Visual poetry

And then there's Ed Baker,

It is important to collect these writers because, as has been the case over and over in the history of literature, the best and most innovative writing, the writing that advances the art and that in the future becomes the classic and defining work of a period, is almost always the work of outsiders. (Dr. John M. Bennett, Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State U.)

                                                                         all

                                                                         is
                                                                         just

                                                                         so

                                                                         let

                                                                         it
                                                                             (Ed Baker, from G oo d night)

Part 1

Ed Baker, Bob Grumman, Jeremy Seligson and all the contemporary practitioners of what I call a more classical visual poetry, have had to share the stage with Vispo for at least two decades now ('Vispo' being shorthand for a computer-generated type of  work that can be easily interchangeable with all (or any) of its other kinetic, aural and  textual hybrids). Though Baker himself resists any labeling, saying to me in an email that "as for me I reside in the I-just-don't-no" school The Nopo school!" I can't help feeling there are significant differences, if only one. And I'm inclined to believe that one lies in a growing discrepancy, fuelled solely by Internet technology, between the way visual art's produced and its genre status. Perhaps I'm a little dismayed also at how unevenly the two are being presented, visual poetry almost becoming synonymous with Vispo (which it certainly isn't).

I choose to speak of genre status as meaning primarily textual production and accompanying visual effects, two essential components of every single artifact. Visual poetry today, both the digital and traditional kinds, combine both in complementary and also more interestingly contrastive ways. With the result that two types of visual poetry seem to occupy the same writing space. While 'Vispo' can be stated in purely technical terms (media poetry and fiction"born to pixels rather than the page", as Robert Kendall says of his work in Word Circuits), traditional visual poetry (in my view) has to restrict itself to a purely verbal (and even pictorial) representation of technique & the classical forms on which it relies. Don Wentworth's Issa's Untidy Hut: The Poetry Blog for Lilliput Review is an example of an online forum for haiku-based poetics.Any discussion, therefore, of the differences between Vispo and classical visual poetry amounts to an understanding of what's always been a technology and culture bifurcation at work in every artistic production.

What's at stake (in my view) is the changing form & content of visual poetics itself as a result of Vispo. And whether, indeed, older models haven't been already relegated to an outmoded "bastarda gothic" in light of a computer-generated language of pure interactivity. Perhaps the same sort of fundamentally transformed notion of  literacy that took place after Gutenberg. Digital technology has only magnified the split between, on the one hand, original haiku-inspired art and accompanying visual representations of the surrounding world (perhaps a form more properly akin to 'Haiga'), with technology comprising of brush- or pen-strokes on a page, calligraphy, experimental typographic designs or even simple spacing. And, on the other, a text wholly derived from multimedia software whose themes & images, produced primarily by poet-technicians intent on exploiting all the possible applications of Web 2.0, say as much about production techniques as the nature of literary form itself.  The former oftentimes grossly overshadowing the latter. Jim Rosenberg's Poetries, a showcase of interactive & hypertextual ingenuity, is a case in point.

Perhaps nothing has better illustrated this growing technique and artistic integrity dissonance ("dissemblance" is a term Jacques Rancière might have used ) than the recent online controversy over the way editors Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier formatted the text of Larry Eigner's poetry in their The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Stanford, 2010). Blogger Steven Fama's made the impassioned plea for preserving the integrity of original text at all costs, enjoining editors never to "change the way the poems look on the page, in a way that greatly mars the poetry." He seems to have intuited a great loss to textual integrity in editorial decisions that are not responsive perhaps to the type of visual and typographic settings found on an Eigner page.

I wonder if the same sorts of concerns couldn't be voiced about traditional visual poetry? Fama's perhaps sounded a warning to those who would subordinate artistry to means of production. One we'd be wise to hear. Has there been, in other words, a tendency to conflate techniques of artistic production with art itself, a process abetted by the frenetic deployment of  a "hyper-mediatic type of work" (Rancière)? In short, if there are innovators empowered by their technological tools, then who are the cultural gatekeepers? Who are the real predecessors of Vispo whose textual pristineness has been compromised by interactive art ? A few (oftimes unknown) sources of much of what's empowered contemporary Vispo can perhaps be cited, primary among them Henri Michaux, particularly his influential Darkness Moves,  Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, inspiration for Pound's ideogrammatic style, and even the female avant-gardists Hannah Höch and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven from whom Baker says unequivocally the "Dada Guys...stole lots of 'stuff' "'.

