Before talking about it, I want to try to clear up an misunderstanding about Ampersand Squared, which paloin calls an "unauthorized anthology of word poems" in the introductory remarks to his Primer. Geof Huth edited it, I published it. It was rushed, not "unauthorized." We had permissions from all the poets whose work was included that we were able to contact with reasonable ease, or knew would give permission (because we knew them personally and had understandings with them that we were free to reprint their work anytime, as they were to reprint ours). We apparently never contacted paloin about his word, probably because we assumed he wouldn't mind (and thought him part of "our crowd"). Or maybe, in our haste, we thought we'd contacted him, but hadn't. In any event, it was my job as publisher to make sure we weren't using a work from anyone who didn't want it in the book. So, I apologize to paloin for not making sure he was okay with our using his. It doesn't seem that he was greatly disturbed, for he says he would have agreed to let us reprint his piece if asked, and praises the anthology as "a wonderful collection of word poems."

Now to the Primer. It has 45 terms, all neologistic. Most are extremely specialized (Yes, folks, he's crazier than I!): "amplitoots," for instance, is what he calls those of his poems that use some symbol that indicates nonmathematical addition or continuation, such as the ampersand he uses in "c&le." I think there are very few such symbols. Besides the ampersand, he mentions ellipses and "etc." I think I'd enlarge the classification to those un,n poems that use any typographical symbol in place of letters and call it "symstitution poetry," (a subset of infraverbal poetry). Sorry, can't help stealing an idea and running with it, folks.

A key strength of paloin's Primer is its demonstration of the many ways words can be infraverbally manipulated to good effect which have been too little noticed, if noticed at all, by others, like "anagrammar," which is "protext that uses anagrams to create interesting phrases or other pieces--e.g., "belief be life." Another particularly clever one is "repeatrix," a form in which the spaces in a phrase are moved around to make a new phrase. paloin's example is "father of lies" transformed to "fat hero flies."

More on this and paloin's work tomorrow.