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WINNER OF THE 2008 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD from the Poetry
Society of America, selected by Ron Silliman
"Anyone interested
in art made from words should have it." —The
New York Times Sunday Book Review
Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies
and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet,
Aram Saroyan’s
groundbreaking concrete and minimalist poems of the 1960s
are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. Complete
Minimal Poems includes the entire contents of Aram
Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The
Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan’s contribution, “Electric
Poems,” to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman,
1972), and a sequence, “Short Poems,” which hasn’t
appeared previously. With ties to the work of such writers
and artists as e.e. cummings, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein,
Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Steve Reich, Complete
Minimal Poems confirms Aram Saroyan’s place
among the most daring and engaging figures in modern poetry.
Complete Minimal Poems is the third
installment of UDP's Lost Literature Series.
ARAM SAROYAN is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer,
memoirist and playwright. His poetry has been widely anthologized
and appears in many textbooks. Among the collections of his poetry
are Aram Saroyan and Pages (both Random House).
His largest collection, Day and Night: Bolinas Poems, was
published by Black Sparrow Press in 1999. 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; Trio: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship;
The Romantic, a novel that was a Los Angeles Times Book
Review Critics' Choice selection; a memoir, Friends in the World:
The Education of a Writer;
and the true crime Literary Guild selection Rancho Mirage: An
American Tragedy of Manners, Madness and Murder.Selected essays,
Starting Out in the Sixties, appeared in 2001, and Artists
in Trouble: New Stories in early 2002.
The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts poetry awards
(one of them for his controversial one-word poem "lighght").
Saroyan is a past president of PEN USA West and a current faculty
member of the Masters of Professional Writing
Program at USC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Gailyn
Saroyan.
_______
In the late
60s, when I called myself a poet, Aram was the poet I envied.
Because you couldn’t be sure if he was fooling or
if he had really gotten to all there is to get. Because
while the rest of us tried to be verbs, like everybody told
us to do, he had the nerve to stop at nouns. Because
he took a deep breath and willed himself into the self-confidence
of naming. Because it wasn’t ‘nouns,’ it
was ‘noun,’ only one noun, because he boiled
it all down to one. Because then he let himself go, he let
himself stutter, he let the one go and let the one double
and go out of focus: while the rest of us ran for our lives
all over the place and over the page, his noun shimmered
and breathed and trembled and moved—shh!
softly, softly—from within.
—Vito Acconci
Aram Saroyan’s minimal poems have
grown to legendary status since their disappearance from
bookshelves some three decades ago and their reemergence
is a cause for celebration. In these elegant works, Saroyan
anticipated the next thirty years of poetry:
the rigor claimed by Language writing, the iconic visuality
of e-poetry & web aesthetics, and
a melding of process & ideas that influenced the current
crop of conceptual writers. This book is now.
—Kenneth Goldsmith
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