I'm  tempted to separate Baker, Grumman and certainly even Michaux and the above-named sources from the digital work of contemporary Vispo artists like Geof Huth, Jim Andrews, Gary Barwin. But that would be to make things look too neatly compartmentalized, causing us to overlook the necessary overlaps that always do exist between tradition and innovation. Bob Grumman, for example, has recently told me (in email correspondence) that Geof Huth, among the most active practitioners of interactive poetics, could be characterized as both a "pen-master-a calligrapher, in fact" and a "very digital" artist. John Martone, owner of  tel-let, a site for a more traditional minimalist writing, can himself alternate gracefully between almost lyrical "dogwood & honeysuckle" verses and more contemporary "visual texts & essays". A careful (and sympathetic) reading of contemporary visual poetry must obviously resist simplistic categorizations and see it as a confluence of many interesting contrastive elements.

Baker's Things Just Come Through (Red Ochre Press, 2005) throws into relief the artistry of the classical style as against its more current digital formats: here technique and artifact result in poetry that's attributable directly to calligraphy, collage art and minimalist writing style. Carl Rakosi, looking at Baker's 1974 work The City, remarked on its "ability to express both vast and complex meanings in a few words" (from Baker-Rakosi mail correspondence reprinted with permission), a literary ideal to which Baker has remained faithful all his life. Dedicated to Cid Corman and offering "special thanks" to HaChungJeanne, Baker's 2005 work is one that homages tradition, friendship & visual artistry.The Korean Spring Orchid is its subtitle and centerpiece: it is also his friend Sophie Song , with whom Ed wrote the poem's English and Korean versions. A splendid work of artisinal craft and inspiration that issues out of  literary & linguistic disciplines.

                                                     Dedication to Cid Corman

Things Just Come Through could have been a handmade product: a delicate artifact, wispy & light, to be prized for its aesthetic and textural features. I own another edition that has the feel of a Japanese sewn wrap. Means of production and work (in limited editions) are barely distinguishable. Here's work not made to be retrieved like a Web 2.0 hypertext poem (even when it appears online) but offered as a model for imitation. And it assumes (as all cultural traditions do) a certain physical initiation into the practice and theory of finely illustrated poetry, making it both hand-crafted and visual work.

As for methodology, Baker's told me the translating and pen-work always followed the drawings and poems in English: the whole never to be seen as a work of translation only. Baker's book is visual literacy par excellence that can't, despite its accessibility, rely on any romanticized  "empathetic" qualities of pre-literate eras (as Ong likes to characterize them). The work is classical and spontaneous, each poem elusive and mysterious as a breath; and the poet, a craftsman indebted to contemporary masters Soetsu Yanagi (potter and art collector), Kazuaki Tanahashi (calligrapher)  and Hidetaka Ohno (artist).

                                                  "Korean Flower" poem & calligraphy

Baker has recently celebrated  Jeremy Seligson's new book Cherry Blossoms, his art & verse on the cover page, calling it "simple, clean, precise", & visible proof that "less is more". The praise is significant. Baker's used the "less is more" language in discussions with me about the work of colleagues & mentors like John Martone,John Perlman and Cid Corman, saying (in his impish way), "I do think that [they] have come to the same "less is more" attitude that Cid embraced INDEPENDENT of Cid maybe parallel to (?) [for] nobody writes/does as/what John M or Cid or me does-did-doing". And what they do is collegial, eclectic and disciplined. And what binds this community of visual artists together is adherence to a principle of exact, finely-crafted verbal economy that's maybe due (at least in the case of Grumman and Baker) to the restrictions of early xerox and mimeo technology as well as an interest in mathematics and electronic technology.

The traditional visual poet means something uniquely different. But what?  A question that, of course, can't make sense as long as there's the problem of just what to call it when it appears. Let's say it's art that's indistinguishable from work (or its own productive means), almost hostilely averse to names. Baker's Hexapoems, for example, is an I-Ching inspired work in which a hexapoem (a term Baker coined) refers to a  "six-line-poem using chance operationings", but it's a technique which he dropped in 1973. Though Grumman and Huth have referred to Ed's work as visual haiku ("visku") or even calligrams (after Apollinaire), Ed's also refused to call even his haiku-like work haiku at all, preferring to use a term like "shorties" instead.

