eyeyeyelighghght

via Ron Silliman's blog:

A second Saroyan type that comes closer to Grenier entails poems that utilize the graphic elements of language – the poem at the top of this note is a famous instance of this. As it does there, this kind of poem works when there is some intelligible connection – it doesn’t have to be articulatable – between what is going on the page and denotative & connotative dimensions of the word at hand. Thus

eyeye
strikes me as effective precisely for the way it calls up the double-image element involved in stereoscopic vision, why humans see in 3D, whereas

lighght
just sits there on the page doing not much of anything.

&

via Nathan Austin's This Cruellest Month:

But exclusive attention to these poems' graphical components ignores — as Silliman does — their sonic dimensions. I'm not interested in disagreeing with Silliman, of course; his attention is focused on the visual by the parameters of his essay, and particularly by his comparison of Saroyan with Grenier. Rather, and nevertheless, I want to look at other ways of reading the poems to investigate them differently.