[New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan

[Chris Lott]

>  Chris, doesn't it bother you at all that when you denigrate poets like
> Saroyan, you sound just like the poetry-readers a hundred years ago talking
> about free verse?

Short answer: yes, it has and does bother me... particularly in this
case because that wasn't quite what I was going for. When I am, I also
consider that many people have slagged a lot of artists who actually
were bad and whose reputations have never been rehabilitated or
remarked upon and many branches of artistic creation that never turned
out to be meaningful.

I'm hoping you didn't read my immediate followup before posting this.
I wasn't meaning to denigrate Saroyan, just the mindset wherein it is
a poetic revelation to be stoned and type words repeatedly and the
idea put forth in that anecdote where a single word evncing an emotion
in a particular context is somehow the same as writing a poem.

In the context Coolidge provides, the word leukemia has some
resonance. I just disagree that it means

"leukemia"

would be an interesting poem. There are many experiences in which the
context makes something otherwise uninteresting, even mundane, moving
or inspirational or turn such things into triggers for events or
conversations of great magnitude. But that doesn't make the half
buried glass jar or the soap bubble or the shiny coin a poem.

That's essentially my argument about a poem like JOE, which is
interesting only in a very particular context (and not really as a
poem, in my opinion) and part of why I think:


lighght

remains clever wordplay but not a particularly enervating poem despite
your eloquent defense in various forums and my respect for your
clearly authentic reaction to it.

Sorry you're not taking up "organic"-- I guess idioformular gets at
what it seems most people mean when they use the term though.

c