April is International Pwoermd Writing Month,
and I spent the month writing
pwoermds over on Twitter—in Latin.
What’s a pwoermd? It’s a one-
word poem, a poem aggressively edited,
language torqued and tickled: diced, spliced,
& awfully nice. As Geof Huth,
who coined the word, has noted,
pwoermds seem more native to English
or French, languages with unintuitive orthographies
that encourage unlikely spellings. Even Chaucer
got in on the hacktion. So
my Latin pwoermds, which I’m calling
Carmnomina, may come off as blatantly
English—especially with their love of
consonant clusters and unlikely compounds—or
maybe German? I’m thinking of working
them over awhile, into something worthy
of a chapbook. Or translating them,
or asking others to translate them?
We’ll see. Meanwhile, some of my
InterNaPwoWriMo pwoermds from 2013 were published
in the wisdoms of the universes
in a single string of letters,
just released by Xexoxial. It includes
lots of great pwoermdists: Grab it!
