The Most Expensive Word in History
By Dan Piepenbring
The Print Series
Since 1964, The Paris Review has commissioned a series of prints and posters by major contemporary artists. Contributing artists have included Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and William Bailey. Each print is published in an edition of sixty to two hundred, most of them signed and numbered by the artist. All have been made especially and exclusively for The Paris Review.
Among these is Aram Saroyan's lighght print, available in our online store. The print is a record of Saroyan's most famous poem—one among many collected in his newly reissued Complete Minimal Poems. Soon after the poem's first publication in 1965, "lighght" engendered a surprisingly long-lived controversy, in which The Paris Review's own George Plimpton played no small part. As Ian Daly's terrific piece at poetry.org explains,
Plimpton decided to include it in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology, which he was editing for the National Endowment for the Arts … Plimpton picked Saroyan's "lighght," so the NEA cut him a check for $750—the same as all the other authors in the anthology. The Review kept $250, and Saroyan kept the rest. All of which seems reasonable enough—that is, unless you judge the poem's worth on a strictly cost-per-word basis—which is exactly what Congress did.
When Representative William Scherle, a Republican from Iowa, caught wind of the one-word poem, he launched a national campaign against the indefensible wastefulness of the newly established NEA, and urged the removal of its chairperson, Nancy Hanks … Mailbags of letters from fuming taxpayers clogged the agency's boxes, most of them variations on a theme: 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?!
"If my kid came home from school spelling like that," one congressman said, according to the now-defunct arts and literature quarterly Sabine. "I would have stood him in the corner with a dunce cap."
The NEA lived to cut another check, of course, but more than twenty-five years later, "Ronald Reagan was still making pejorative allusions to 'lighght.' That sparked Saroyan to write about the whole affair for Mother Jones in 1981, in a piece he called 'The Most Expensive Word in History.'"
But our lighght print is not merely a keepsake from an ill-advised chapter in cultural politics. As Daly elegantly writes—and as none of the pols could see through the fog of their vituperation—the poem is also energetic, ineffable, beautiful:
"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 … "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."
The Paris Review's lighght print is available here in an edition of 150.