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A Conversation with Aram Saroyan

by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG

I grew up the son of a famous writer, grew up in his shadow in a general sense, except for two fortuitous graces ... the first, that astrologically speaking I had many planets in Leo and so I was absurdly full of confidence, when I wasn't struck numb with my own incapacities. And the other, and perhaps the decisive factor, was that I had the honor of being a member of the generation that came of age in the sixties.

- Aram Saroyan

The Los Angeles-based writer Aram Saroyan has recently released a collection of his prose entitled Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age. Son of William Saroyan, the publication of his Complete Minimal Poems was a 2007 sensation. In the following interview, we discuss his career as prose writer and poet, his writing process and the reverberations from 9/11.

YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG: What was your reaction to seeing so much of your work, spanning five decades, in one book? Did you have the urge to go back and edit some of your older work?

ARAM SAROYAN: I worked on Door to the River for years, putting things in and taking them out and making changes in the writing. And then when Susan Barba, the editor at Black Sparrow/Godine, accepted the book, she had some very good ideas, including cuts. As a follow up I sent her the political pieces and was really happy that she liked them because none of them had been published until now.

Your post-911 essays, "After Tuesday" and "After Two Weeks" are eerily prescient. What is your perspective on the Afghan War today?

That’s the one aspect of the Obama government that worried me right away. I admire him very much but I felt this militarist inclination in the administration that surprised me. It’s astonishing how much he’s accomplished, but I don’t believe in the wars.

There’s a great essay in this collection about Charles Bukowski and the style-over-substance aspect of his work, i.e. the drunken poet alone in his room with his typewriter. I love the suggestion that a writer doesn’t have to be alone, that it’s okay, even beneficial, for writers to go out in the world. Why does this notion persist that writers must necessarily be, as you say, “beleaguered?” How necessary is it to "be among" people in order to write successfully about and for them?

It may come down to temperament. Emily Dickinson managed to be a very great poet and lived her whole life at her parents address in Amherst. But then there’s Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg, who were generally up for everything and everybody. Gary Snyder is another wonderful poet of the larger world. And of course Bukowski had relationships and was happily married in his later years. I guess I was reacting to the Bukowski cult more than to Bukowski himself.

Do you think it takes young writers some time to understand that? That writing is not a persona, but a daily commitment, that it's work?

Everybody's a little different I think. At the beginning I really didn’t know where writing might lead me but I was attracted to certain kinds of writing and I would try to do something that resembled that writing. So I think you can begin with certain examples that you like or that engage or intrigue you in certain ways, and that might get you started, those initial influences may get you into the game. And later on it may turn out you’re more intrigued by other writers, but those first writers open the door and then you’re writing.

photo by Steven Keylon

Thinking about this idea, my favorite essay in here is the wonderful "Occupation: Writer." In your forties, circumstances required you to set writing aside and take up a job in a cubicle, which eventually led to a sort of personal writing renaissance. Do you think all writers would benefit from entering the world of the working? Your writing has such a genuine, optimistic quality. Can you attribute this in part to your choice not to write in isolation?

I’ve never been able to go into my room and write for the morning, then break for lunch, and then write again that afternoon. And I know there are many good writers who do. But that’s never been the way I work — or only very briefly when I wrote Last Rites in a kind of white heat in about three weeks when my dad was dying, but that was a special case and it never happened again. And at a certain point, as you say, things conspired to send me back into the 9 to 5 workplace and I think it refreshed me as a writer. Some other readers of the book have mentioned an optimistic feeling in it, including my friend Don Share at Poetry magazine, and it surprised me because I didn’t have any sense of that being there.

Will you share how you work? Do you have a working ritual?

It changes, depending on what I'm working on, but these days I usually do a first draft in hand in one of those lined school notebooks that you can buy at Staples. It’s a pretty messy draft because I’ll think of something when I reread it and put it over on the side or delete something — and usually I don't write much more than a single page at a time and the books I get are wide-lined so it's not a lot. And then when I’ve done let’s say four or five of those pages, I start to want to type it up so that I don’t have to decipher the hodge-podge into something coherent every time I read it through, and that’s when I type it onto a Word file. Then every time I read the file I'll change something, and if it’s a longer piece I continue to write it, usually in the notebook in hand before I type it.

There’s a beautiful scene at the end of "Occupation: Writer" where you describe a bus trip you once took, and the bus driver’s particular genius: calmly navigating a bus through hairpin mountain turns, creating a beautiful experience for the riders. Can you say more about the idea of genius being a flexible term?

That piece is a little story called “The Genius” (it’s in my book Artists in Trouble) that I tacked on at the end of the essay. You’re saying that genius isn’t necessarily confined to activities associated with the mind, and I agree. There are extraordinary dancers and great athletes. Or a musician like Pablo Casals or a composer like Gershwin. I don’t know where that comes from but it’s got to be coming out of the whole self, as I’m sure was the case with, say, Einstein and Freud, too. The critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote: "[All] that man undertakes to produce, whether by action, by word, or in any other medium, ought to spring from a union of all his faculties; and…productions springing from isolated faculties are, almost uniformly, worthless." I think that’s true and in fact that’s the epigraph for my previous book of essays, Starting Out in the Sixties.

Many of these essays discuss your time as a young poet in New York during the sixties. You spent time with so many of the elephants—Kerouac, O’Hara, Robert Creeley—while also crafting original work in your minimalist poems. Did writing and socializing as a young writer, in the company of these giants, enrich or hinder your creativity at the time?

Oh, it was great to meet and see all of them in action to varying degrees. And it maybe wasn’t as daunting as it might have been because I had my own family giant to deal with. And I think it’s great too when you’re young. I was really trying to figure out how to be whatever kind of person I actually was and these people were all like big clues along the path I’d set out on.

