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American poet From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aram Saroyan (born September 25, 1943) is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright, who is especially known for his minimalist poetry, famous examples of which include the one-word poem "lighght"[1] and a one-letter poem comprising a four-legged version of the letter "m".
Aram Saroyan | |
|---|---|
Saroyan in 2007 | |
| Born | September 25, 1943 New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet, writer |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Genre |
|
| Literary movement | Minimalism, concrete poetry |
| Notable works | lighght |
| Spouse | Gailyn Saroyan (1968-2020) |
| Partner | widowed |
| Children | Strawberry Saroyan Cream Saroyan |
| Relatives | William Saroyan (father) Carol Grace (mother) Lucy Saroyan (sister) Walter Matthau (step-father) Charles Matthau (half-brother) Armenak Saroyan (grand-father) Ross Bagdasarian (first cousin once removed) Ross Bagdasarian Jr. (second cousin) |
There has been a resurgence of interest in his work in the 21st century, evidenced by the publication in 2007 of several previous collections reissued together as Complete Minimal Poems.
Saroyan was born in New York City.[2] His parents were author and playwright William Saroyan and actress Carol Grace and his sister was actress Lucy Saroyan. He is the father of Strawberry and Cream Saroyan.[3] He is of Armenian descent from his father's side and Russian-Jewish from his mother's.
During the 1970s and 1980s he lived in a writer's community in Bolinas, California, though by 1999 he was living in Santa Monica.[4]
Saroyan's poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. Among the collections of his poetry are Aram Saroyan, Pages, and Day & Night: Bolinas Poems, the latter published by Black Sparrow Press in 1998.[5] In 2007 several previous collections were reissued together as Complete Minimal Poems by Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn. The Poetry Society of America awarded Complete Minimal Poems the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award[6]
Saroyan's prose books include Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation; Last Rites, a book about the death of his father, the playwright and short story writer William Saroyan.[7] In 1985 he wrote Trio: Oona Chaplin, Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship, published by Linden Press/Simon & Schuster.
Saroyan has worked extensively in the visual arts, authoring many works for the stage, screen, and theater. In 1988, Saroyan wrote the teleplay for an episode of St. Elsewhere.[8] He is the author of plays including Pollen Count; Landslide; Hollywood Night; The Laws of Light: Pasternak, Akhmatova, and the Mandelstams under Stalin,[9] and The Evening Hour. He's also written work that can be characterized as performance art, including pieces such as Artie Shaw Talking (solo performance piece); and A Tender Mind: The Life and Times of Lew Welch, Beat Poet (solo performance piece).[10]
Saroyan is the author and narrator of the documentary film The Moment, directed by George Sandoval, 2001. He is also contributor of his poetry and prose to publications that include The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Village Voice, and The Nation magazine. Saroyan taught for 15 years in the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program.[10][11]
Aram Saroyan has had careers as a poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, playwright, educator, editor, and publisher. According to the UbuWeb site, which reprints some of his early publications, Saroyan first established his reputation as a poet working in the genre of concrete poetry in a style that is described as "minimalist":
The groundbreaking 1960s concrete poetry of Aram Saroyan [includes] The Street, a film based on Saroyan's life during that period. Other works include three full-length books of classic concrete poetry: Pages (Random House, 1969), Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), and Cloth: An Electric Novel (Big Table, 1971). Saroyan chronicles his making of these poems in his essay Flower Power and his historical position is noted in Mary Ellen Solt's 1968 Concrete Poetry: A World View: United States[12]
Saroyan's four-legged "m" has been cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's shortest poem.[13] Admirer Bob Grumman has written that the poem plays on formation of an alphabet, as if 'm' and 'n' are in the process of separating. It can also be understood as a pun on "I am", implying the formation of consciousness itself.[13]
One of Saroyan's most famous poems was simply the unconventionally spelled word "lighght" in the center of a blank page. This poem was selected by George Plimpton to be featured in The American Literary Anthology and, like all poems in the volume, received a $750 cash[14] award from the National Endowment for the Arts, then just 20 years old.[15] The NEA was created in the same year the poem was written, 1965. Many conservatives, such as Representative William Scherle and Senator Jesse Helms, objected at the per-word amount of the award, complaining that the word was not a real poem and was not even spelled correctly. This was the NEA's first major controversy; 25 years after it was written "Ronald Reagan was still making pejorative allusions to 'lighght.' "[16] Grumman says the poem is "neither trivial nor obscure", but plays with the glimmering quality of light, leaving us with "intimations of his single syllable of light's expanding, silently and weightlessly, 'gh' by 'gh', into...Final Illumination."[13] Saroyan himself explains that "the difference between "lighght" and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process"; it is a poem you "see rather than read".[14]
His 1968 book, Aram Saroyan, was almost a full-size representation of its contents as they could be presented in typescript or mimeograph, in Courier typeface, printed on one side of each leaf in what looked like unevenly inked print, with a total of only 30 poems. Edwin Newman, a reporter for NBC News, read the entire book aloud on the NBC Evening News.[17] Some of Saroyan's early poems were published in issues of 0 to 9 magazine, a 1960s journal which experimented with language, form and meaning-making.
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