Friday, January 2, 2009

More on the topic of "Lighght"

Here's more on the topic of "Lighght", from the Poetry Foundation:

It’s also a valid question. “Lighght” is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer. “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process,” says Saroyan, who lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of Southern California. His Complete Minimal Poems was published in June by Ugly Duckling Presse. “Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”

Just how precarious the whole thing is, though, might not be so immediately apparent. Take away one “gh” and it would pass straight through you—add another, and its starkness is lost. Repeating the “t” in the middle would be like dropping a rock in the ancient-lake stillness laid out by those four silent consonants. What you’re left with is more sensation than thought. The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity. That way of looking at language became Saroyan’s playing field for years. “I got intrigued by the look of individual words,” he says. “The word ‘guarantee,’ for instance, looks to me a bit like a South American insect.”

Damn. That's giving "Lighght" a lot of baggage and responsibility.

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