Posts tagged "Poetry"
Let There Be Lighght
Dec 18, 2014 • 6 min read
lighght. Seven letters which made poetic history. Seven letters typed out on a sheet of paper by Aram Saroyan. “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. 'Lighght' first appeared in The Chicago Review and later was featured in 'The American Literary Anthology', where it ran for seven pages, with one letter on each page. When the poem received $ 750 from the National Endowment for the Arts, there had been a huge uproar about wasting government funds, and there had been a letter from a taxpayer "We can't afford to lower taxes but we can pay some beatnik weirdo $ 500 to write one word..and not even spell it right." (Saroyan received $ 500 out of the 750 from the publisher).