Reykjavík Grapevine - 02.07.2010, Qupperneq 55

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38
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 09 — 2010
It’s a poetic mouthful—a hard-to-per-
form sound poem in its own right—
“pwoermd”. When you Google it the
machine asks if you meant “power-
mad” and you’re half inclined to say “yes I am,
what are you gonna do about it?”
beautyfault (Karri Kokko)
fjshjng (Geof Huth)
breathrough (Christopher Rizzo)
llyllylly (mIEKAL aND & Geof Huth)
eyeye (Aram Saroyan)
It’s the new new in poetry. The new black. Yet
since poetry, like infants, needs an entire child-
hood and adolescence before reaching young
adulthood—the mere concept is already 23 years
old (whereas, per usual, the practice is as old as
language itself—in fact, it’s probably how lan-
guage was made). Coined in 1987 by entrepo-
eteur Geof Huth, “pwoermd” is a combination
(obviously!) of the two four-letter words “poem”
and “word”.
One of the first instances of public notoriety
for pwoermds—the “obscenity trial” that made
‘em famous (with no tabloid interest since the
1800s, poetry wouldn’t have survived without its
obscenity trials)—was when Aram Saroyan (son
of William) typed the infamous “lighght.” Sa-
royan was a 22 year old fan of dada and concrete
poetry and had started working on one-word po-
ems that, instead of requiring a “reading proc-
ess,” simply happened in an instant, a single
moment. No subject-verb-object; no meenie,
minie, moe; no ifs or buts or even abouts.
Lighght was first published in The Chicago
Review in 1965 and in 1969 it was included in
the second volume of The American Literary
Anthology—whereupon the National Endow-
ment for the Arts (NEA) awarded it the same
sum as any other poem in the book: 750 dollars.
Which makes about 5,200 dollars at current val-
ue (104,000 times what I make per word). For a
single poem. Consisting of a single word.
Whoa!
Taxpayers were incensed. The government could
not afford to cut taxes but they could afford to
pay beatnik weirdos exorbitant amounts of mon-
ey for writing one word “and not even spelling
it right”? The American right—congressmen,
voters and bureaucrats—had a full-on hissy-fit,
with mailbags upon mailbags of rage arriving
in Washington. The NEA was made to answer
on Capitol Hill, the Republican Party used the
opportunity to squeeze the NEA and as late as
1981 Ronald Reagan was still citing Saroyan’s p
oem as a reason for the abolition of government
funding for the arts.
The shortest poem I know is Steve McCaffery’s
“William Tell: A Novel”. It is simply a lowercase
“i” with an extra dot over the dot. According to
the Guinness Book of World Records, however,
the shortest poem is one by Charles Chigna en-
titled “I” (uppercase)—which goes “Why?” But
neither constitutes a pwoermd as they are both
dependent on their titles—and are thereby a
process and not an instant.
Like writing any poetry, writing pwoermds
is basically easy while writing good pwoermds
is somehow miraculous. To a reader of pwoer-
mds they all seem very interesting at first, but
the more you read the higher your standards
become and the more it takes to surprise you, to
create that prodigious instant which blows you
away and leaves you “discombobulated”. Which
incidentally is a “normal word”—a nwoorr-
madl—and not a pwoermd.
Poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
Cotery Poelumn: Pwoermds
Books | Review
As I walk to work every morning, I
never cease to be amused by the
people on Laugavegur. There are
two kinds, really. First there are the
people who clearly live here, who are going to
work, walking at a steady pace with a cigarette
or coffee. Typical.
Then you have the group of North Face-clad,
up-and-at-‘em camera-clutchers who really
want to get a head start on their day. Invariably,
they wind up looking completely befuddled
and dismayed at the lack of anything being
open at the crack of 9:30. That’s what nobody
tells you before coming here: everything starts
really, really late! Stores don’t open before 10,
at the earliest, and most restaurants only start
polishing the silverwear around 11. Unless these
tourists have an early morning day trip booked
or are only coming back from last night’s party,
they should still be in bed.