Was there anyone in particular that showed you the way, or had the most significant influence on you and/or your work?

For me, the initiating figure was Robert Creeley. Then there was the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and at the same time Ted Berrigan. And I should mention Allen Ginsberg’s early poems in Empty Mirror, which are so naked. I couldn’t believe he would write about himself so nakedly. But before those writers, before I was really thinking about being a writer myself, I loved Salinger — I guess everybody in my generation loved him. And I liked my father’s writing. I'm a slow reader so I was drawn to poetry at the beginning because I could read a complete work in one sitting and have a sense of the overall shape of it.

Do you think poetry is still a way of life? Were the constraints that you imposed upon your writing then, in your minimalist poems, at any one point the same as those you wanted then to live by?

I think that minimalism for me was a way to slow down and pay attention. I came out of a pretty chaotic family situation: both my parents, who were divorced when I was young, were big players in their own ways, and I felt the need to sort of shore myself up or I’d get swallowed up in their worlds. So writing and reading was a way to get into my own space as a person. There’s that myth of Theseus and the Gorgon Medusa. If he looks at her directly, he’ll turn to stone. So he looks at her reflected on his shield and he’s able to defeat her. That’s vocation to me: it’s a shield and a mirror and thus a way to move through the big bad world. Minimalism was a part of that at the beginning for me.

Aram and Gailyn Saroyan, St. Mark’s Church, 1969. Photo by Jayne Nodland

Assuming the poet must also teach in order to support herself, how much of oneself should be devoted to teaching and how much reserved for the practice of one's own art? Can the two usefully intertwine?

I started teaching in my forties, although I did a little in my twenties as a Poet in the Schools in the NEA program back in the 1970s in Massachusetts. I think it’s very demanding and very rewarding and a whole field unto itself. I don’t think it necessarily conflicts with being a writer. But again it may be a matter of temperament. I didn’t expect to become a teacher but it happened and I was glad it did.

I agree with your comment in "Poets of the Realm" that to be at home in oneself as an artist in America is a rare achievement. Why do you think this is so?

We live in this power-charged economic state: “capitalism with the brakes off,” Saul Bellow called it. Artists are like window dressing on the main action, and I think it’s easy to lose your balance or paint yourself into a corner. One of the advantages of seeing a lot of poets when I was young, and knowing other kinds of artists through my family, is that I saw first hand a lot of different exemplars, and it sort of domesticated the idea of living that way. My dad was very disciplined about working; he had to be his own taskmaster. I remember that when I began as a writer in New York I had to figure out how I was going to fill my time up, make a whole day, if I didn’t have a regular job. I started a little magazine, Lines, and that gave me a project, which helped in many ways, including opening doors to my contemporaries.

Is there anything integral about the "collection" of poetry anymore? At one time, the "single" was the centerpiece of the music industry (maybe it still is); the same perhaps could be said of poetry. Do you think of the poem at hand as a piece of a larger whole, or as a freestanding entity?

I guess both. I have a manuscript called Autumn that spans the last 20 years and it’s just 130 pages or so; whereas my book Day and Night: Bolinas Poems is around 200 pages while spanning just 10 years. But both books — Autumn isn’t in print yet — are kind of diaristic and so there can be a cumulative aspect to the book per se that’s not in the individual poems by themselves.

photo by Gailyn Saroyan

In "Performing Poet," a review of Anne Waldman’s collection, Journals and Dreams, you write that during the sixties poets coming of age tended to be "beguiled by the drug induced dissolution of any seemingly too specific, personal identity." Then of the 70s, you write that the emphasis turned inward: "Limited as we may be, it seems increasingly clear that we are all we really have." What do you see as the current paradigm?

As I got older I gradually got more involved with the larger world and less introspective, so it may be that the paradigm will continue to shift in the normal phases of your life. In a few days I'll be 67 and I remember that I wrote a poem in the 1970s in Bolinas in celebration of my father’s 67th birthday, thinking of him as a pretty old guy. Well, well, well (lol).

Is it more important to write well or love well?

The best writing surely has love in some form in it and surely loving relationships play a part in bringing that into one’s writing. I don’t think it’s either/or, and both can be hard at times. But given the choice anybody’s going to want to choose loving over writing, no contest, right?

You’re also a prolific writer of prose. In addition to essays and criticism, you’ve written biography, memoir, novels, short stories, true crime. What role has prose writing played in your life as a poet?

I’m flattered to be called a poet after all these years when most of my writing has been prose. However, Complete Minimal Poems, published in 2007 but made up of poems 40 years old, received more attention than any book I’ve published, so I’m not sure what to make of it. One thing about that book is that while it’s nearly 300 pages it can be read in 15 or 20 minutes, so that may make it more congenial in the age of the internet. But then maybe people like it because it slows things down, which like I say was the impulse I had in writing the poems in the first place.

We’re always hearing about how no one reads anymore, but do you think this is really true? What are you reading now?

I’m reading George Bernard Shaw’s long preface to his play Saint Joan, which I’m enjoying very much. And I’m reading Malcolm Cowley’s –And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade, which is a good history of the American literary life during the last century, including a clear explanation of the bad blood between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites, which I’ve been hoping to find somewhere for years. So, yes, I’m a reader and I can’t imagine that reading will go out of style completely. But maybe Kindle will be the big venue instead of the book per se. I’ve heard that the royalty arrangement with Kindle is actually very favorable for writers.

You can buy Aram Saroyan's Door to the River here. Yvonne Georgina Puig is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

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