By Stephen Motika Palisadian-Post Contributor A book that could be read cover to cover in a couple of minutes? That’s what Edwin Newman did on the six o’clock NBC local news in New York City with Aram Saroyan’s first poetry collection some 40 years ago. Self-titled, the book, published by Random House, featured 30 short poems typed on letter-sized pages of the author’s own design. The longest poem was 14 words, the shortest just one. It was one of these single-word poems, ‘lighght,’ that caused a huge uproar when selected by George Plimpton for the second volume of ‘The American Literary Anthology,’ resulting in a cash award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Saroyan received a check for $750, which enraged members of Congress and fueled Jesse Helms and others to attack the NEA for paying hundreds of dollars to an artist for spelling a word incorrectly. Now, with the publication of ‘Complete Minimal Poems’ (Ugly Duckling), Saroyan’s poems are receiving acclaim in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, and he received an award from the Poetry Society of America. Saroyan reads from this and other works at Village Books on Swarthmore on Thursday, July 17 at 7:30 p.m. Saroyan, 64, was raised bicoastally, spending a couple of years on Maroney Lane in the early 1950s when the ranch homes in upper Las Pulgas Canyon were first being built. In an interview with the Palisadian-Post, he remembers it as an ‘idyllic neighborhood for a young kid.’ When his mother moved him and his sister to live in New York, he likens the initial shock to ‘Hey, what the hell happened?’ As he grew older, Saroyan began to appreciate the city, and after a couple of attempts at college, found himself trying to find his way as a poet in Manhattan. Now he looks back with affection and wonder on the minimal poems he wrote in his early 20s. ‘It was a good beginning. I got into being in the world in a minimalist way,’ he laughs, noting that the poems represent ‘a young man in his room and at the door to his room. It’s curiously domestic work.’ He describes the poems as a result of a ‘cross-fertilization going on’ in the New York poetry community of the mid-1960s. Saroyan’s own interest in Black Mountain poets, such as Robert Creeley, was coming into contact with the ‘playfulness’ of the New York School poets, epitomized by his friend Ted Berrigan. Additionally, Saroyan became aware of and inspired by visual artists such as Andy Warhol and Donald Judd. He believes that the ’60s gave us permission to be more playful, that there was a reaction to the high-modernist poets, William Carlos Williams and e. e. cummings.’ His experimentation, with a typewriter and marijuana, resulted in a collection of minimalist poems, as much to be looked at as read, that now seem a forerunner of everything that followed in the 1970s, including experimental poetry and the visual artists’ play with language. The poems, such as ‘a leaf/left/by the/cat/I guess’ and ‘the radiator, the radio louder,’ exhibit Saroyan’s warm humor and generosity of spirit even while practicing great economy. Random House published his second book of poems in 1968, but by then, Saroyan had left it all behind. He says: ‘It was 1968, one of the darkest moments in history. There were the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Five hundred American lives were being lost every week in Vietnam. Playful minimal poems weren’t striking the right note.’ Saroyan met his future wife, Gailyn, moved to Massachusetts, and tried to ‘get on with my life.’ He didn’t return to writing until 1972, when he and his family settled in Bolinas, in Marin County, where they lived for the next dozen years. He embarked on an ambitious writing career, producing novels and nonfiction, including a biography of his late father, the playwright and fiction writer William Saroyan, and a book about his mother, Carol Matthau, and her friendships with Oona Chaplin and Gloria Vanderbilt. After three years in Connecticut, Saroyan moved to Southern California in 1987and now lives with his wife in Village Green, at the foot of Baldwin Hills. He has recently been pursuing playwriting, which he finds to be very satisfying for the immediate audience reaction, as well as teaching at USC. Even though it has been decades since he wrote the minimal poems, Saroyan appreciates the renewed interest in the work. He took an active role on the design of ‘Complete Minimal Poems,’ insisting that the poems be typeset using today’s technology, the computer. This time the poems appear as though they were written using a word processing program, rather than on a typewriter, and the book includes headers, footers, and page numbers. Saroyan wished for the poems to appear in a new way, having already experienced publishing the work with the typewriter typeface and wanted to ensure that a contemporary reader felt comfortable picking the book up. One suspects that he wants to share his history with the next generation. He says, ‘I see those early years as a kind of cognitive self-notation in the moment in whatever environment I was in. I was waking up in the world.’