He's quipped already about his own allegiances to the "Nopo" school, clearly showing his antipathy towards literary movements and the credentialed set in general: "just remember... nothing much ever happens in a crowd... nothing!"Beginning his career at the "same mimeo xerox typewriter place" as Grumman, (& familiar already with "oscilloscope images and working Sinusoidal Wave stuff" of his electronic technology training), he's acutely aware of production techniques and yet he also derides the fondness of contemporary avants for all things digital . When he works he's not afraid to get his hands dirty, maker not just of poems but of pottery,calligraphy, water colors and sculpture.Geof Huth has given a wonderfully detailed description of the art studio that is Ed Baker's entire home, from yard to front porch.

What is the effect on us of a Baker visual poem (or water color, sculpture, artifact)? Are there any points of intersection with Vispo at all? In his blog article about Baker, Huth makes the following important observation about the man's poetics, & perhaps about all significant artistic expression:

Early on in our conversation, Ed said something I had to write down: “Everything comes out of silence and goes back into silence.” The two nothingnesses: the time before life, the time after death. And we live between them, so, as we do, we try to make something of that time, we try to make. And that is what Ed does. He makes.

It is perhaps for this reason that Baker can't belong to any noisy literary crowds: the essence of creativity residing in the interregnum between  "two nothingnesses" . There can't be for him any sign-systems (such as reviewers like me have to use) to get in the way. If we replace language of the image by that of the visual, we might say, with  Jacques Rancière, Baker's creations reveal a "double poetics of the image as a cipher of a history written in visible forms and as obtuse reality, impeding meaning and history" (The Future of the Image, 11-12). Meaning a Baker poem, though easily placed within a certain literary American tradition (one that, in my view, follows in a line of descent from Oppen, Corman and Creeley), to be catalogued & explained, is primarily and unmistakably an artifact to be made and seen: primarily a "naked, non-signifying presence"(Rancière, 14) that beggars analytic description.

And seen and felt and even heard it certainly must be. Reviewer Joey Madia talks of the "house-building/carpentry" metaphors in Baker's Restoration Poems: "The sound of hammer on nail, of plane on plank and the smell of the wood and the land dress the words, which are sparse and carefully chosen." The bare bones bonze at work in a house of art. All the "cut-price mis-mixed paints" of Baker's art, the "found materials, with pieces of wood in intriguing shapes, with rocks, with pieces of material culture left behind as if trash" (as Huth says) are both the media and very tropes of his language.

The hypertext poem

When world gets word: & some principles of hypertext poetry

"For enlightenment, therefore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into." (Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 53)

How far from the poem's lyrical heart we have finally strayed is perhaps best seen in hypertext poetry. Not that interactive texts haven't been around nor that even authors from the past (such as Sterne, Joyce, Becket) haven't already anticipated significant aspects of the nonlinear form. The poetic heart's always taken a beating, even in print. At least since Robert Coover, Michael Joyce, Deena Larsen, considered its most famous practitioners, began working in interactive fiction since the late 80s, it's almost become commonplace to think of hypertext (and hypermedia) as a radical reworking of the traditional linear, topical text along the lines of such seminal works as, say, Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story.

While not exactly spelling the death of the author or destroying narrative homogeneity altogether, certainly a different rhetorical writing space has emerged from this changing author and reader relationship: as Jay David Bolter says in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print, "hypertext authors have set about refashioning the rhetoric of the linear plot, calling into the question the notion that fiction should narrate events in a single, clear order." (129) Language is beginning to image a new world, and it's here, at this word and world gathering facilitated by electronic reading & writing, I locate the "hypertext". Tim Berners-Lee ,inventor of the World Wide Web, has recently spoken, for example, of a need for huge stores of Web data to be"reachable and manageable by Semantic Web tools." Words, images, graphics, recombined in an array of almost limitless trajectories, offer a textual site where the reader can materially interact with the world in a way that's considered only metaphorically possible in the traditional book. Lately even book authors, like David Shields, have imitated the "recombinant or appropriation" techniques of Internet composition to form narratives that comprise solely of materials purposely excerpted from other authors.

