pwoermds

Ron Silliman talks about Geof Huth's anthology of pwoermds, the term one of many Huth seems to have coined or adjusted the meaning of. "Pwoermds" reminds me of one of my brother David's coinages, "Switagern" which is a griffin-like beast whose front portion is swan and whose back portion is tiger. Note that both Geof & David use every letter from the two source words when creating a new one. Ron doesn't seem much impressed by the pwoermd ... "a comprehensive anthology of literary minimalism – from the one-letter poems of Joyce Holland’s Alphabet Anthology up to, say, haiku – would generally reveal pwoermds to be the weakest mode therein." I don't know what all is in the Huth anthology (I could probably buy the damn thing, yeah?) but I wonder if Huth has included poems associated with American haiku, like the ones I saw in Cor van den Heuvel's Haiku Anthology, "foalmosteady", being a favorite of mine (foal+almost+steady). (Consulting my notebook I see I encountered "foalmosteady" by Emily Romano in the magazine Modern Haiku edited by Robert Spiess, not in the Haiku Anthology. However, in the Haiku Anthology one would see some by Marlene Mountain, including, "sn wfl k s")

In Silliman's comments I threw in a pwoermd, riffing off one by John Byrum, "UTTER":

UDTER