Aram Saroyan: Selections

"M" is perhaps the very smallest of Aram Saroyan’s minimal or “instant” poems; in fact, it’s said to be one of the shortest published poems in the world! When you look at this poem, what do you see? Before you read further, take a moment and really look at it.

Study it as closely as you can. Try not to worry too much about the expectations or associations that might come with calling this piece a “poem” and give yourself a moment just to reckon with what your eye actually takes in. What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Looking at a poem in this way, rather than reading it, may seem strange. This process, though, is part of Saroyan’s intention for an “instant” poem like “m.”

This kind of seeing invites the reader to be a creative viewer, and to engage in the poem as an equal participant with the writer. “m” does not make sense in the same way a sentence does, or even a single word, but it still admits many different ways of being seen.

Aram Saroyan (1943–present) is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright famous for his one-word or “minimal” poems, a form he developed during the early and mid-1960s, and which is often linked to concrete poetry.

Introduction

Aram Saroyan’s poetry has long subverted readers’ expectations of what a poem can be. His minimal poems, the first of which were published in the 1960s, break linguistic expression down to the tiniest possible pieces: instead of lines or stanzas, some of the most extreme examples of “instant” poems are made up of a single word, or even a single letter. This extraordinary commitment to poetry at the smallest scale invites readers to consider a whole host of questions: What might a poem on the page and a piece of visual art have in common, if both can be taken in by the eye at a moment’s glance? What is the difference, if any, between reading and seeing? And what role does sound have to play in all this, especially when the reader is faced with a poem that may seem impossible to pronounce? Even in his non-minimal work, Saroyan’s writing is attentive to these questions about the sights and sounds of language, enlivened by his background in the theater and performing arts, his training in photography, and his ongoing drawing practice.

In the years following the somewhat scandalous success of Saroyan’s minimal poems, his literary output blossomed across genres, including more poems in verse and many books in prose. He also began a longstanding engagement with the visual arts (his late partner Gailyn Saroyan, whom he met at the tail end of his minimalist period, was an accomplished painter), a practice that continues to the present day.

In contrast with his minimal poems, which register in the reader’s eye and mind almost instantaneously, Saroyan’s longer poems often interrogate the very idea of time; an instant may transpire with such force that its clamor causes language to trail it, to “follow slowly / like thunder,” as in “At a Bus Stop.” Or, as in “The Clock in Literature,” language itself might lead a scene, bringing the reader slowly over eight sound-rich stanzas to the precipice of an unnamed character’s encounter with a “lissome / Dark-eyed angel.” Either way, Saroyan’s poems are at home in our eternal present, where screens and social media make us more aware than ever of the collective now we all share. The hope of the poet, Saroyan’s enduring and multifaceted oeuvre seems to suggest, is to give that now a name, a form, one somehow simultaneously fast and vast enough to keep (up with) it.

—Tom Snarsky

"M" (1968)

Let’s look at "M" again. Here are a few things I see in this poem:

• This poem looks like the letter “m” written with one extra “leg.”
• It almost looks like it could be an “m” and an “n” fused together.
• Looking more closely, you can tell that the “m” is analog and not digital; that is, it is not 100% symmetrical the way a computer typeface might be, and the last “leg” looks as though it’s at just a slightly different angle than the other legs, like—and here let’s be a little fanciful—it’s kicking outward, or maybe even walking away.
• The “m” appears to be written in what is sometimes called a “slab serif” or “block serif” font; the beginning downstroke of the “m,” along with the bottom of each of the legs, has a little serif marking, like a square attached to the end of the stroke. The serifs and the strokes connecting them give the “m” a look of surprising fullness.
• The spaces between the serifs at the bottom of the legs are all lined up in a row, so taken in visually all together they look a bit like one long rectangle that has been split into four parts—like a stick of butter or a blacked-out row in a crossword puzzle.
• By contrast, the arches at the top of the “m” look like they could be waves on the sea, or even a somewhat cartoonish depiction of an animal (snake, caterpillar, sea monster…).
• The serif at the top of the beginning downstroke of the “m” looks like it could be a head, and the serifs at the bottom of the legs could be feet, which would give the impression the “m” is on all fours—perhaps walking, or looking leftward. (One might ask: At what?)
• If you let yourself see the negative space of the “m,” concentrating on the white space around the letter rather than the letter itself, it looks almost like a little row of three popsicles, or even trees.

The above list is just a jumping-off point. You may have seen something completely different in the piece. When you look at “m,” what do you see?

Give yourself another moment to look at it, and don’t worry about whether your idea is too silly. As the list above shows, you can bring some ways of reading to a minimal poem that may seem trivial or frivolous, but are in fact testaments to how full of meaning even the tiniest poem can be. Saroyan himself describes the spirit of the minimal poem as playful and permissive, qualities that he attributes to his inspiring early correspondence and meeting with the poet Robert Creeley:

One question you might ask about this poem is how to read it aloud. When you look at it, do you say the name of the letter “m” in your head, so it sounds like “em”? Or do you make the “m” letter sound, so it sounds like “mm”? Or something else entirely?

