A pwoermd a day

                                                                 taminate (posted Wednesday, July 07,2010)

The poet sometimes resorts to radical half-measures (like the removal of the prefix 'con-') to make things consistent. Scission is not murder but a sort of simple division (like Grumman's 'Mathemaku No. 10'), language always divided by  a user-reader & resulting in a significant poetical remainder. After all, what do you call the heart quotient in a Grumman poem?  Churchill's famous "end of the beginning" phrase (at war's end) is another case in point. I guess it operates by the same principle of slotting surprises into the commonplace and seeing what you get: a case of wilful insertion (or, as in this case, scission) that language always opts for, if given a chance. I think Grumman's heart or Huth's taminate are both unforeseen products that couldn't have been expressed better.

Maybe the pwoermd taminate (produced by scission), the mathemaku (produced by division) are dangerous nomads (after Deleuze). Significant literary forms that happen when you're not looking, an attack by night. Since traditional "page-based" ways of describing them seem outmoded already, we could even call them hyperlexical items. Is there a hidden 'code' at work that makes the mathemaku, pwoermd "interface texts"?The pwoermd is now (after Grummnan & Churchill) an uncontaminated product of superartful division:  Grumman's mathemaku being no more reducible to a simple 'visual heart' times 'poetry' rule than, say, the pwoermd to simple act of cutting. And yet they obviously are remainders of a sort, vital and active products of poetical imaginations not afraid to transgress material boundaries, both enjoying (in Grumman's words) "a widening/existence".

A "dissolution and resolution".

Used in a sentence: Taminate the springs before you drink deep.

A pwoermd a day

                                                                        Sperson (posted Monday, July 05, 2010)

Sperson is the degradation of a person. Take that anyway you like. The propensity of pwoermds, in general, to disperse the unity & solidity of words. Show the rearing serpent itself. A random letter-addition, though bearing the shame of not being a real prefix & prefatory to anything real (to be keyed to a normal lexical entry), can still punch a hole in the world. Perhaps inverting (as pwoermds do) the expectation that words are immune to lexical misadventures like this. What's in that person that a nomadic, stray 'S' can't disclose as so much language verbiage, if we let it?

Sperson's maybe an icon instead of word. We can't seem to interact with the world safely through words all the time: and even with the appearance of something new (like stray 'S's), play can also turn dangerous. Not a country for old language-users.

Used in a sentence: We haven't been able to find the true second sperson of the trinity

A recently published prayer

From all the sad imperfections
  I did stations,
& got as far as the throwing of dice
  —sad Veronica, too!—

Meeting crucifer at the double-doors
  (boy in a cassock),
  was old carmine glass

Out of my head with all the shit,
  like father, grate
I ratcheted up a gallery: —out of shit in
  my skull—

of the sadness in life's see-through mist
  where the flesh's lost
  in spored and thistly scent;

and  lakes green-whipped to shore
  may spring
 whole to a young hegelian (waters
  that holy at 24!)

Ugly ghosts behind the eyes, hipshot
   kill sanctuary joys
   for which I mewed

The grey-haired in black, sandals
  dragged up, or alone
live (I find) as plentiful as gristly boys
  I find

A pwoermd a day

                                                                          ogject (posted Saturday, July 03, 2010)

The shift from labial ('b') to guttural ('g'), the difference in a single sound-production, makes the putative forward-looking model 'object' a lot more problematical than it already is. Now literally stuck at the roof of the mouth.The ob-prefix doesn't find its exact semantical corollary in og- in any sense I can discover (except as its comical 'other'). Unless, of course, you sound out each letter. OG is street slang for original gangster and, by extension, may make 'ogject' a candidate for intercity dialect or a metaphor for the endearing clumsiness of first things. Perhaps 'ogject' is both what's to be found in a primitive 'protowriting' stage in language development (if ever there was one) and today a remnant, almost iconic, of that mythic past. Maybe the faint trace of the classical 'ogee' creates the nostalgia for more comforting classical world. Huth's pwoermd releases the kind of will to change that marks the 'dimentional': a transformation through simple letter substitution made possible by soluble language-reality ties. Perhaps a linguistic and socio-economic gridlock is envisaged here, a reluctance to be too self-assured in matters of things, words for things and the language-communities (the 'hood') they both come from. To encode experience and language in prearranged realities.

