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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, April 18, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="276" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/rp9GimRA-xgya32-VuJ61QYDTF9U_dNZIwCq7VEe-56Hfg0YVYAMq1sx0IM0ENHF3NYN3NDuMNZHqgNl0sC1a5JR_C1U5v8%3Ds0-d" width="168"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I was planning on running this note next Tuesday, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>after </i>the awards ceremony dinner on Monday. But as Ugly Duckling <span class=SpellE>Presse</span> has already posted a notice on its website &amp; sent an email to its list, I&#8217;m running it today. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Here is my statement, as it will appear in the awards ceremony program on Monday, April 21<sup>st</sup>, giving the William Carlos Williams Award to Aram Saroyan for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/page-Complete.html"><span style='color:black'>Complete Minimal Poems</span></a> </i>from Ugly Duckling <span class=SpellE>Presse</span> of Brooklyn:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published<em><span style='font-family:Verdana'> Kora in Hell </span></em>in 1920 and the complete version of <em><span style='font-family:Verdana'>Spring &amp; All</span></em> three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan's minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake, even as they too went out of print and stayed that way for over thirty years until Ugly Duckling <span class=SpellE>Presse</span> of Brooklyn seized the opportunity to make them available again. Like all miniaturists, Aram Saroyan uses the poem as a giant magnifying glass on the language of our lives and the processes we use to understand this. A work like &quot;<span class=SpellE>Blod</span>&quot; - that's the entire text - calls up not merely the words blood and <span class=SpellE>bod</span>, but all the sexuality that truncated latter term conveys, refusing to settle on one side or the other. Reading <em><span style='font-family:Verdana'>Complete Minimal Poem</span></em>s, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan's sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As I noted when I submitted this to the folks at the PSA, I think that the William Carlos Williams Award is the perfect prize for this book, and that this book is the perfect selection for this prize. The synergies just don&#8217;t get any better. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Here is a poem from the book that I recommended also <span class=GramE>be</span> included in the awards ceremony program:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img border="0" height="123" id="_x0000_i1026" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/C62ubUIpnaIQaIhrQl2jveY3SOADlAaRV1sZP25OVAlNlaL_wBQHHlXMdMfqyibOm13Np3xPmUM3UDrb8klqhvM26ZKjKaa6DhEzuFlS-nxT%3Ds0-d" width="156"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That borders on being visual poetry, as do a number of works in this extraordinary book. I wondered at the time if a visual poem had ever been included in a PSA program before. And I wonder even now if readers will recognize the ways in which this very brief poem engages the oldest of literary devices, rhyme. One of the things I like about it is the way it makes clear that visual poetry &amp; &#8220;poetry&#8221; <span class=GramE>are</span> not entirely separate genres. Other poems here echo the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Not a<br>
cricket<br>
<br>
ticks a<br>
clock<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nor am I imagining the connection. There is at least one work in this volume explicitly dedicated to &#8220;L.Z<span class=GramE>..&#8221;</span> One thing this larger collection really accomplishes is to spell out just how rich &amp; various Saroyan&#8217;s different strategies were with such a densely compact canvas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Complete Minimal Poems </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>contains the work from three books that appeared between 1968 &amp; 1971, two of them from Random House. A fourth section appeared as part of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>All Stars, </i>in 1972. A fifth is gathered into book form here for the first time. When Saroyan received an NEA grant for his work, he was the subject of fulminations from various <span class=SpellE>Babbits</span> on the floor of Congress. Indeed, it was probably the NEA&#8217;s first scandal. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As a result, Saroyan took the heat for an awful lot of writing that would come after, which could not have been fun. By the early 1970s, he&#8217;d done what he wanted with this form &amp; moved on. But these works stand <span class=GramE>on their own</span> almost shockingly well. Since I&#8217;ve never met him<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>(I suppose it&#8217;s conceivable that we&#8217;ve been at the same event at some point, tho I&#8217;m not aware of it) I&#8217;ve never had the opportunity to thank him for opening up the landscape so broadly. I was only one of dozens &amp; dozens of poets who benefited from these poems. The William Carlos Williams Award seems like the perfect opportunity to note just how important these poems have been.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, May 21, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='color:black'><img height="123" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/C62ubUIpnaIQaIhrQl2jveY3SOADlAaRV1sZP25OVAlNlaL_wBQHHlXMdMfqyibOm13Np3xPmUM3UDrb8klqhvM26ZKjKaa6DhEzuFlS-nxT%3Ds0-d" width="156"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of my reluctance in 1970 to include Bob Grenier in the &#8220;15 New Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area&#8221; feature that David Melnick &amp; I edited for the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chicago Review, </i>an old acquaintance &amp; longtime editor writes that<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>there was really no need in late 1970 to be afraid of bob <span class=SpellE>grenier's</span> minimalism: </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>aram</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> <span class=SpellE>saroyan</span> was already there<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It was, of course, impossible <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>to know about Aram Saroyan circa 1970. Random House had published his eponymous volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/ARAM/aram.html"><span style='color:black'>Aram Saroyan</span></a>, </i>(in which the poem above appears) in 1968, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/PAGES/pages.html"><span style='color:black'>Pages</span></a> </i>one year later. How many other experimental poets were getting books published &amp; widely distributed by </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> trade presses back then? Clark Coolidge&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/SPACE/space.html"><span style='color:black'>Space</span></a>, </i>published by Harper &amp; Row in 1970&#185;, <span class=GramE>was</span> really the only other one. If you knew about the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, you knew about Aram Saroyan. Ditto if you paid attention to the conceptual poetics that seemed to be emerging from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/page-0-9.html"><span style='color:black'>0 &#8211; 9</span></a>, </i>the journal co-edited by Vito Acconci &amp; Bernadette Mayer, tho that was, at the time, a much more fugitive endeavor. And, of course, when Saroyan got a grant from the NEA, some congressman read some of his work, perhaps &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Blod</span>&#8221; (a one-word poem, if, that is, <span class=SpellE>Blod&#8217;s</span> a word) into the Congressional Record with all the rhetorical froth we would expect today from Bill O&#8217;Reilly. Finally, the name Aram Saroyan inevitably rang bells simply because, for my generation &amp; at least in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>California</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, William Saroyan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Aram"><span style='color:black'>My Name is Aram</span></a> </i>was as predictably a part of the high school curriculum as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Things Fall Apart </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Beloved </i>are today. <span class=GramE>That the title character&#8217;s name in the book is not Saroyan, or that the poet was born three years after <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>My Name is </i></span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class=SpellE><span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Aram</span></i></span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class=SpellE><span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s</span></i></span></span><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> initial publication, were just details.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But, as I replied, I was pretty sure that, in 1970, I wouldn&#8217;t have included Aram Saroyan in that grouping either. His conceptual poetics were perceived, I think, as a satire on publishing and poetry itself, witty &amp; fun perhaps, but decidedly &amp; willfully outré. And outré was not what <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chicago Review </i>was about in that era. While it published some experimental fiction, thanks to editor Eugene Wildman, in poetry the journal struck Melnick &amp; I as being anxious about its status as a &#8220;major&#8221; college-based publication, which meant in practice that they were not looking for Aram Saroyan but the next Sylvia Plath. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Besides which, what Saroyan &amp; Grenier were doing at that time were not exactly identical, a distinction that might have been lost because both used exceptionally short forms &amp; were often paired in the minds of readers &amp; editors with Clark Coolidge. Grenier&#8217;s best known work from this period is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sentences, </i>published originally by <a href="http://www.whalecloth.org/"><span style='color:black'>Whale Cloth Press</span></a> in an edition of 500 cards delivered in a box, but now online at the Whale Cloth site. Saroyan&#8217;s work has been online also, principally at the Eclipse website, but now is available in a fat &amp; sumptuous edition from <a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/"><span style='color:black'>Ugly Duckling <span class=SpellE>Presse</span></span></a> under the title <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Complete Minimal Poems. </i>At 275 pages, it&#8217;s just slightly over half the size of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sentences. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Saroyan&#8217;s work often seems to come out of the same conceptualism that drove <span class=SpellE>Acconci&#8217;s</span> work of that period. One poem in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Aram Saroyan, </i>the first of Saroyan&#8217;s minimal books, is a page of nothing but radio call letters. Another reads:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>STEAK<br>
<br>
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQURSTUVWXYZ<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A third contains the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>crickets </i>repeatedly typed, one word to a line, down an entire page. This is a type of poem almost entirely absent from Grenier&#8217;s work, which shows almost no interest in conceptualism. The closest Grenier gets to this mode is an occasional poem that functions at the <span class=SpellE>metacomment</span> level:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana; so-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>TWELVE VOWELS<br>
<br>
breakfast<br>
<br>
the sky flurries<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A second Saroyan type that comes closer to Grenier entails poems that utilize the graphic elements of language &#8211; the poem at the top of this note is a famous instance of this. As it does there, this kind of poem works when there is some intelligible connection &#8211; it doesn&#8217;t have to be articulatable &#8211; between what is going on the page and denotative &amp; connotative dimensions of the word at hand. Thus<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>eyeye</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>strikes me as effective precisely for the way it calls up the double-image element involved in stereoscopic vision, why humans see in 3D, whereas<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>lighght</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>just sits there on the page doing not much of anything. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Grenier likewise has works in <i>Sentences</i> that depend on their graphic presentation, such as this poem, which builds on a device &#8211; the s t r e t c h e d word &#8211; first developed by Paul Blackburn<span class=GramE>::</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>s o m e o l d g u y s w <span class=SpellE>i</span> t h s c y t h e s<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>At one level, this is a poem about the blank space, what Hugh Kenner liked to call the 27<sup>th</sup> letter of the alphabet (and certainly the last one &#8220;invented&#8221;) and how it cuts (or scythes) discrete words from the flow of speech &#8211; it a prerequisite for the existence of words at all. Yet there is a richness both of sound and image here that gives Grenier&#8217;s poem dimensions that simply aren&#8217;t active in Saroyan&#8217;s work. This is characteristic of Grenier, whose most common mode of <span class=SpellE>micropoetics</span> in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sentences </i>is a snatch of language that begins &amp; ends in atypical places, e.g.,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>yawns at solid<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>or <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>or the starlight on the porch since when<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Grenier&#8217;s use of the graphic dimension of language doesn&#8217;t really occur until much later, when he moves into his &#8220;<a href="http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&amp;d/grenier/lgrena00.htm"><span style='color:black'>scrawl</span></a>&#8221; works. In those pieces, tho, what seems to interest Grenier most is the making explicit of the &#8220;coming to recognition&#8221; process of <span class=GramE>reading.