13 Minutes, 277 Pages, of Poetry

I am not a fast reader. Instead, I generally read slowly, with some precision—unless I drift off to sleep. I can scan a page quickly and ingest the gist of the message, but I find that process disturbing. It is important, to me, to read for nuance, to understand not the point of the text but the style of the text, to find the hidden secret of the text. This method of reading is a burden. A short book can take me longer than seems reasonable; with time, though, I plow through.*

Tonight, however, I read a book of poetry in record time, as I thought I would. I timed it to be sure. Reading every word in the book (blurbs, colophon, acknowledgements, and even the poems themselves), I finished 277 pages of poetry in 13 minutes. The trick to this is to choose the right book,

Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems is a book I’ve been expecting for a long time without ever realizing it. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been enamored by the poetry of Aram Saroyan, how it was concrete but not always, how it was as minimalist as minimalist could be (Saroyan was the master of the pwoermd), how it played with language and expectations, how it squeezed so much into so little. Almost all of his poems, even those complete with syntax, are textual objects of contemplation. We are forced to slow down to see them. Read too fast and they can be lost.

Yet I finished the whole book in a baker’s dozen of minutes. All of his minimalist poems (here relegated to the even shorter name of “minimal poems,” not—the message seems to be—poems with a bent toward the small, but poems of little intent) in one book, a career confined to about an inch’s width of spine.

Half the poems in the book I had already memorized—how long, after all, does it take to remember a single word?—but there were a number of surprises. The book brought a few poems into new sequences for me. Reprinting each of his books of minimalist poetry (Aram Saroyan, Pages, and The Rest), a sequence from an anthology (Electric Poems), and a hitherto uncollected set of poems (Short Poems), the anthology was more than a reminder; it was a revelation.

There’s something of minimalist brilliance even in those poems imbued with syntax:

whistling in the street a car turning in the room ticking

This is but a line, but it is filled with cinematic jump cuts. Our attention is redirected after every few words when another image is slipped into the sequence, ending not with resolution, but with continuity (ticking). The poem doesn’t end so much as suggest movement forward.

All of his pwoermds, collected together (by me, below) into a “Complete Pwoermds of Aram Saroyan,” suggest a wider range of styles than I had remembered:

from Aram Saroyan (1968):

eyeye

*

lighght

*

morni,ng

*

Blod

*

    ’
aren’t
from Pages (1969):

priit

*

aaple

*

lobstee

*

torgh

*

Alice
from Short Poems:

a d j
u s t
men
t . .

*

suc
cess


*
t













                                                                                                                                              i













                                                      n













                                                                                                y

*

    y
ou

from “Electric Poems” (1972):

j;u;n;g;l;e

*

    pagne
cham.

*

eatc.

*

nnausea

*

z/o/x

*

Judd…

*

Shakespeare!

from The Rest (1971):

leukemia

*

guarantee

*

hghgh

*

noom

*

waht

*

REMIEIMBER

*

FAICE

*

Picassc

*

oxygen

*

gum

*

eights†
Numbering thirty or thirty-one (depending on whether “eights” is actually meant to stand alone), this is a small oeuvre, yet giant in the field of pwoermdy. His two classic pwoermds appear at the beginning (“eyeye,” “lighght,” etc.). Much of Saroyan’s career is built upon these poëmots, and the reason is their insistence of treating words as physical objects, series of letters, the DNA which he can fiddle with to devise gene-spliced masterpieces. But he continues beyond these experiments, producing poems that depend on capitalization for their effects (“Blod,” “FAICE,” etc.) or typographic placement of letters (“you,” “tiny,” “adjustment,” etc.) or simple presentations of simple words (“oxygen,” “leukemia,” etc.) or names (“Alice,” etc.) or that use punctuation to make their points (“aren’t,” “morni,ng,” etc.). At their core, these are all games with words, little attempts to open our eyes to meaning and reality.

There’s a bit of real visual poetry (of the concrete variety) in this book as well, though even the pwoermds and most of the other poems would count as concrete poems in 1960s terms. Included here are his famous poem “crickets,” his “poster-poem” (a three-legged m that I now see was never burdened with a title in its original printing), and this most deft of his classic concrete poems:

....
wwww
wwww
waww
wakw
wake
....
walw
walk
The opening w’s, which we cannot help but see as an extended opening to a URL, suggest breathing, snoring, movement, indistinguishable reality, and slowly transmute into something like wakefulness (as the poet pulls himself out of dream) only to morph into walking, a definite expedition into a new day.

Though minimalist, his textual poems often have a weird lyrical quality—something only rarely seen in the hard-edged intellectualized world of minimalist poetry. And the book ends as The Rest ends, with two little poems presented (we assume) in Saroyan’s own languid hand, one line to a page, the last poem comforting, or maybe not:

a bird flies by.

children scream.

Gailyn is doing the dishes.
Eventually, and maybe in the middle of the early experimentation that wrought these minimalist poems, Saroyan produced his most minimalist writing, a ream of paper, titleless‡ but stamped with a price, a perfect praecisio, a song to the singing of nothing. All minimalism tends towards praecisio, towards silence. It yearns for the tension caused by saying almost nothing to say everything you ever wanted to say.



















_____

Saroyan, Aram. Complete Minimal Poems. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007. (This book is the third installment of Ugly Duck Presse’s Lost Literature Series. I have one of the others in the series, and still need to figure out which I’m missing. The books are a joyful return to the past, and the service I received from this press was quick and professional. I’m glad to have my dining room table burdened with a couple of their books.)

* Right now, I’m ploughing through the Harry Potter series (one of my allowances for popular culture) because I need to have the plot of the whole story clear in my head for the last book. I’m reading 150 pages a night, which devours most of my free time. Plot is not usually of the greatest interest to me, yet these books subsist on plot and description of an imaginary world. There is some style to the books, though not of any particular interest to me.

† Which might, instead, be nothing more than the title to a sequence of exceptional short multi-word poems.

‡ Unless we are supposed to take © 1968 by Aram Saroyan to be the title.

ecr. l’inf.