'Ogject'. There's something machine-like about it, a cyborg quality that stresses the relatively easily recombinant properties of all words. It chafes somehow. 'Og- now's an unconscious revulsion at the alien (and silently embedded) 'cog' nature of every object (and every object-creation): I see now Haraway couldn't have been more serious about the 'prosthetic' nature of culture-making activities. Say it. Feel it. 'Ogject' is hard to hear and touch: in precisely the way a primitive raw orality and tactility can be uncomfortably rediscovered through the acquisition of any new cultural trade. In the way that learning to write (as Melanie Klein's shown) can reveal initial primitive "gestures" as the hand goes stodgily to the page,  letters seen as a store of erotic and kinetic energies. 'Ogject' is perhaps the way a cyborg or child or old gangster writes the world of things.

Used in a sentence: The ogject of love is a little grainy to the touch.

A pwoermd a day

                                                             dimentional (posted Thursday, July 01,2010)

First transposition (as in the case of 'caugth') and now a simple substitution, a 't' for the normal 's', to the degree that any word-formation modelled on patterns of resemblance and relationship seems simple. But Huth's letter-substitution is far from simple. Being both necessary (vital harbingers for any future semantical development) but also playfully loose and gratuitous, as if thought of at will. Perhaps the pwoermd is a way to ground the possibility of semantic newness in language's very renewable course: or perhaps even to show that meaning and the evolution of language can oftentimes take parallel courses, weaving close to but never touching each other (asymptotically). So that intersections have to be wilfully inserted.The problem of slotting linguistic surprises into normal readerly expectations like 'dimentional' is worth taking a critical look at for otherwise the language-reality paradigm to which we're still committed (surprisingly still Carnapian and analytical) might not appear wooden, stodgy enough to get anyone's attention. So much for origins. What about the pwoermd itself?

Where did 'dimentional' come from then? And how was it formed?  Well, it seems to have been: self-sprung. Sui generis but in a more whimsical sense (like the poet writing in his bathing suit).We perhaps seem to need the same space, speed and technical styles of digitized modes to arrive at anything like the transpositions & substitutions (among others) in pwoermd-formation: all necessary but in the end radically gratuitous conditions. Perhaps it's the 'dimensional' subtext of Huth's pwoermd. The kind of send-up of depth in poetry that underlies most of new media poetries. And Huth is also a media poet. Making poets as much "digerati" as literati. How did the 't' for 's' substitution suggest itself really perhaps if not as freely as the decision to write a HTML-based poetry in the first place?We can do without Internet literacy as long as books & handouts are still considered okay alternatives: living forms (as Gould has taught) that can turn back without actually being regressive. The asynchronous, nonlinear, and everything radically virtual—what are these but (in Lockean parlance) just secondary qualities, more imagined & disposable than real: gifts of the imaginative head only.

But 'dimentional' itself? The thing itself? Perhaps in the pwoermd itself is just a taste of the 'space' and 'speed' and 'digitzed' feel of hypertext works: the semblance of the reality that the play of letter substitutions feels like it's imitating and never really is. A taste of verbal madness: after all, if 'e' subs for 'i' we've also got a case of 'dementia', don't we? Or just jouissance without senses jostling into position. Perhaps poet, cyborg-like, has morphed into a poetry-writing machine. As if the pwoermd is saying, 'Look at what the poet, in his wetsuit, who transposes, substitutes freely is doing rather than the pwoermd itself.' The wetware between the ears rather than the hardware in the sand.

Used in a sentence: Einstein discovered the dimentional properties of space-time in his sleep.

