Poet Aram Saroyan reflected in 1999 on his early publishing history:
“Over thirty years ago, in the dark, violence-riddled spring of 1968, Random House brought out my first book of poems. Actually, that’s not quite the case; I should say that they published my first mainstream book of poems, since, like many New York poets of my generation, I was active in the small press scene chronicled recently in the New York Public Library’s exhibit and book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. What was distinctively different about that April publication was that now I could walk Manhattan with my typewriter-page-size book, printed in typewriter facsimile, in virtually every bookstore that I passed. The book, called only Aram Saroyan, comprises thirty minimal poems, also without titles, and can be read easily from cover-to-cover [here on the web — FmH] in a minute or two.
Soon after it appeared, in fact, the book was read from cover-to-cover, on the local Six O’Clock NBC News, by Edwin Newman wearing his cultural commentator hat. My editor at Random House, Christopher Cerf, alerted me to this unprecedented phenomonon—which I had missed*—with a certain astonishment but with his perennial good cheer. In the Art News Annual of that year, John Ashbery noted his surprise at catching the event, and then remarked ruefully that, since the media was wont to pass from ‘put down to panegyric without an interval of straight reportage,’ he expected that I might soon be appearing on the Johnny Carson Show with Andy Warhol and the rest of the avant-garde.
That was not to be, needless to say. I was 24 years old, just wading into the deeper waters of a relationship that would lead to my marriage that fall, regularly seeing a psychoanalyst, and more than a little troubled by the phenomonon of my book. For one thing, in stalwart sixties fashion, I wasn’t certain whether it was correct to be published by a mainstream publisher at all. Simultaneously, and in seeming contradiction, I was troubled by the fact that while the book was selling well for a book of poems, the ratio of copies sold to the numbers of readers who read the volume cover-to-cover while in the bookstore, as evidenced by the increasingly soiled condition of many of the unbought copies, was easily ten to one. While one might congratulate oneself on thereby undercutting corporate profits, at the same time one was a near-penniless young poet who could have used a royalty check. The longest poem, the first, goes:
a man stands
on his
head one
minute–
then he
sit
down all
different
This fourteen-word opener is followed by 29 more poems, scarcely any of which exceed a dozen words, and a number of which are only one word. Of the latter, the most notorious is probably this one:
lighght
Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award of $750 after its appearance in The Chicago Review, this poem seems to have induced in Jesse Helms, among others, a state of apoplexy that has yet to abate in, lo, these thirty years hence. In my own defense, one wonders if Mr. Helms and other members of Congress who haven’t taken kindly to my minimalist exposition of light in the sixties, are more warmly disposed in the universally celebrated artistic precincts of, say, Picasso.”
*More recently, on a small poetry mailing list to which I subscribe, he revealed more about the circumstances around his missing that reading of his first book of poems:
In a room at UCLA’s Special Collections Library, I’m set up with an old
fashioned spool-to-spool tape recorder in order to listen to a radio
interview I did one night in Morningside Heights thirty five years ago when
I was a sixties poet. I hear the voice that once was my own: the slow,
irritating, callow voice of my budding self.
Why am I doing this? I wonder. I’m 57, happily married, three times a
father, my children grown up, my father long gone to the hereafter, my
mother recently gone. Something must be sadly amiss for it to come to this
pointless self-scrutiny. Who was I? Or rather, who cares? Walking out of
the building into the evening chill of a warm November day in Los Angeles, I
feel belatedly apologetic toward the interviewer–a decent, stolid sort
saddled with this weirdo of post-modern manners. I owe him, and I haven’t
seen or heard from him since that fateful night.
I walk to my car parked on LeConte in the darkening twilight. The night the
radio program was broadcast in New York City, I took an all-night acid trip
with some friends in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. I’d eagerly
anticipated hearing my voice over the airwaves, and the opportunity, in my
altered state, to discover in it nuances that would otherwise be
unascertainable. As it turned out, my friend Derek had not been able to
find the station that broadcast the interview–a lame excuse, yet another
signature of his passive aggressive jealousy, an old wearying story by now,
but not one I’d allow to interfere with the psychedelic main event of the
evening.
What a great favor poor Derek had done me. I find 12 minutes left on the
two hour meter where I parked. I would have hated myself, perhaps for the
entire intervening 35 years, had I listened to the interview that night.
Instead I focused on the grain of the parquet floor, and saw slowly emerge
from it, a tiny, stately procession–on floats–of Semite kings bedecked
with crowns and scepters.
I wake up in the middle of the night, still roiling with inner torment.
With my head cushioned against my upper arm, lying full-length on the floor
of that third-floor apartment on the corner of Avenue A and Sixth Street,
how I had scrutinized the extraordinary detail of those Semite kings. A Jew
on acid, I think, and the words “camp concentration” come to me. In the
dark, I reach out for my notebook and pen by the bed.
