Aram Saroyan

Aram Saroyan's first mainstream book of poems, called Aram Saroyan, comprises thirty minimal poems, without titles, and can be read easily from cover to cover in a minute or two. Soon after it appeared in 1968, in fact, the book was read from cover to cover on NBC News by Edwin Newman. His latest books are Day and Night: Bolinas Poems and Artists in Trouble: New Stories (both Black Sparrow/Godine) and Starting Out in the Sixties, selected essays (Talisman).

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

In a room at UCLA’s Special Collections Library, I’m set up with an old fashioned spool-to-spool tape recorder in order to listen to a radio interview I did one night in Morningside Heights thirty five years ago when I was a sixties poet. I hear the voice that once was my own: the slow, irritating, callow voice of my budding self.

Why am I doing this? I wonder. I’m 57, happily married, three times a father, my children grown up, my father long gone to the hereafter, my mother recently gone. Something must be sadly amiss for it to come to this pointless self-scrutiny. Who was I? Or rather, who cares? Walking out of the building into the evening chill of a warm November day in Los Angeles, I feel belatedly apologetic toward the interviewer--a decent, stolid sort saddled with this weirdo of post-modern manners. I owe him, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since that fateful night.

I walk to my car parked on LeConte in the darkening twilight. The night the radio program was broadcast in New York City, I took an all-night acid trip with some friends in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. I’d eagerly anticipated hearing my voice over the airwaves, and the opportunity, in my altered state, to discover in it nuances that would otherwise be unascertainable. As it turned out, my friend Derek had not been able to find the station that broadcast the interview--a lame excuse, yet another signature of his passive aggressive jealousy, an old wearying story by now, but not one I’d allow to interfere with the psychedelic main event of the evening.

What a great favor poor Derek had done me. I find 12 minutes left on the two hour meter where I parked. I would have hated myself, perhaps for the entire intervening 35 years, had I listened to the interview that night. Instead I focused on the grain of the parquet floor, and saw slowly emerge from it, a tiny, stately procession--on floats--of Semite kings bedecked with crowns and scepters.

I wake up in the middle of the night, still roiling with inner torment. With my head cushioned against my upper arm, lying full-length on the floor of that third-floor apartment on the corner of Avenue A and Sixth Street, how I had scrutinized the extraordinary detail of those Semite kings. A Jew on acid, I think, and the words "camp concentration" come to me. In the dark, I reach out for my notebook and pen by the bed.

OLD POET