Aram Saroyan

During the 1960s Aram Saroyan experimented with concrete poetry, and ignited controversy after winning a National Endowment for the Arts poetry award for his one-word poem "lighght." 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).

THE MARCH

Since we knew parking would be a problem, Sheila drove Chloe and me as far up Highland as she could, to where the orange plastic barriers were arranged across the street, the ones that look like bullhorns. Chloe and I got out then and walked the block or so up Highland to Hollywood Boulevard and joined the march against the war, which was in full swing. We just stepped on board, and began walking toward La Brea.

There was a group behind us that had a drummer, so there was syncopation from the beginning. For the first time in weeks--years?--I was in step. There were a lot of freaks around, a multi-ethnic potpourri. Martin Sheen and Anjelica Huston and the others were up at the head. We were the rank and file, the great non-white or at least not-all-white majority.

I was wearing a little label I'd printed out that said "War Is Obsolete." I saw a placard up ahead that said "End Mad Cowboy Disease" and another saying "Thank you, France."

It was that feeling from the sixties--that a lot of us were together on this. It didn't matter that the country was being run by lunatics like a cutthroat corporation, because we knew the score. The word was out. They could commit crimes, kill people, get our own people killed, but we knew.

"This is cool," Chloe said. When we got to La Brea, we turned down toward Sunset, enveloped, a single big organism, chanting about the power of the people. And then back the other way on Sunset. After a while, Chloe and I cut up a side street back to Hollywood Boulevard. A little later I called Sheila on the cellular to tell her she could pick us up.

THE WAR

He suddenly became real, as did I
It was because our lives could be shot out
>From under us like a plane shot out of the sky
"They're strip-mining our country, these
Corporations," he would say. Maybe it did some good
To hear the unvarnished truth, instead of
The varnish of the Times, the editorials
Like hand rails for the elderly and frail
Of mind. The civic disorder was a
Kind of madness, all the citizens
Going their way for a biweekly paycheck
While these buffoons from a Bosch
Painting held sway in the international theater.