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22 November 2005: Geof Huth calls the following, which is from the just-out issue of Dirt, "A Series of Pwoermds":
Ight
nowhere
lignt
gnight
lightninght
thwords
now here
It isn't: it's a single poem. I'd like to think it was my yammering about going beyond discrete pwoermds that got him to make it, but he did this back in Wreadings, the collection of his pwoermds (one to a page) that I published two editions of, the first in 1987--by generally playing each of his poems off the one on the page opposite it. So, in one place "awkword" faces "bequtiful," in another "unknwn" faces "guesst," and--in my favorite such juxtapositioning, "wuidwhinds" lyrically precedes "myrrhmyrrh."
The above is the most elaborate such interactivity of pwoermds he's yet done, though, as far as I know. It starts with a kind of "near-luminance" (as "Ight" is a "near-word" for "light") that, even as so dim a form of light (or night, which is also almost forms the word for), is "nowhere." Next (to my eye, at any rate), comes a spark of electricity making a partial night, or "lignt"--due to ligh(ht)'s starting out of n(igh)t (to result in light as not-quite-complete as the word "light" with the top of its "h" chopped off is not-quite-complete. In other words, it's about as visual a poem as it is infraverbal.
The next moment, there's just enough light left (the single g of the word for it) for the night to be visible . . . at which point, a full bolt of lightning explodes out of it. Foreshadowed, I might add, by the suggestion of "ignite" by both "lignt" and "(i)gnight." The bolt goes "thwords" here--to become, now, here. I hear enough of "swords" in "thwords" to see the slash of the lightning, while "words" increases the overall image to an implicit metaphor for the effect of words on . . . Darkness.
A very superior poem, I'd call it.
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