If hypertext replaces pen-on-paper technology, poetry's also been radically redefined (or more properly reset) so that our understanding of its scope and limits has had to accommodate the emergence of new radical verse styles such as flarf, sampling, concrete, kinetic & "machine modulated" and architextural poetry etc., styles that seem to flourish in a uniquely sympathetic digitized writing environment. Visual poet Geof Huth has told me, in a recent email correspondence, that interactive poetry as working exclusively within HTML is somewhat outmoded. It's legitimate to speak rather of hybrid types, using 'interactivity' in even broader ways than envisaged by hypertext pioneers (See Chapter 7, "Interactive Fiction" in Writing Space). I'll define "hypertext poetry" then as a type of interactive text either inspired by or harvesting all the resources of Internet technology or software design for e-writing. I've meshed my definition with that of Ted Nelson who as early as 1965 spoke of it simply as "non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen." (Cited in Alex Wright" Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, 208). The most radical word and world interface conceivable.

Kenneth Goldsmith in a recent Poetry Foundation article entitled "Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo" has given what I consider a more contemporary characterization of the dolce stil novo of Web 2.0 interactive writing. The new style, as he says, is one that's been "grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry." If Goldsmith is correct and poetry's become the offspring of virtual language, the very legitimacy and propriety of literary work may have been called into question. Perhaps hypertext is a kind of generic term for any radical rethinking of the origins & technique of poetry writing, one that is, among other things, no respecter of tradition or authorial privilege.

As far as trends go this one seems destined to feed on the forces conspiring to make the printed book extinct. If iPad and Kindle, for example,are replacing the book, it's because "The world, and the future,"as  Internet Evolution writer Daniel W. Rasmus says, "are messy places, however, and something as big as the Internet deserves a deep understanding of the forces at play and the wide range of ways those forces could unfold under differing social, technological, economic, and political situations." Rasmus even going so far as to speak of virtual reality as a realm of "perfect prescience". Internet is seen as a nursery in which explosive forces of "free-floating language" collide randomly and with design to form new poetic galaxies, and poetry innovators as prescient language engineers reconfiguring the abc's of writing. And, of course, Christian Bök speaks of " a poet in the xenotext experiment [who] might become a breed of technician working in a linguistic laboratory." (from The Xenotext Experiment)

But what about poetry as a verbal interactive medium: is it  traditional writing set to new hypertextual (and hypermediated) conditions or a purely avant-garde creation? Is hypertext poetry just an anomaly of a burgeoning electronic communications phenomenon? I think the fairest answer is that interactive poetry (as defined above) is as messy as the world of technology it comes from, and just as circuitous, flexible and experimental. Poet, rather than circumscribing textual space, allows the reader to remake the world through the computer's oftentimes playfully interactive matrices: each poem becoming a world for not just two but potentially limitless number of participants who can literally change the poem as they read (Again Chapter 7, in Writing Space). Poetry's a "messy" world where poet can make claims to a special digitized type of "prescience", and this by virtue of a Web 2.0 language that's processual, spontaneous & ubiquitous to the umpteenth degree.

As I've been attempting to show, poetry and the world mirror each other. Art is a function of epistemology. Poetry as a distinctive type of e-writing reflects changes not just in the way we see & write external reality: the hypertext seems to have given us a different world altogether. Words, sound, and images, both hypertext and hypermedia form the new materials of interactive poetry, and a word and world interaction in which language resolves into a purely visual, iconic, and "programmable" system. Poets (like Huth, Goldsmith) and technical writers (like Tim Berners-Lee, Rasmus), both dealing in first principles or the basic algorithms from which their work arises, can almost speak the same language: media and means of expressions now practically indistinguishable. The Internet is envisaged as a kind of Lockean or Lucretian inquiry into the nature of language and reality but one where artistic work arises as a uniquely interactive collaboration. What are the 'first principles' of this new interactive art?

Interactive poetry may begin with the very smallest particles (after George Brecht and "Fluxus"): letters certainly but even parts of letters themselves.Principle 1 is that 'fragments' have the ability to produce significant artistic forms. In software such as Type is Art: An Interactive Exploration of theTypographic Form, aptly called an "interactive art project", poets, writers, graphics artists rearrange bits of letterforms that have already been (I assume very arbitrarily) classified by name and shape: for example, Ear is the character name for " the small stroke projecting from the top of the lowercase g". Language materials, the traditional thoughts & emotions of lyrical poetry, are actively reconfigured as pictographic representations of a world that, fragmented to begin with, the poet writes "by dragging, scaling and rotating" a given system of "21 distinct parts" variously extracted from the alphabet. Even traditional Lettristes poetics can be easily outdone now that letter shards have been defragmented on the computer screen. A technique that seems collagist to the point almost of being iconoclastic.

