A pwoermd a day

Visual & minimalist poet Geof Huth has recently started posting almost a pwoermd a day on his blog dbqp: visualizing poetics, poetry sometimes alternating with insightful commentary on the present state of Vispo poetics. Pwoermds are "one word poems, visual plays, portmanteaus, abbreviations and cuts of regular words." (cited in introduction to Huth's recently published collection of 750 pwoermds entitled ntst ). They're just too good to pass up. I think I'd like to give to some of them a bit of commentary, short or long, off the cuff, studied or perhaps as the result of sheer inspiration. But not everyday: just as the  mood takes me. Let's begin with poisong ( posted Saturday, June 19, 2010)

                                                                   Poisong

Poisong looks like a morbidity itself, suggesting "poison" if read too rapidly.If, in other words, it's taken too visually and aurally. Like a too high dosage of an unknown herbal remedy. Perhaps the result of looking for danger in exotic-looking things though the fear of contamination, even at first glance, may be a bit unreasonable. There's just too much music in the word! What is more likely is that it's a healthy confluence (saved in its mellifluous consonant and vowel combination alone) of ancient island staple (poi as food): the opposite of "poison", and of dance (poi as performance art), activity associated with health and vitality. Now combinative properties (of 'poi' and 'song' ) rather than jangling and sounding morbid on the tongue can actually swing delicately from the dancer's hands and serve as principles of dance, poetry and life.

But yet there's still something lurking in the pwoermd that suggests the toxicity (or perhaps the dark underside) of tropical exuberance.

Used in a sentence: "To lose the slow but pelting poisong of summer rain—tragedy!"