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April 22: After being shocked to find out Aram Saroyan's book, Complete Minimal Poems won a major prize, I wrote the following to Ron Silliman's blog, Ron having been the judge responsible for the award: "Amazing, an important book has now won a major poetry prize in America. Thank you, Ron. Okay, I do believe a few other important poetry books have won important prizes here, but not many. As everyone who knows me knows, I've been a champion of what I call Aram Saroyan's 'infraverbal poems' for years, and admire his 'lighght' more than any other poem I know. So I have just one quibble with your words about your choice: Saroyan's book isn't just a book appropriate for an award named after William Carlos Williams--it is the best collection of poetry of 2008."
The award is an annual one given by the Poetry Society of America to a book published by a small press--that has entered the book in its contest, along with a submission fee of twenty dollars. It is unlikely that Saroyan's book got much competition. I'd be greatly interested in how it came to be published, and why its publisher entered it in a contest very few innovative poets have ever won. (Ivan Arguelles won it one year, a fine poet but only moderately innovative--and, I strongly, if politically-incorrectly, won it much more for his ethnic background than for his poetry, which should have won it without help.) I suspect Saroyan's publisher figured Saroyan's name might help, as well as his publication by many "real publishers," like Random House. Whatever the case, I am extremely pleased that it won--however unsettling it is for me that a book I actually bought, read with admiration, and reviewed won a prize English professors will be aware of.
About "lighght," now that it's come up again, I have a new sneer for those who look down on it: "Only someone with no sensitivity for the haiku moment that all the best minimalist poems climax to, or no capacity for dealing with two expressive modalities at once, or neither, will not experience with wonder and exaltation his first encounter with the equation Saroyan's 'lighght' instantly makes of the silent, mystically huge flow of light through space, a quantum-mechanical step at a time, with the silent expansion of the word 'lighght' across a page and mind, a textual step at a time. . . ."
The poem no longer delights me, for I've seen it too many times. But I am more convinced now than ever that it may be the best poem ever created--because among the hundred most effective poems of all time (an effective poem, in my poetics, being one that causes a significantly large amount of pleasure, as a poem), and among the hundred most important poems of all time (an important poem, in my poetics, being one that gives poets a significantly useful new poetic device, in this case the infraverbaphorization (i.e., infraverbal metaphorization) of textually-signified silence.
Urp, as I always say after I've been especially pretentious--to show that I'm not without some self-awareness.
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