Complete Minimal Poems [Paperback]

Aram Saroyan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2007

Poetry. Visual Poetry. 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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933254254
• ISBN-13: 978-1933254258
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #704,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars eyeye, May 19, 2008

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Tony S. G. Green "Tony Green" (North Shore City, NZ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Complete Minimal Poems (Paperback)

' eyeye ' all by itself on a white page is the one-word poem I think of first when anyone says Aram Saroyan. At dinner recently a friend reminded me I tried doing poems like that a lot in the 70s. It's great to have the whole range of them assembled in one book. I've taken to carrying it around with me. It's fatter than a City Lights book. It goes in my bag, not my back pocket. it's a pleasure to sit over coffee teasing the poems out one after another. I'm really glad I don't get them all immediately. Minimal poems, one word, a few words, are slow to read. The possible contexts for the thought of them have to be envisaged. The more the narrative and imagistic recedes the more the syntax and the spacing and the arrangement of the letters become insistent. There's more of these poems than I knew back then. They are also easily memorable so go on working when the book is closed. It's powerful active art stuff for cleaning mould and stains in brains.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars not enlighghtening, January 21, 2011

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R. Randazzo "Bibliomaniac" (South Burlington, VT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Complete Minimal Poems (Paperback)

I'm a student of short-form writing: haiku, 6-word memoir, hint fiction, Twitter recipes, Fibonacci, Pollanisms, and more. So when I read The New York Times book review for Complete Minimal Poems, I was fascinated. The Times raved: "...the master of the one-word poem." "His ear is as sensitive and pleasure-hungry as his eye..." "This beautifully designed collection...shivers with itself, like something just born." I was sold.

I ordered it, read it, and wept at the waste of it all. Master of the one-word poem? One white page, one word: "Shakespeare!"

Here's another: "tinker-toy-dream".

And yet one more: "YOU YOU".

Aram Saroyan admits that he smoked a lot of grass at the time, and you can tell. But unless you want to read the poems on weed, I doubt you will find much to like. "Pool of fluff" anyone?

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (think pipettes inserted into tardigrades...) from Ahadada Books, March 27, 2008

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M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Complete Minimal Poems (Paperback)

A fascinating collection from an early minimalist, whose experimental forays inside individual words (think pipettes inserted into tardigrades/ nano windmills raised on molecular landscapes erected with the aid of electron microscopes), paved the way for today's storming of the citadels of poetic form.