iangordon finds poetry behind the internet
Tucked away at the back of the internet, behind all the helpful scroll-down menus and interactive banner ads, and amongst the endless collage of millions of rotting geocities pages and threads on the forums of long forgotten bands there exists a page that I return to every second season or so, always flush with the joy of remembrance.
This webpage, hidden in the depths of an archive created by a moustachioed professor of poetry from the University of Pennsylvania, guides the reader through a series of twenty-nine poems containing around one-hundred words in total, a handful of mathematical operators, a lot of random letters, and a few twisted unclassifiable typological characters created by the sublime mind of Aram Saroyan.
The American Literary Anthology, funded by the American government, paid Saroyan $1500 for his lighght-hearted poem, which works out to be just over $214 per letter. Saroyan is most often referred to as a “concrete” poet, which seems to be a rather unsuitable label for someone who creates words so free of all restrictions and conventions.
Aram Saroyan quickly contorts the sentence structure of the English language and the form of our words into manipulations that seem as though they ought to make sense, but trying to describe the inspiring qualities of his poetry would be unforgiving and probably futile. Saroyan’s work is like an optical illusion, one that is doubly powerful because it is both textually and aesthetically beautiful.
Saroyan’s work can seem like salvation to those of us trying to find beauty in empty phrases like ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Alternatively pondering over the meaning of ‘lighght’ (yes, that’s how it is spelled) can at times be like the poetic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, only much smaller and much more dense, a neutron star of confusion.
http://www.ubu.com/historical/saroyan/saroyan01.html