All of these options are correct and rich with associative possibility, just like the many different ways we could “see” the extra-legged letter. The “em” sound is sometimes used as an abbreviation for “them” (“Go get ’em”), which is a fun visual rhyme with the letter’s many legs—like the poem itself is pointing to their plurality using sound. The humming sound “mm” is a comforting drone that the poem elongates visually, the extra leg like a held note in music. It feels like no coincidence that Saroyan was writing his minimal poems in the heyday of drone music and the Fluxus movement, which explored extreme duration and minimalism in sound. The work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets similarly explores how language can be taken apart from standard schemes of meaning and used to entirely new ends in poetry. In a similar nod to plurality that we heard with the “’em” pronunciation, there is also the fact that, when you hum a song—even if it contains every possible note!—you can do it while making only one letter sound underneath all those different pitches: mm... With a small imaginative effort, this little letter can contain a whole sonic world.

“lighght” (1968) & “cham./pagne” (1967)

Like “m,” these two poems involve taking a very small unit of language, changing something about it, and inviting the reader to see and hear it differently. One way that “lighght” and “cham./pagne” are different from “m” is that they work at the level of the individual word rather than the individual letter. When you first read them, you probably read each as a word, at first, but with something off-kilter about it: a few extra letters, a period, an unexpected line break.

Let’s start with “lighght,” a poem that has a surprisingly contentious history for such a small work. How could a poem of only seven letters rile up so many people? One reason might be that this poem flies in the face of our typical reading experience of a poem.

Paradoxically, “lighght” reads too quickly and too slowly at once: too quickly in the sense that your eye passes over it instantly, like a camera flash, nowhere near the minute or more it might take to read some traditional poems, during which readers can settle into a cadence even if they don’t understand the writing right away. But “lighght” has an essential slowness, too, in that after your eye moves through the word it has nothing else to linger on, no next line to get to: it gets stuck on the single almost-word, like the imprint on your retina of a bright light you looked at for too long that won’t go away.

What is it, exactly, we’re looking at, that our eye can’t move away from? An extra “gh” in the word “light” seems simple enough, but upon reflection (pardon the pun) it suggests some surprising things. First, “g” and “h” are both consonants. Taken on their own, they are associated with definite sounds, like the hard “g” in “glow” or the aspirated “h” in “hot.” But together, in “light” and other words like it, they annihilate each other sonically, adding nothing to the sound of the word except lengthening the “i” (compare “light” with “lit” to hear the shortened “i” sound we would default to if the “gh” wasn’t there). So, the presence of the second “gh” in “lighght” is a kind of reassertion—that something silent is still present, and can be seen even if it isn’t heard.

Hearkening back to “m,” there is also the shape of the letters themselves to think about: “g” extends below the written line and “h” stands up above it, so “gh” almost looks like one trough and crest of a wave. “ghgh” accentuates this effect, giving typographical representation to two wavelengths, hinting at the physical fact that light can, in many contexts, be understood as a wave. Saroyan is deeply interested in the quantum and relativistic physics of energy and light; as he says in his interview:

In contexts where the wave theory of light can’t be reconciled with our best physical understanding of the world, sometimes physicists consider light as a particle called a photon: a subatomic dot, like the conspicuous period in the middle of “cham./pagne.” Like “lighght,” this poem also uses vertical space in a playful, figurative way: although most poems break the line such that the reader continues down, visually, to the next, in “cham./pagne” the line breaks up—like a cork popping and flying into the air. (One is reminded of Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins singing “A Spoonful of Sugar,” in which her voice goes up as she sings the word “down.”) The period in the middle dramatizes that small, suspenseful moment where a room full of people at a party watches someone open a celebratory bottle, their silent collective pause just before the pop.

“cham./pagne” is evidence that minimal poems don’t have to operate only on an abstract, philosophical level: they can also be like little plays, almost like cartoons depicting real situations. Just as we saw with “m,” that playfulness doesn’t preclude them from being read seriously: set up and away from the rest of the word, the reader can directly connect “pagne” to its homonym “pain,” which could be gesturing to the risk of an accident (champagne corks are responsible for about a fifth of eye injuries related to bottle tops) or something a bit more subtle, more general. If you have ever been sad at a party, like you are floating just above the collective experience of merriment enacted by the bodies around you, perhaps you can imagine how a small, playful poem ostensibly about a moment of celebration can still carry a little melancholy.

