Complete Minimal Poems

lighght

(1965)

Aram Saroyan's minimalist and concrete poems, lots of them, are collected here in a pretty comprehensive way, after their bits and pieces publications have gone out of print. The above poem was blasted by noted jerk/terrible person Jesse Helms after winning an NEA award of $500. Like many of his works, the poem draws attention on multiple levels—the letters themselves, how they are arranged, what the "word" means and what its disruption implies, the ephemerality of its meaning, and our own minds eye that assigns it a connotation even when it's wrong.