Zane Koss

“Aram Saroyan is perhaps most famous as the target of conservative political outrage over a $750 payment for the inclusion of his one-word poem “lighght” (1968) in an NEA-funded anthology twenty-five years after its original publication. Like “lighght” but written a year later, “lobstee” presents a single, misspelled word in the middle of an otherwise blank page: lobstee.

[…]

We typically talk about the lobster/lobstee relationship as parallel to employer/employee, which then leads to the question of what exactly it means “to lobst” – the activity of a lobst-er. Once, a student pointed out that it was a key stroke error, that the “e” and “r” are beside each other on the standard QWERTY keyboard, which open onto a conversation about how this poem was likely composed on a typewriter and how we can talk about the ways in which the technology of writing changes how and what we write. It’s a lovely poem to talk about with students!”