[New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan

[Bob Grumman]

Chris Lott wrote:
> 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.
>   

"leukemia" is a complete dud, as far as I'm concerned.
>   
>>  Should he return the prize on the grounds that he did the equivalent of
>> using steroids?
>>     
>
> Never said nor implied that. 
Didn't say you did.  I was just musing aloud.


> 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.
>   
I was saying you DO have to get stoned or the equivalent (for those who 
are lucky, without the use of drugs) to find what ultimately counts the 
most in poetry, unique combinations of words and images.
>  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.
>
>   
Everything is an artifact of its time, but Keats worked for me when I 
was young, and I see no reason why Saroyan should not work similarly for 
young people coming to poetry who have the kind of receptivity for 
Saroyan that I had for him and Keats.  And others.

> 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.
>
>
>   
For some people.  Many don't even find it neat.  But haiku lovers can 
get  much more than a single, "wow, that's neat," out of it, just as 
they do out of the best haiku (and "lighght" is certainly a full-scale 
haiku in all important respects).  Like all art, though, it is not 
permanently beautiful: I no longer get anything out of it, or out of any 
of Keats's odes.  Except implicitly, when I engage new poems that have 
in one way or another evolved from what Keats and/or Saroyan did.

> Quite different from a good epic, which rewards anew in some way each time.
>
>   
Which I just disagreed with.  In fact, I've never read an apic that 
didn't bore me /before/ I'd engaged it all the way through even once.

--Bob
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