MIT Press Reader Sees the 'lighght'

Paul Stephens writes about Aram Saroyan's minimal poems in an article published at the MIT Press Reader. To Stephens's mind, Louis Zukofsky was "the greatest influence on Saroyan’s minimal poems." Robert Creeley introduced Saroyan to Zukofsky in 1964. Moreover: 

Creeley’s poems also became more minimal in the late 1960s, but never so minimal as a single word or a single word repeated. Zukofsky provided the epigraph for Saroyan’s journal Lines, and he may have partially inspired Saroyan’s “lighght,” as well as his “crickets / crickets / crickets . . .” Saroyan wrote three distinctly different cricket poems, two of which were recorded for LP.

The column version of “crickets” would go on to become a signature poem of Saroyan’s, as evidenced by a 1968 Paris Review advertisement that found Saroyan at the peak of his fame. The column of “crickets” (like “not a cricket”) should be listened to in order to be appreciated fully. In the 1967 recording, the one word is repeated by Saroyan for 80 seconds, and it evokes that of which it speaks by onomatopoeia.

According to the author, the poem “was written in the spring of 1965 in an apartment building on East 45th in New York City, proving that crickets are powerful creatures, capable of penetrating New York City itself.” Interestingly, Saroyan repeats the word “crickets” about 33 times per minute — not far off from the 30 chirps per minute produced by the North American field cricket. (The speed at which a cricket chirps is determined by species and temperature — it is even possible, following Dolbear’s Law, to determine the temperature outdoors by counting the frequency of cricket chirps.)

Learn more at the MIT Press Reader.