POETICKS

#652 had some gadgets by Richard Kostelanetz that I thought fun but trivial–4-letter words in squares, one letter in each quadrant.  The gimmick is that three of the letters, in upper-case, spell a word that becomes a second word with the addition of the fourth (lower-case) letter, as in

.                                         G O
.                                         o D

The anti-gimmick is the fact that very few of the too words disconcealed in each specimen relate enough to each other to achieve metaphoricality, or anything poetic else.  The above is the best one I could find among the bunch he sent me (and others of his literary friends).  Another problem is that such words are too easy to find–although I applaud Kosti for bringing their existence to our attention because they do provide word-game fun.

Several nice poems in #653 that I got from the June 2005 issue of Haiku Canada Newsletter, including this, by John M. Bennett:

.                                                Clou
.                                                laem
.                                                foam
.                                                   d

and these two haiku gems, the first by Cor van den Heuvel, the second by Grant  Savage:

.          end of August--          
.          a crinkled elm-leaf falls
.          and rocks once           

.          on the park bench    
.          this spring afternoon
.          a new old man 

#654 featured wonderful pwoermds from LeRoy Gorman like “marshush,” “rainforust” and “riverb”; but I complained that powermds as pwoermds rather than as climaxes in longer lyrics had become boring for me.  I returned to my quest for a decent word to represent “partaker of artwork” in 655, reporting that I’d just coined “aesthimbiber” for that purpose.  I seem to have dumped it soon after that but think I should not have.   I like it right now.

After posting two works of J. Michael Mollohan in #656, which I put on display in yesterday’s entry, I discussed them in my next two entries.   A few lazy autobiographical paragraphs on my procrastination followed.  This set of ten entries (from a zine called Dirt) ended with an example of what can be done with pwoermds used as I’d like to see them used, as parts of longer poems:

                     Ight

                   nowhere

                                  lignt

                   gnight

                      lightninght

                                       thwords      

                     now here

It’s by none other than Geof Huth, who calls it “A Series of Pwoermds.”