Dear sisters,

As I start typing I also start counting and as I already pause my writing in order to count there are twenty-seven words and I think of what to make of this number and if these twenty-seven, now forty-four, words could have been used in a better way and now I have already used sixty words and thereby reduced the amount of words before reaching the given limit allowed by you and I wonder how to express my emerging sense of a poetic self in this text just as I wonder how to express any poetic self in any text and realizing that this has taken one hundred and six words so far it is time to bring the word academic into text because the search for a poetic self is easily afflicted with the search for an academic identity and this I suggest has everything to do with the process of writing like the one I am undertaking now and I have reached one hundred and seventy-one words before even thinking of the potential need for a punctuation mark. Full stop. One hundred and ninety-one, already increased to one hundred and ninety-eight because of the words used to write out the number in letters – now two hundred and fifteen and I notice how my software automatically offers to count the words, something I appreciate now as I keep counting the words but also something that makes me worry as soon as I become aware of how it breaks down my writing into single elements of countable entities suggesting that the literal number of words contains an essence of my thinking which again makes me wonder how we might understand the relationship between the words themselves and the way they become entangled in text, during writing, through thinking, in order words in the making, and how this again might express a poetic self or parts of it – which again makes me wonder whether a poetic self can at all be divided into parts and if some of these parts then might relate more to the word academic than others and using this word, academic, again makes me stumble and I decide that after three hundred and seventy-two words it is time for another full stop. Dot. Academic. Just one word. Poetic is another. Dot. Poetically academic. Dot. Academically poetic. Dot. Towards a poetic of academics? Question mark. Academically polemic. Dot. Acapoemically epidemic. Epedemic self? Myself. Yourself. Us. After precisely four hundred and eighteen words I am continuously counting words, writing words, thinking through words, and as I am about to end this word count I have used until now four hundred and forty-eight words to open up my investigation of the relation between my academic self and my poetic self in text as text through text and I express my urge to investigate the materialisation of my poetic self outside these words in order to acknowledge how much words count.

Yours sincerely,
Writing (g)Host