The column version of Saroyan’s “crickets” would go on to become a signature poem of Saroyan’s, as evidenced by this 1968 Paris Review advertisement that found Saroyan at the peak of his fame.Īccording to the author, the poem “was written in the spring of 1965 in an apartment building on East 45th in New York City, proving that crickets are powerful creatures, capable of penetrating New York City itself.” Interestingly, Saroyan repeats the word “crickets” about 33 times per minute - not far off from the 30 chirps per minute produced by the North American field cricket.
In the 1967 recording, the one word is repeated by Saroyan for 80 seconds, and it evokes that of which it speaks by onomatopoeia. The column of “crickets” (like “not a cricket”) should be listened to in order to be appreciated fully. The column version of “crickets” would go on to become a signature poem of Saroyan’s, as evidenced by a 1968 Paris Review advertisement that found Saroyan at the peak of his fame. ” Saroyan wrote three distinctly different cricket poems, two of which were recorded for LP. Zukofsky provided the epigraph for Saroyan’s journal Lines, and he may have partially inspired Saroyan’s “lighght,” as well as his “crickets / crickets / crickets. Creeley’s poems also became more minimal in the late 1960s, but never so minimal as a single word or a single word repeated. Perhaps the greatest influence on Saroyan’s minimal poems was Louis Zukofsky, to whom Saroyan had been introduced by another strong influence, Robert Creeley, in 1964. Saroyan, however, understood himself to be writing not as a concrete poet, but as a minimal poet. This expansive definition would include many notable concrete poems - for instance, Eugen Gomringer’s “silencio” or Finlay’s “ajar” or Mary Ellen Solt’s “Zinnia” - and my own rough estimate is that perhaps as many as 10 percent of concrete poems are primarily constructed of a single word.
Following Finlay’s lead, I too consider as one-word poems not merely a single word in isolation on the page, but a single word repeated per poem or per page (or other unit of publication) that is repeated (in whole or in part) as a series. All of the poems included in the issue featured a title, and most of the titles were longer than a single word. This is because we can’t have whole-world poems (we haven’t got one), but at the same time we should not despair of something with corners, such as making them, and opening them up.Īs can immediately be discerned from Finlay’s letter, the rubric “one-word poem” is slightly misleading. These are to be thought of as 2 straight lines, which make a corner (the poems will have form) while the paradox of these corners is, that they are open in all directions. The idea being that the poem consists of one word and a title. In July of that year, Finlay wrote to Saroyan - then only 24, but a leading practitioner of the form - that he intended to put together an entire issue of P.O.T.H. The one-word poem may in fact have rapidly reached the height of its popularity in late 1967 with the final issue of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s journal Poor.
Though the Oulipo’s founders may have been underinformed about concrete poetry, their skepticism is telling: Setting aside concrete poetry in the 1950s, it was not until the 1960s with the contemporaneous emergence of pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art that a single word or letter could be recognized as a poem. This article is adapted from Paul Stephens’ book “ absence of clutter: minimal writing as art and literature.” The two also seemed unaware of the work of Aram Saroyan, whose mid-1960s poems explored and broke the limits proposed by Queneau and Le Lionnais. Perhaps because their backgrounds were not primarily in experimental poetry or postwar art (Le Lionnais was a mathematician and Queneau primarily an editor and novelist), the two oddly overlooked concrete poetry, a form of visual poetry that uses the arrangement of words to convey meaning.
Even in 1976, they doubted that a poem could be constructed from fewer than several words. Writing in 1961, at the founding of the Oulipo ( Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) movement, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, two of France’s most significant postwar literary experimentalists, wondered to one another “how few words can make a poem?”Īccording to Le Lionnais, this question would preoccupy the two until Queneau’s death 15 years later. Jack Spicer, “Second letter to Federico García Lorca” A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
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