Complete Minimal Poems

Aram Saroyan

POETRY  |  $20 $15

May 2007
OUT OF PRINT
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lobstee

Anyone interested in art made from words should have it.

Richard Hell

This edition is out of print. However, you can purchase the Second Edition here. 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

About the Author

Aram Saroyan is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. Among his books of poetry are Aram Saroyan and Pages (both from Random House) and the collection, Day and Night: Bolinas Poems (Black Sparrow, 1999). Saroyan is also the author of several books of prose, including 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: The Intimate Friendship of Oona Chaplin/Carol Matthau/Gloria Vanderbilt; The Romantic (a Los Angeles Times Book Review Critics’ Choice selection); Friends in the World: The Education of a Writer (a memoir); and Rancho Mirage: An American Tragedy of Manners, Madness and Murder (a true crime Literary Guild selection). The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts poetry awards (one of them for his controversial one-word poem “lighght”), Saroyan is a past president of PEN USA West. From 1996-2011 he taught in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and architectural historian Gailyn Saroyan.

Praise

Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since.

Richard Hell

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-933254-25-8
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 280 pp, 5.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: May 01 2007
Distribution: SPD
Series: Lost Literature #3