</span> He is really fascinated at the idea of identifying the instant a word &#8220;pops&#8221; into consciousness &amp; poem after poem functions to locate precisely this moment. I&#8217;ve often that Grenier comes closest to what I would call a cognitive formalism &#8211; using form to explore cognition, the mind as such. There are of course limits to this &#8211; one can explore that instant in which words appear, for example, but it would far harder to identify a gap that occurs, for example, when one can&#8217;t think of a term, even tho it is every bit as palpable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The place where Saroyan and Grenier completely overlap, not surprisingly, are in the poems that call up the relationship to what they&#8217;re doing as poets and the larger tradition of poetry, as such, especially the short poems of Louis Zukofsky &amp; the Robert Creeley of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>LOUIS<br> <br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>Noisy <br>
&#8220;Zukofsky&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Or <span class=GramE>this,</span> entitled &#8220;Placitas&#8221; and dedicated to L.Z.:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:4.2in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in;text-align:right'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The trees&#8217;<br>
noise of<br>
the sea<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Or this, entitled &#8220;POEM&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>One two<br>
three there<br>
are three are<br>
never seen<br>
again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>These three all are the work of Saroyan. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A word that turns out to be important to both poets is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>crickets. </i>Not only does Saroyan have a couple of poems that allude not just to the critter, but to the great summer drone of insects, one of Grenier&#8217;s <a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGEn5/pictures/001.shtml"><span style='color:black'>best known essays</span></a> explores the ways in which Keats&#8217; own use of the term &#8211; &#8220;hedge-crickets sing&#8221; &#8211; milk <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>words of all possible letter/phonemic qualities without really challenging notion of English word/morpheme as basic unit of &#8216;meaning.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My favorite of Saroyan&#8217;s several cricket poems is one that falls into the neo-<span class=SpellE>Zukofsian</span> category:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Not a<br>
cricket<br>
<br>
ticks a<br>
clock<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But when Saroyan moves away from this one area that he shares with Grenier, he goes back toward either a conceptual poetics and/or a </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> one. These two poems appear on facing pages in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pages</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>cat<br> book<br>
city<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ted <span class=SpellE>Ted</span> <span class=SpellE>Ted</span> <span class=SpellE>Ted</span><br>
Ted<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first depends entirely on scale of referents for its impact, something I can&#8217;t imagine Grenier ever <span class=GramE>doing,</span> the second may be a parody of the NY School&#8217;s (esp. Gen 2) penchant for name dropping. Or it might be the most NY School poem ever written.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Grenier&#8217;s default mode, in sharp contrast, tends toward documentation:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>of life days like<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>a port to a green<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>rain drops the first of many<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>repetitive bird and black<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Each of these four one-line poems can be read both as an instance of language-in-the-world and as a study in form. It requires an almost obsession focus on the language itself. With Saroyan, not so much:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Later<br> <br>
the atelier<br>
<br>
ate her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s not that Grenier does the <span class=SpellE>micropoem</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>better</i>, whatever that means, than Saroyan. Nor is it that Saroyan is the original, Grenier the copy. Rather, what each was seeking to find &amp; explore was ultimately something different about language &amp; the poem. Which suggests that even one-line poems can (are) so thoroughly stylized that one can discuss their relationship to different literary movements. This makes me wonder what a new formalist one-line poem would look like &#8211; not a couplet, not a haiku, but a real single-line work of art. How would it then enact its values? What would it be able to look, see, do in the world of poetry? Or is it simply the case that new formalism, so called, is by definition incapable of writing so focused? I&#8217;d love to see someone try. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; As part of Fran McCullough&#8217;s attempt to bring the second generation </span></span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New   York</span></span></st1:PlaceName><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></span><st1:PlaceType><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> out broadly through Harper.</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Other books published by Harper during that period included Tom Clark&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stones </i>(1969), his volume <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Air, </i>Dick Gallup&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Where I Hang My Hat </i>and Lewis Mac Adams&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Poetry Room </i>(all 1970). Then it stopped. Once Robert Duncan &amp; Robert Creeley left Scribner&#8217;s for New Directions, the publication of post-avant poets by the New York Trades largely came to an end, save for later collected editions of already canonic poets. The </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> had successfully defended what it saw as its turf. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text2', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text2'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
</script>
</body>
</html>