And out of the lettered fragments of all potential artistic work comes Principle 2: the creation of  networks of multiple artistic forms, replacing specialization & traditional elitist views of creativity with radical open-endedness. Word Circuits is an example of such a hypertext site designed "for poetry and fiction born to pixels rather than the page--writing that's digital down to its bones",showcasing new media fiction and poetry, hypertext fiction and poetry, and even a cybertext poetry. Its purpose, in the words of site director Robert Kendall, is to exploit all of the non-print avenues for innovative digital means of artistic expression allowable on Web 2.0:

This is a watering hole for new media poetry and fiction--indigenously electronic work that couldn't be realized in print. Hypertext is the mainstay here, but we also deal in more exotic forms of cybertext, which exploit such innovations as text-generating algorithms or animated text that moves and mutates on the screen. Welcome to the world of hypertextual, interactive, self-generating, kinetic, and multimedia poetry and fiction.

 Xylo, for instance, an animated poem featured in the Word Circuits Gallery, is a fully active multimedia poem using Flash technology. It's a kinetic, visual and aural panoply of moving letters and verse lines in which lines of text seem to spring out of  flashing letters, the poem gradually taking shape in each of the screen's quadrants. Letters change colour and shape, and move erratically over the entire textual space. For most of the hypertertext presentation the eye looks through what appears to be a roving rifle scope as if letters were being targeted (as in a video game). And since the poem itself at the end slowly fades & disappears, it's described in the Gallery as a "fleeting, evanescent text...[that] examines the nature of temporality." If the roving eye acts as cross-hairs, the act of creation is doomed to die the moment it's born, an interpretation consistent with a multimedia format. Interestingly, too, its Greek derivative xylo, used to form compound words to mean any wooden object, suggests the word xylon that, in a biblical context, may imply a wooden implement of torture. Now the reader considers the interesting way the broken crossbeams intersect the circle, both vertically and horizontally, to form a type of cross.

Interactive technology is polyvocal, heterogeneous and complex in general and possesses an inherent tendency to change the world and word relationship from which it began into an almost exclusively language and image one. Which transmogrification of the world of reality into images only lies at the core of Principle 3. The supremacy of the visual at the expense of a vanishing outer reality.  But image must be understood here in an important twofold sense (following  Jacques Rancière's The Future of the Image, pp. 6-7): the image as faint copy of its original in the world and image as the "interplay" of significant artistic forms, the sum of which is to disorient the perceiver or reassemble perceptual fields into pure artistic effects. Rancière explains the distinction as follows:

In the first place, the images of art are, as such, dissemblances. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding. (7)

 If we look at Jim Andrews's Vispo, for example, we see a perfect illustration of the tendency of interactive art to offer "a relationship between the sayable and the visible", the "visible" taken here as almost a metaphor for the radical heterogeneity of artistic representation on the Web. Visual poetry (Vispo) is a sort of umbrella term for all the ways multimedia allow us to look out on a radically new world of artistic work made possible by Internet technology: the range of visual 'seeing' extending from standard visual and sound poetry to "db Cinema ("interactive painterly cinema for the internet"), to interactive audio, visual music, and to animisms and pure langu(im)age creations.

the pwoermd

Geof Huth's ntst: analysis and appreciation

Again, a gift of poetry from American visual, textual, aural and digital poet Geof Huth. I've just received a review copy of ntst: in the words of the PRESS RELEASE (3/3/10) by publisher if p then q, a collection of " 750 of Geof Huth's pwoermds; one word poems, visual plays, portmanteaus, abbreviations and cuts of regular words." The poet is introduced as writing in a tradition dating from 60s minimalist style of Aram Saroyan; and, even more interestingly, the poetry described as showing " the great maximalism of minimalism", by which he means the pwoermd gives both an "inside and outside" configuration. The essential 'paradox' of poetry in the fewest possible words: indeed, in the stand-alone word itself (as in the case of Huth).

