[New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan Sells Blue Sky

[R Dillon]

Aram Saroyan had a program.
 
A colleague, as well as an Obamaesque egomaniac (Saying nothing and saying it especially well in a cagey way.), he made his entrances and exits at the Grolier Bookshop in the '73-'74 epoch. Gordon, George Burroughs (Orson Bean's father), Judge Alinsky
(who compelled Gordon to erect a last will one afternoon which I witnessed legally), Ken Irby, Geoffrey Movius, Achilles Fang, Bruce Comjean, Bob Creeley, smoking Vantage cigarettes, (Patty Smith and Bockris/Wylie's early publisher) and I were conferring one fine noon when Saroyan entered.
 
He had hired a skywriter airplane to contrail his poetry over the Harvard/Yale football game which was being played at that moment.  
 
Aram, black haired, alabaster skin, black eyed, talked with his arms.
 
(As many of you know, he is the scion of that famous Dallas department store [N/M] which sells mink slippers, as well as having had a world famous author as his father.  He studied macrobiotics, as I had, with Michio Kushi.  Those were lite and thin days. I went on to dine at the John Birch Restaurant, Cardello's Cafeteria, where each Cardello had their own kiosk, food specialty, and cash register.  Aram stuck with brown rice and hiziki seaweed at the Seventh Inn cattycorner to the Ritz Hotel downtown, and even named his little girls, "Strawberry, " and, "Cream."  He had a very quiet streak but could get snarky if disappointed.  Anyway.)
 
Aram explained that life was like television.  It had different channels.  "Right now, " he said, "over a channel that I turned on at the stadium, I am writing the word, "SKY," in the sky over the upturned heads of 100,000 of our friends."  He paused and took a long pregnant look from eye to eye around the room.  "See it yourselves, up there in the Cambridge blue by the Charles River.  SKY.  Curleycued in white cloud writing.  And now comes the best part.  It is dissolving before our very eyes."  He announced that he was changing the station and exited into Plympton Street.
 
His central aesthetic principle: "For poetry to be made new, the slate must be wiped clean. Totally. At the outset, before the writing is begun."
 
Another time he stole a very important one word poem from me, and he must give it back.
 
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R. Dillon
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