[New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan

[Chris Lott]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 7:10 PM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net> wrote:
>
> >
>  I'd be happier if I knew that Saroyan composed without pharmaceutical help,
> but I think all the best poets composed out of an altered consciousness.
> Those lucky are able to get into such a consciousness without marijuana or
> the like.  I wonder how many of the poems Saroyan wrote while stoned he
> kept.  I'll bet he edited himself while unstoned.

You're mixing two different things up here. I was remarking on
Coolidge's anecdote which is a good anecdote and which gives power, in
that context, to the word "leukemia" but as far as making that word
into a poem, exhibits just the kind of problem I have with that kind
of time and contextually contingent art. Things can be poetic without
being poems. Things can have power in a context of time, place and
sequence but that doesn't mean they stand alone as interesting
artifacts without those things.

I have no idea if Saroyan wrote any of the poems in the book stoned,
nor would it bother me if he did.

>  Should he return the prize on the grounds that he did the equivalent of
> using steroids?

Never said nor implied that. What I *am* saying is that if one has to
get stoned in order to see something interesting in a piece, then that
piece probably isn't very good. I know that my hand used to be very
interesting when I was dropping acid... it's not particularly good art
without it.

>  As for "lighght," Chris, it may just be me (and a few others) who, as kids,
> found the fact that some letters are silent in words so exhilaratingly and
> profoundly wowwy that we found Saroyan's poem irresistibly appealing.  (I
> was extremely taken with homonyms, too--sea/see probably the most.) Even if
> we overrate "lighght," though, it has to be admitted that it did something
> no other poem ever did--in a genre Saroyan practically invented, the
> one-word poem.  I would claim that any poetry-lover who looks down on such
> poems is as ridiculous as a poetry-lover who would look down on epics.

It's also an artifact of its time. Saroyan deserves credit for
inventing a genre, but a genre it is and it just isn't possible for me
to ignore all the wordplay since and see it the way you did then.
Unfair, perhaps, but the way aesthetics seems to go.

I don't disagree right up to your last sentence. For me, the kind of
cleverness shown in "lighght" (and it is quite clever) has a limited
and short-term appeal. It's a one-and-done, "look that's neat! Now I
never need to see it again" kind of thing.


Quite different from a good epic, which rewards anew in some way each time.

c