Editor James Davies even offers a sort of literary framework within which to analyze (& appreciate) the poetry publications of if p then q, offering the public work that's "cutting edge" and clearly faithful to a "three tier" vision of writing to which the reader will hopefully be drawn at some point in interpretation. I'd like to offer a reading and appreciation of the one-word pwoermd in terms of 'the most in the least' paradox. And since it offers an outline suitable to my own reading of Huth's work, I will cite the publisher's "three tier model" in full:

• The first level is that the reader simply likes the poem (this could be that it works on a relatively simplistic, accessible level in part or in the whole) or that the work is aesthetically interesting - a comparison here is the minimalists.
• The second level of the work is that a reader may want to (is encouraged to ) 'dig' deeper and see the ideas through, without any need of specialist background knowledge - poetry or otherwise.
• The third level is that of a reader, who does have some prior knowledge to something contextual, allowing them an understanding of content or form. The audience who has gone through level one and two is prepared to research (because it's gone through level one and two).

In an earlier work of Huth's entitled &² an/thology of pwoermds, Huth himself justifies the one-word poem, eager to dispel the myth that writing style can be judged by virtue of size alone ("Why One Word is Enough: A"). There are, in Huth's estimation, three ways a pwoermd (however exiguous it looks) can bristle with meaning: as (i) a "single unmodified traditional word" relying on visual impact (tundra by Cor van den Heuvel), (ii) variations on a "the DNA of an original source word" ( groww by bpNichol), and (iii) a combination "of two or more words" ( ouzelfinesse by Emily Romano). Presumably all three types appear in ntst (though I haven't looked closely enough to say with certainty). If there is a minimalist credo here it's that language has the wherewithal to communicate in "the smallest of orts" ( & ) even a single letter sufficing to bear significant meaning.

If the pwoermd displays both "inside and outside", offering variations on a primary one-word form, perhaps it might also be true to call its inside "the tensions [that] exist within each word", as Huth also says in the introduction ( A) and the outside, "the page" or "garden" (after Ian Hamilton Finlay). Keeping the minimalist format as consonant as possible with the traditional expectations of poetry. "We can believe," according to Huth, "pwoermds are clearly works of art when we see they function just as traditional poems do." (O) It looks as if the pwoermd, very much a traditional poem, must also promote clearly defined etymological, typographical and visual purposes. The "great maximalism of minimalism" principle at work here.

I will randomly select a single page from ntst, and provide for the first three pwoermds I see a sort of traditional poetic interpretation (& appreciation). For each an analysis in terms of the way both individual pwoermd and any specific level of reading (as per Davies's "three tier model") can parlay into significant literary content. Reading poetry is here, I believe, as much aesthetics as poetics, relying on good literary instincts and a willingness, at the same time, to let each offering work on the eye unmediated by theory, and in the end remain what it essentially is— a lovely little artifact of language and art alone in its own garden.

To begin with, Huth is a visual poet and yet the pwoermd also seems to be an element of a wider textual design: namely, the page on which it appears. I consider the pwoermds on page 65, for example, as a sort of "text art" in its own right (the recto of page image below), a vertical (vertebrae-like) column that both supports and rests on nothing, and yet the whole amplifying a sense of stodgy resiliency, a verbal monolith of sorts. The page is also a site of traditional poetic meanings where, despite the predominance of writing 'space', the eye cannot fall too freely down the page. A writing space adaptable to text design and visual art: for it is here, especially in the case of cutting-edge minimalist poetry, that literary theory and the material act of writing cross paths.

 Huth addresses the text art & visual poetry distinction in a January 09, 2010 "dbqp: visualizing poetics" blog article. A distinction in which the textual artist is seen as dealing just with shapes on a printed page, without the "lifeblood" of meaning, reserving for visual poetry the "mysterious and magical" elements of true artistic expression. As he says,"[t]he visual poet is focused on text as lifeblood. The text artist focuses on text as a medium." I suppose the pwoermd is a bit of both: product of poetic imagination as well as a way to put "consistent and cutting edge" theory to the test. And now to Huth's page.

                                       thevolution

I'm tempted to read here at an advanced third-tier level, noting a fundamental "form and content" tension. On the outside, 'thevolution' is a fusion of two words with the 'e' serving to key possible meanings to pronunciation: a clear case of the union of thought and the materiality of the written (or rather spoken) word. But does meaning subserve speech (felt here as a distinctive 'vowel' sound-feature) or writing itself? The lack of textual spacing between 'the' and 'volution' doesn't frustrate linear reading too wildly. If 'e' is part of the article, & 'volution' is not too implausibly imagined as a concrete noun derived from the root word 'volute'[L voluta, fr. fem. of volutus, pp. of volvere to roll], the pwoermd reduces to the "spiral scroll-shaped form" (from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary) of both the classical Ionic column to which it's etymologically akin, and the page's own verticality.

