Letter from a Poet

Poets love to talk poetry as well as write it so it came as no surprise when I received an email from Shisa, one of the Captiva Poets, about Aram Saroyan, a 60's rebel poet. Here's an excerpt from her note and a link:

"a funny thing: they misspell a famous poem of one word in a history of poetry here:

POEM

should be lighght"

Dear Shisa,

What a great poem! The spelling is everything, isn't it?

Doesn’t matter how many times gh is there–it’s silent–but twice is nice, like a blink or a double take. And the "lighght" helps us see poetry in a new way:-) Hate my comments, they seem reductive, but you know me, born to critique.

Thanks for the note.

Carol

Comments

[Ranger]

Not reductive at all; very enlighghghtening ;-)

I guess three is overkill, eh?

[Shisa]

It is megacool what a couple of letters will do...

Thank you, Carol, for posting letters to your blog.
Write ME one and you are sure as hell going into Pattern Recognition :)

[Carol]

The conversation continues:
> >
> > In a message dated 3/2/2005 1:52:54 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> >Shisa writes:
> >
> > dont you think the idea is that it is NOT lightweight with that
> > extra gh
> >
> > and not bright with the ugly (silent but glaring at you) gh

Rus says
> > The "gh" is not really silent. If the word were "light" with a silent
> > "gh", we would say "lit". To say "lite" is our modern pronunciation.
> >
> > To attempt "light" as it would have sounded way back when, is to get
> > into residue of old dialect. Was it something like we say "licked"
> > only throatier or something, the lazy thing, or the simple un-ugly
> > thing, being to just say "lite" ultimately.
> >
> > To have "lighght" is then to stress the origin, and in a way, to
> > stress the origin of "light" itself. The specific "light",
> > metaphorically, could then be, first traced back to old England or
> > Wales with the first "gh", or wherever it stemmed from; and then for
> > another "gh" to go back just as far in language, as if looking at the
> > light from a star, we were looking at the origin of language, and
> > stressing the long burnt-out star, and not the twinkle we usually see.
> >

[Eliot Prufrock]

Words have always been held up by invisible strings. A sentence becomes a tightrope walker, balanced on the stretched point of a perceived shared meaning.

[Eliot Prufrock]

This comes under strange things which security guards read, but this evening, I was reading something about figures of speech. It appears that the poem, lighght is a metaplasmic figure of speech, an epenthesis, to be exact.

[cryststal]

now, i'm not trying to bash on this poem or anything. know what i'm saying? but what is so peotic about this poem? there's nothing genuine about it. my little brother could have written that.then again, that is my opinion and i do have the right to it.

[Carol]

Cryststal~You're teasing, right? Like the double 'st' in your name isn't like refracted light or a mirror reflection or some play in a glass. Sheer poetry, beautiful language, appreciative compliment to the original.

Thanks for commenting,
Carol