteen Boxes to Go) |
pw(o'er)md
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
NoTouch
A word can stand alone and mean. It can.
And a word can stand among other words and mean as well. That is also true.
A word can even exist amidst a visual field of color and shape and letters, and still provide us with meaning. This happens. This does happen now.
Catherine Ednie has started down this path this month, with two beautiful visual pwoermds that vacillate between image and word, that give us split words, unknown boundaries, and mistiness and mystery instead of murkiness and madness.
Two pieces, two wide digital canvases, two words, each broken in two.
One is something like "NO T," not quite only one word, but something like a word fractured to give it more meaning. The visual breaking gives us that. But it's not just three letters. Following the T, there are three letters only partially visible. They may read "ONE." The poem may read "NO/TONE," or the poem may be "NO/T/ONE." In the latter case, the word is about there being not one way, not one sound to make from the sequence of letters, not even one clear reading of any sequence possible.
Our you can have before you a word reading "YOU\CH." Once again, tmesis takes center stage by clearing that part of the state, the part between the first three and the last two letters. This break creates two words: the YOU who the poem is talking to and the YOUCH or OUCH the YOU is feeling.
But something else happens. The word TOUCH almost appears. It's not there, but it seems to be there. The TOUCH might cause the YOUCH or might serve as the gentleness opposing the roughness that caused the YOUCH.
For us, the answer to this is less interesting or necessary than the need to consider the question, how any poem is more the thinking about it than the reality of it.
pw(o'er)md
Monday, April 13, 2015
the word
.jpg) |
| Geof Huth, "eucHrism," boxed (13 April 2015) |
I hold onto things for years--small objects I've accumulated, sometimes on walks, usually found, occasionally bought----and sometimes these are objects that have some significance in my life. Yet I save all of these things for a project, some project, some artwork that I imagine the possibility of but never imagine the shape of.
Somehow, I believe in the talisman, I believe in the poem as the object, I believe that art is the word in physical space, the eye held in place so the mind can read it. I can hold onto an object for decades before I find something to do with it one night. Or I can find something one day, and make something new of it that same day. I am not governed by a timeframe. I don't really ever even know what time it is.
Tonight, for some reason, I believed I could make a poem out of the white bowtie I wore at my first holy communion in Oporto, Portugal. I was seven, I believe. It was a tiny FHC with only two other people, a girl younger and shorter than I and another girl older and taller than I. These details might seem unremarkable to you, but to the culture I was from at the time these details were significant. Ours was not merely a tiny first communion at a small chapel at the convent we went to for religious training.
We were the embodiment of the three children who saw the Virgin Mary at Fatima, a shrine in Portugal that I certainly had visited, but probably one that my co-communicants had visited as well. We were Portuguese children. Fatima was more important that communion. It was the evidence of the eternal supernatural in our lives, more so even than the thin papery wafer, the flavor of a scan, laid on our tongue that day of our communion, the only day I ever served as an altar boy.
Later, I became an alter boy, something else.
I've held onto that bowtie for almost fifty years now, almost half a century. I used to keep in in a glass jar with other objects of some significance, real or in-, but for the last few decades it has lain out in plain sight with no reason or purpose, no company to give it meaning.
Only tonight did I make something of it. I thought I could never write on it, but I did tonight. I took a thick leaden pencil, held it in my hand, conjured for minutes, and decided on a word, "euchrism," which I wrote as "euc|H|rism," the H (the only majuscule letter) written on the knot of the tie.
The word combines "eucharist" with "chrism," and the accumulated schmutz of a half century of handling serves as the chrism.
I cannot say this pwoermd, roughhewn and unready, dirty and unsteady, means anything to anyone but me. But we cannot create for strangers; we can only create for ourselves.
We are trapped by our individual imaginations.
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pw(o'er)md
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