A specific, easily verifiable property that can be identified as referent.The first pwoermd caps the page like an Ionic capital but really only resting on an abstract textual space: perhaps a purposely ambiguous symbol of any notion of poetic firstness. Of the primacy of  form over content. If the 'e' slides over to form 'evolution', however, both pronunciation and meaning change accordingly: the portmanteau word being strongly felt as a presence despite the missing vowel. As though pronunciation (the ease with which the combined elements roll off the tongue) signaled a 'missing link' whose absence is only minimally felt, and this because of some overriding sense of 'organic wholeness'. There isn't here the bending of the rules of word-derivation (as in the case of 'volution'): 'evolution' is allowed to evolve carrying with it a suppressed silent marker of linguistic harmony. Almost a case of elision. Perhaps the point being that what is natural to speech will survive even if partiallymuted.

                                       complext

Tampering with linguistic DNA can result in a semantical reprioritizing of the world (and of our relationships to it) the likes of which have never been seen til the advent of minimalist writing. A single 't' addition to the root 'complex'( adj[L complexus, pp. of complecti to embrace, comprise, (a multitude of objects), fr. com- + plectere to braid) does not just mark gratuitous alteration of an otherwise complete word, organically safe & sound, at best a case of successful, "aesthetically pleasing" linguistic experimentation. What's at stake here (for me) is the semantic power of language in general or, to put it more more speculatively, the degree to which words can naturally adopt the self-transformative properties of the world, becoming a 'complex text' with the potential for significant variations. What looks on the "outside" like wanton variation on a root word is rather a seismic shifting deep "inside" language itself. It's the job of 'complext' to register that shifting and provide direction for detecting similar processes at work in word formation.

Perhaps all the forces ( from the root 'plexus' or "interwoven combination of parts") have lain hidden under layers of an all too familiar language usage. Huth's pwoermd is really an active linguistic blood and guts network distinguishable from ordinary words by its telltale 't' addition: 't' is a genetic marker for a new hybrid one-word formation.Perhaps it's both formulaic and combinatory at the same time: a sign of visible alteration attributable to lexical upheavals that like to push their way through to the surface of language. It's very much in the spirit of (but not the same as) Bök's xenotext project by which the pwoermd is a code that if deciphered will disclose deep "two-way interactions between letters and their more general DNA properties. In Bök's case a letter-nucleotide interaction that hopefully results in a genetically self-perpetuating poem!
                                       eduction

If we have to look deep inside DNA for the causes of a pwoermd's hard 't' ending, it might be possible to make a similar claim for softer vowel-prefixes like the  'e' in 'eduction', but recognizing that 'eduction' is, unlike the first two pwoermds, a "single, unmodified traditional word". Here the powers of word-formation, stemming from its root 'educe' [L educere to draw out, from. e- + ducere to lead] don't seem quite as cataclysmic. If by that we mean taking notice of the transformative powers arising from deep inside language, such as marks the  investigative practices of minimalist (Huth, Saroyan)  and the most post-avant conceptualist ( Bök )poets who aren't afraid to cross disciplinary borders.

Perhaps 'eduction' is a pwoermd manifesto of sorts, leading the reader away from the traditional writing space of poetry as comprising words only. By definition a pwoermd can never be just a word. It's maybe the reason poet Geof Huth has recently christened April "International Pwoermd Writing Month", and offers a much more comprehensive 'typology' of pwoermd-formation than that outlined above (In fact, I could very well have used the terms 'apheresis' and 'syncope' in my discussion of ''thevolution, a refinement made necessary by the form's growing appeal'). The scope is international; its spirit is both wildly experimental but respectful also of cultural & literary tradition. As he says in  the InterNaPwoWriMo blog,

For the third year, I'll be encouraging folks to write a pwoermd a day for every day of the month of April, and once again I'm looking for many participants, across the globe, and working in many languages. If you can write one one-word poem a day thirty days in a row, drop me a note so that I can keep track of you. ("So Begins InterNaPwoWriMo 3, Thursday, April 1, 2010)