“ly ly ly ly” (1968) & “all all all all” (1971)

One compositional tool available to the minimalist poet is repetition. As with the repeated “gh” in “lighght,” these two poems repeat small strings of letters—the word “all” and the almost-word/suffix “ly”—four times each, with the instances arranged to form a square. The square shape suggests a frame, like the reader is at a museum, and the page is a gallery wall; in this metaphor, the poet is less a writer than a kind of architect or curator, arranging the reader’s experience in space.

Although these poems date back to the 1960s, concurrent with Saroyan’s minimalist period, they are entirely consonant with how Saroyan understands himself and his creative practice now—as a visual artist first:

These poems are also amenable to the kinds of readings we tried above of “m,” “lighght,” and “cham./pagne,” emphasizing what we see in the poems and what we hear in them. Looking at both poems, together, it is striking to see 12 lowercase L’s between them, and in the chosen typeface it is almost impossible to distinguish a lowercase L from a number 1. (Perhaps there is a bit of political commentary in the choice to repeat a letter that looks like a “1” and can be written with a single stroke—in this way a small poem is like a tiny society, made up of individual letters.)

Repetition also has a numerical aspect that creates different kinds of visual puns than are possible with non-repeating poems. When we talk about a “four ‘all’” poem, we are immediately in a language space familiar to any American student: the end of the Pledge of Allegiance, “with liberty and justice for all.” There is also a bit of meta-commentary in this moment, in the form of a small joke about the reception of Saroyan’s poems themselves: “all all all all” appeared in The Rest (1971), by which point Saroyan had been publishing minimal poems for several years (and the “lighght” affair had already happened, three years prior). To suggest that minimal poems are, in fact, fo(u)r all was to reassert the uniquely broad appeal made possible by the instant poems’ scant linguistic resources, even in the face of several years’ worth of bad-faith reactions and misunderstandings of Saroyan’s work.

Since his minimal poems could sometimes occasion fiery blowback, Saroyan is especially grateful to editors who took a chance on them, including Poetry’s editor from 1955–1969, Henry Rago:

Saroyan and other mid-century poets experimenting with minimalism used the unique gestures of their art to cast a wide net that included very big ideas of politics and aesthetics despite being contained in almost impossibly small vessels.

“Poem Recognizing Someone in the Street” (1969)

This poem makes use of a considerably broader vocabulary than the poems we have considered thus far; the nine distinct words (counting the title, “ey,” “he,” & “hey”) of “Poem Recognizing Someone in the Street” feel like an embarrassment of riches after “m” or “lighght.” However, it shares with Saroyan’s other minimal work an intense focus on a single perceptual moment. While the first few poems we looked at seemed to focus their attention on a moment of the reader’s perception, encountering the one-word or one-letter poem and glitching a little at the way the letter/word varied or hiccuped or repeated, this poem seems more concerned with a moment in the life of an imagined speaker, and in this way is closer to the classic lyric-poetic tradition: the reader can even begin to make out some classical literary elements like character, narrative, and setting.

We can imagine the scene: a speaker, walking along on the sidewalk, looks up and sees someone they might recognize (“e y ?”). The figure moves closer and they think it might be a particular person they know, a “he,” but a line break dramatizes their fractured perception and continued uncertainty; they’re not yet sure of the person’s identity (“h / e ?”). Perhaps with increased proximity, or because they look directly at the person so their perception is no longer split, they recognize the “he” in one whole glance, unbroken on one line (“h e”). Finally, they decide to greet the titular “Someone” (“h e y !”).

The spacing out of the characters in “ey,” “he,” and “hey” simultaneously emphasizes two things: the distance between the poem’s two imagined characters, and the step-by-step process of perception, cognition, and eventual recognition the speaker undergoes as the poem progresses and concludes. The sense of time here feels a little different from what we saw in “cham./pagne”: it takes only a visual instant to see “cham./pagne” in its entirety, and then we could read a small scene back into it. By contrast, the long title and three lines of “Poem Recognizing Someone in the Street” invite us to give more time to the reading process itself. We can even use the same process we would with a more traditional poem, letting our eyes move left to right and down the page while its individually spaced characters pass before us in linear time, like frames of a film.

“[Poem]” (1964) & “The Clock in Literature” (2015)

One of the strongest forces across Saroyan’s minimal and non-minimal work is simultaneity. Even if we can’t parse or explain every aspect of a poem or experience all at once, we do encounter them all at once, like suddenly coming face to face with all the stars in the night sky; poems are traces of our efforts to make sense of all these things as they pass by us, or through us.

When first printed in Poetry in June 1968, “[Poem]” consisted of thirty instances of the word “night,” all together on the same line: fifteen on each page of a two-page spread. This is night as a horizon, a site of both the calm monotony of sleep and the endless, vibrant possibility of nightlife, the ecstatic way it can take us out of our day-selves and into a new ease and freedom only possible after dark. This tension feels essential to what night is: it comes every day in a predictable rhythm, but what happens when it arrives is the spontaneous stuff of life, of creation.

