lighght(s)

When I attended Geof Huth’s San Francisco reading three months ago I bought two of his books, Ampersand Squared: an anthology of pwoermds, and Texistence which is a collaboration with mIEKAL aND.

The most famous pwoermd (poem/word) in the anthology is probably Aram Saroyan’s:

lighght

That one had the distinction of being denounced on the floor of the Senate as an example of the sort of degenerate art taxpayers were being forced to subsidize through the National Endowment for the Arts.

Huth also includes a poem by Marlene Mountain that I mentioned myself in my 2005 LuvSet post on pwoermds. That poem:

sn wfl k s

The other book, Texistence, is a collection of pwoermds Huth & mIEKAL aND created. Huth said one would write a few letters down then hand it to the other who would mess with it and vice versa until they were satisfied or tired of it. There are 300 pwoermds in the book. It’s a collection of contextless words, one to a page, none defined. You can make up definitions for them yourself, if you’re so inclined. Or you can just contemplate them. I marked several for rereading. Curiously, there are only four placemarks in the book now. Did I do a cull? The one I remember as my favorite is not marked. … Oh. There’s the explanation. As I removed the marks I wrote out favorites on a slip of paper in the back. A few:

fossilitate

ompliallo

tititions

murm

thetheism

olojo

suavalanche

That last one. Favorite!

Huth, by the way, has recently uploaded video of the reading on his dbqp blog.