Post-Consumer: some reflections on bottled water

'Post-Consumer' (or the bilingual 'post-consommation') appears on my water bottle as part of a description of the recycled plastic from which it's made. Printed on a green ribbon-like strip above the familiar "100% recycled" logo, next to the garish "President's Choice" brand name. It obviously means the bottle itself will live on after its user as a recyclable consumer artifact, in which case the 'Recycled Plastic' part of the complete 'Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic' phrase makes it seem a little redundant or, more interestingly, turns 'Post-Consumer' into a kind of devouring abstraction, leaving in its wake nothing but bits of recyclable plastic. Nonetheless the title tries to maintain a salubrious green-friendly sense of both bottle and water. But does it?

Post-Consumer. I'm wondering if something more than just water and name doesn't, after all, threaten to destroy what it wants to preserve: if 'Post-Consumer' isn't just a term for a bottle-producing process but a sort of tag for a consumer culture trying to invoke a stern metaphysics of 'materiality' or, in a more interesting post-environmentalist sense, purposely complicate the notion of the health-conscious Self itself. Strike the water drinker right out of the picture completely! I wonder if what I've just consumed doesn't threaten the very saving waters (read metaphorically) on which the recycling idea rests because I've taken in an ideal configured to make water a consumable whose pure state is becoming harder and harder to come by. And recyclable plastic its purest form of expression.

I'm beginning to think that Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson is right: that Nature, like the Unconscious or Self itself, is being swallowed whole but not just by a late capitalist logic: the abusrdity of drinking from a recyclable ideal can only be possible in a stupid language posturing (buttressed by capitalist production) that's having a similar deleterious effect on a lot of contemporary politics, poetry and media in general. Also interesting in this regard are Žižek‘s views on the end-of-the-biosphere discourses that seem to have been assimilated to eco-friendly capitalist uses. It's language that's been gutted & gilded.

Post-Consumer. If there was ever a fitting analogue for an age of deep cultural inanity. Is it the bottle itself, as recycled artifact, or the recycle process that is primary? Just what comes after the consumer anyways? Water as thing or the act of drinking raised to a purer exploitable function? Is the bottle used for drinking or is it code simply, with or without contents, for a water fetishization that's premised on some clearly irrational 'posthuman' fears of our own. It's as if the 'post-consumer' title is a redundant signifier for the hope that plastic bottles can never provide enough of what's inside it. That the water we essentially are & come from can never be drunk often enough. Legitimate fears of self-extinction used as a surplus value to be branded and endlessly repeated.

Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic. Stupid abstraction work typical of the age of late-capitalist production (and consumption). Of stupid producers and consumers in general.

A pwoermd a day

                                                           caugth (posted June 25, 2010)

An artful way to escape consonantal hardness is to sing a word's silent 'h', which renders the speech apparatus quite literally 'caught' (like a moral dilemma) somewhere between reality and a softening intention. A transposition of two final letters, and a kind of release ensues at the same time. As if the poet has reached the limits of programmable language, wanting to create where there's only a page of stony obdurateness in front of him. 'Caught' is simply too hard to face without amelioration (somehow). Perhaps the squeamish, by introducing speech's always silent 'h' partner & making life's tough endings more bearable, have one over the hard-nosed, for once. But what's the intention, really? Is intentionality the issue at all? And does the substitution of an 'h' not violate any sense of respectable meaning-making? At what point is it right to mess with the hard facts of the real world that evolve linguistically by millennia of usage only? It's, to me, quite akin to the elder's resentment of the propensity of the young to revel in permissible grey areas, forgetting that the young like to stand you on your head for fun. Lustful Mennonites before the beard!

As if the old dictum that language can only mean what's empirically given extends also to what's also potentially or gratuitously permissible. Anything given to speech this freely can't be all that bad, Huth seems to say. It's also interesting to ask what creative fiat led him to do it anyways: what phantom eidolon guides his hand. A Bronze Age versifier, who easily dispensed with a linguist-moralist's tricks,was perhaps the last to experience the thrill of 'h' seduction. But then the survival of the species depended on it. The artist's disdain for convolution.

Used in a sentence: Caugth is a safer bet than a Kantian 'ought'.