Customer Reviews

Complete Minimal Poems

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' 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.

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?

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.

As a minimalist poet, I was extremely disappointed with this book. Thankfully I did not purchase it, but borrowed it from the library. Occasionally there are a few good quips, but most of it is very bland. With Saroyan's background, I was expecting so much more!

There is no universally accepted definition of poetry. However, there is a universally accepted, or acceptable, definition of idiocy - a very low IQ; quantitatively below 60. Aram Saroyan qualifies. This volume of "poetry" lacks content, lacks imagination, lacks form, lacks substance, lacks metre, lacks rime, lacks rhythm, lacks insight, lacks continuity, but is lax in any redeeming element. If you have monay and time to waste, then this volume is for YOU!e