In My Own Avedon, a prose text Saroyan wrote about his experience working for the renowned photographer Richard Avedon when he was a teenager, Saroyan describes Avedon’s technique for settling a model into a shoot:

he could take more or less continuous shots of his subject.…he would kick-start a session, it seemed to me, by taking photographs mostly for the purpose of putting his subject at ease, to establish an ambience of permission and approval. Then as the subject grew progressively freer, more relaxed and comfortable, he no longer needed to flatter or cajole by means of the shutter and would now be tracking to get the photograph.

In “[Poem],” the word “night” repeats like a lullaby, but it also feels a little like Avedon’s shutter, easing the reader into a sense of comfortable rhythm that also enables new forms of perception. Reading the poem aloud it is impossible not to hear the phrase “night-night,” its singsongy gloss on “good night,” a little wish for sweet dreams that one could easily imagine a parent saying to their young child before turning out the light.

The way sound operates in Saroyan’s non-minimal poems is not altogether different from how it works in the minimal ones. Obviously “[Poem]” (“night night night…”) involves lots of repeated long “i” sounds, one after the other, but so in its way does “The Clock in Literature”: “mind,” “wife,” “like,” “rise,” “spied,” “antihero” (depending on your pronunciation), “light,” “bright,” “I,” “might,” and “eyed.”

As the narrative of “The Clock in Literature” unfurls, these sounds act as a kind of sonic metronome, their regularity a way of keeping time in the poem. They are also an interestingly gendered index of identity: the poem has three male figures, each referred to using stable phrases (“the husband,” “the antihero,” and “the old man at table”). Each of these male figures speaks in the poem, and each uses the word “I” at least once.

By contrast, the poem’s lone female figure doesn’t speak, but instead takes on three different aspects or descriptions as the poem goes on: “the young wife” (with its long “i” sound), the “suddenly risen girl” (with now two short “i” sounds), and lastly “the lissome / Dark-eyed angel” (one short “i” and one long “i” sound, the latter of which has been ciphered into the word “eyed,” playing on the fact that this character is seen and described but never heard from directly in the poem). Like the soundtrack of a film, the sounds in Saroyan’s poetry add layers of rhythm, complexity, and characterization to the work.

“The Collected Works” (1965)

When I first read this poem, I laughed out loud, and then I looked at it again in awe.

“The Collected Works” is a paradigm case of the found poem, taking the layout of a standard typewriter keyboard and turning it into a work of art. It shows us something we have probably seen many times—think for a moment about how many keyboards, physical or virtual, you encounter in your own life on a daily basis—but in the new, attentive light of looking at a piece of art. (Isn’t it strange, too, how this mix of alphanumeric and other symbols, in a seemingly random-ish order, is instantly recognizable?)

The closest analog to this piece probably isn’t another poem at all: it might have more in common with strains of twentieth-century art, like Duchamp’s readymades or Jim Dine’s colorfully-painted sets of tools—and the typewriter is, indeed, the 1960’s writer’s toolkit par excellence. Just as Robert Creeley gave Saroyan “permission” to attempt his early minimal poems, Saroyan credits avant-garde visual art with showing him he could explore found poetry:

You may notice that there is no number “1” key. The reader’s eye is also drawn to the fact that the four lines of keys are not quite perfectly even: there is an empty space at the end of the fourth line, which may be a stand-in for the space bar but may also be a gentle gesture at the way even “Collected Works” will always be incomplete. There will always be the unpublished writings, the destroyed canvases, all the parts of a creative oeuvre lost to history.

The piece was first published in 1965, only a year after Saroyan’s debut as a poet, but cheekily gestures at a whole poetic career (and one of no small interest, since the very existence of a “Collected Works” presupposes an audience who deems them worth collecting). The poem is not, of course, a literal compendium—a map of typewriter keys is no more a poet’s total output than a key is a car. But as Emily Dickinson wrote, Saroyan’s poem is a way to “dwell in Possibility”: the poem hums with the potential of, at least theoretically, any poet’s work (which a typewriter could (re)produce, or at least approximate), up to and including the proverbial monkeys tapping away for indefinitely long to generate the complete works of Shakespeare.

There is a possible world in which Saroyan’s minimal poems could have disappeared from public consciousness, one foray among many into the experimental poetics of the 1960s and ’70s. But interest in Saroyan’s innovations in the small poem would only grow, especially as more young poets and artists encountered Saroyan’s work and found in it the permission to experiment with minimal forms in their own work. In 2007, 42 years after “The Collected Works” first appeared in Lines, Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems would be published by Ugly Duckling Presse, winning the William Carlos Williams award for 2008. This triumphant return, portended in its oblique way by “The Collected Works,” seems only fitting for a body of creative work that has inspired so many subsequent generations of artists and poets to dream big by working small.