|
April 28: There's a piece on Aram Saroyan's prize-winning collection
HERE. It's from the Sunday magazine section of of The New York Times. Leave it to the Times to pounce on superior poetry once it wins a prize from a certified institution. The article is thin, but not too stupid, and reasonably entertaining. About as good as one could expect from the Times. Oddly, its author, the interestingly named Richard Hell, thinks one can't pronounce "lighght." The major aesthetic point of the poem, however, is that you can of course pronounce it. Hell also describes Saroyan as a concrete poet, but he has composed very few concrete poems. His pwoermds are rarely if ever concrete poems, by any rational definition of the term. The misspelled ones are infraverbal. They do linguistic things inside words. That's different from popping the o in "gloria" high, which is a visual act inside a word. Not that I expect anyone to see the difference, or consider it important. But I deem it my taxonomical responsibility to bring it up, anyway.
It would have been nice if Hell analyzed something of Saroyan's--to show why it was of value. Even nicer if he'd forerun it into those following Saroyan who have done important work influenced by Saroyan. Yeah, I'm saying the Times should have had me do the review. Fat chance. Nothing against Richard Hell, who may well have been able to write a better review but not allowed to.
What follows is Very Trivial. Thinking about the two instances of "gh" in "lighght" brought it into my head. All I can say is that I'm counting my work on it as my daily visit to Paint Shop--after skipping yesterday.
|
|
|
|
e.mail me HERE |