A good friend recently came to visit me on
her two-week long vacation from work. She had
no particular plans for her stay here and just
wanted to experience life in the city and take in
some of the natural beauty of the countryside.
While I would get up early and head down to
work, she was still sleeping like a cat on opium
on the couch. For the first few days of her visit,
she shamefully admitted that she kept sleeping
until noon. She also quickly realised that walking
around the city in the morning was essentially
pointless, since there is pretty much nothing to
do. I thought this was a perfectly reasonable,
considering it’s rare that she could sleep in on
a Monday, Tuesday AND Wednesday in a row. I
was completely jealous.
And what better way to spend ones vacation
really? Many cultures regard sleep as a flagrant
indulgence that flouts convention and shows a
lack of responsibility or work ethic. To this I say
boo-urns! Sleep is a vital function that allows the
body to regenerate and the mind to defragment,
allowing a person to be happier and more
productive in their waking life. Most of us, with
our fast-paced, overworked lives, would not turn
down an extra few hours of sleep each night.
Why shouldn’t we then qualify unrestricted
sleep as a legitimate form of vacationing?
There is so much pressure whenever you go
on a holiday to “make the most” of the time at
your destination—meaning get your lazy bum out
of bed—but this might be the only little time you
get off work all year to rest and recuperate. The
fact that everything opens so late in this country
permits one to turn off their alarm and get some
extra sleep, guilt free. While some visitors may
find Reykjavík’s lack of punctuality a frustrating
cock-block to their travel plans, I suggest they
try to appreciate the alternative.
The Art Of Sleep
The most underrated
activity in Iceland
Opinion | Rebecca Louder
Here is a short book, available only in electronic
format, which presents eight interviews with ten
people who tell their story of Iceland's economic
collapse. We meet a couple who made some unfor-
tunate real estate transactions, a student who was
abroad during the collapse, a policeman who served
during the demonstrations at parliament in Janu-
ary 2009, a half-Icelandic couple who moved back
in 2007, two Portuguese immigrants, the owner of
a small import business, a retired building supplies
wholesaler, and an investment advisor at Íslands-
banki (a.k.a. Glitnir).
You can read this book in an hour or so. The in-
terviews are interesting, though short. Icelanders
are often more open in print than they would be in
person. You won't get a detailed sense of Iceland's
economic breakdown from this book but you will
get an impression.
Alda Sigmundsdóttir took and edited the inter-
views and writes a brief introduction. For the last
few years she has run a fine blog called the Iceland
Weather Report, which makes good reading for
those looking for updates about Iceland in English.
The book isn't available in print and doesn't
have an ISBN number, but you can buy it (which
means, get a URL which lets you download it as a
PDF) from her blog website for $24.99. Alda makes
a plea on the website and in the book to respect her
copyright and not read bootleg copies of the PDF.
This is all good, but it raises a few issues.
One is whether it's OK to read the book, then
pass it on to someone else and delete it from your
computer. Alda doesn't give any clear guidance on
this, but I'd say yes (as long as you really do delete it
from your computer), along the same lines as that
it's OK to resell a regular old paper book after you
read it.
Another is that this book contains 91 pages of
text, which means it's priced at $0.27 per page.
That's a lot, especially when you consider that lon-
ger e-books sell for $10 on Amazon and you can buy
a good song online (and play it over and over) for
less than a dollar. One wants Alda to be compen-
sated for her efforts, which are valiant and sincere.
But people who are already overwhelmed with con-
tent, much of it free (including the nine volumes
on the economic collapse from the government's
truth commission) need a very compelling reason
to justify spending twenty-five bucks on even a very
sincerely produced ninety-one page PDF.
I wonder if Alda could do as well or better by
reducing the price to well under $10 and using a
sales portal like lulu.com that would allow her to of-
fer the book in paper form as well. As is, I think Liv-
ing Inside the Meltdown just costs too much. That
isn't a judgement about Alda's skills as a writer and
editor, but rather a reminder of how complicated it
is to find workable publishing models in the age of
the Internet. - IAN WATSON
Living Inside the Meltdown
by Alda Sigmundsdóttir
Self-published. Available from
www.icelandweatherreport.com