Frighteningly New from Xexox Sutra Editions—
TEXISTENCE
by Geof Huth & mIEKAL aND
2008, 5.06″ x 7.81″, 300 pgs, $20.00 includes US postage.
ISBN 1-438250-10-X | EAN-13 978-1-43825010-6
http://xexoxial.org/is/texistence/by/geof_huth_and_mIEKAL_aND
“There is a trick or two to writing a 300-page book and typesetting it in two days. One is to have two people work on the book, and the other is to require only one word per page. And that is what mIEKAL aND and I did on June 29th and 30th in West Lima, Wisconsin: We wrote a book of 300 collaborative pwoermds, certainly the longest book of pwoermds ever and, to my knowledge, the only collaborative pwoermds ever made.
The pwoermd is a queer little literary beast, one that combines the art of neologism with the practice of poetry. The goal of the pwoermd is to provide the experience of a poem over the course of a single poem. As a poetic form, it is doomed to fail frequently, but its size makes the attainment of perfection at least possible.
The way mIEKAL and I created texistence worked, one of us wrote fragments of two words on facing pages of a page layout on a computer and the other added letters in any way to those words and then wrote two partial words of his own. Occasionally, I wrote a starter word of only two letters, which mIEKAL had to work hard to make into something, and occasionally I wrote him a starter word so seemingly complete that he wasn’t sure what he could add. It was great fun. We worked on this for hours at a time. I usually was working on another writing project simultaneously, and mIEKAL would turn the computer towards me when it was my turn, and I would turn it back to him when it was his turn.”
—Geof Huth