My first encounter with concrete and minimalist poetry came as an art exhibit in the late ‘60s. Maybe I already knew of otherwise traditional verse presented typographically to represent a visual image on a page – a vase or bird, perchance – but this time, the words themselves took on an independent visual wonder. Think of Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE as a cube of giant building blocks.
The writer I most appreciate in this field is Aram Saroyan, the son of a famed Depression-era novelist. Aram came to fame at age 20 with a one-word poem:
lighght
which became a source for right-wing scandal when it won a $750 award from the National Endowment of the Arts. As conservatives charged, it wasn’t spelled right and it wasn’t a real poem anyway. Things got ugly.
Others, me included, find it a vibrating both in the thought and the image. If that silent “gh” adds something to the sense of the word, either as illumination or as featherweight or even carefree, why shouldn’t two intensify the sensation?
It revives that wonder and puzzlement we’ve all felt, but many writers, I think, more keenly, when we first encounter many quirks of the English language but then later glaze past.
In this vein, Saroyan also has a playful
aaple
as another entry.
His small collection, Pages, has traveled from one side of the continent to another with me. A downside of these works is that they don’t work at an open mic or featured reading. They really do belong to the page.
For my own ventures along these lines, check out Sun Spots and Drumming at my Thistle Finch blog as well as the weekly Kinisi entries here at the Red Barn.
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