Aram Saroyan

Two for the Road

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Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. by Marc Andrus. Parallax Press (Berkeley, California). 207pps. $24.95

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov. St. Martin’s Essentials (New York). 325 pps.

Marc Andrus, an Episcopal bishop, and Helen Tworkov, the founder of Tricycle, the first Buddhist magazine in America, both begin their books with the same event. Andrus writes:

On June 12, 1963, many people around the world, including the president of the United States, opened their newspapers and looked with shock at a photograph of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, seated cross-legged in a posture called the lotus position, engulfed in flame. Thich Quang Duc is composed and upright. The revered monk, in his mid-sixties, had been soaked in gasoline by a younger monk and had then struck a match to set himself on fire.

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New Directions: Aram Saroyan’s Q&A with Gerald Hausman

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After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge.  Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.

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True Crime

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Just now at the age of 76, for the first time in my life, I was the victim of a crime. It was done largely over the internet, through emails, texts, and digital bank transfers, and I never laid eyes on the perpetrator, or spoke with her over the phone, or knew her address.

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My Meeting

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“Why is there evil in the world?” the Zen Master was asked, and answered, “To thicken the plot.”

In Santa Monica I attended a Sunday evening Al Anon meeting.  Al Anon is one of a spectrum of meetings based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and it’s specifically directed to those of us who are involved with either recovering or practicing alcoholics or addicts.  One may be involved by family, marriage, friendship, work or other circumstance, but the involvement is what qualifies each of us for the meeting and brings us to it.  It’s what we talk about, in a variety of ways as great as our numbers.

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Irrevocable

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During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.

I happened to come across a French edition of the photographs while I was reading Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 and they didn’t look the same. Arbus writes in A Chronology of the gossamer quality of the light in these images, which were taken mostly outdoors at sunset, and the photographs now seemed suffused with the deepest tenderness. It’s as if Arbus is photographing the soft underside of the human psyche — the pre-rational child that can scarcely navigate. It isn’t a pretty picture except that it looked now like only another natural part of the whole operating system of reality, including the light in which she finds it.

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Double Trouble: Dramas of American Communism

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News an Oxford don has bought into b.s. about Alger Hiss’s innocence sent your editor back to Aram Saroyan’s play, UNAMERICAN, which is based on the public record of the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Hiss. UNAMERICAN is posted below along with the second act of My Confession, Saroyan’s “solo performance play” based on Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her encounters with Stalinists in the 30s  (which she published in Encounter in 1954).

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Poetry and Money

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Aram Saroyan considers the life of Lorine Niedecker and takes in the material conditions underlying the creation of poetry. (Oliver Conant follows up with a poem that speaks to what the French call “the social question.”)

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The H.D. Book

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The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. University of California Press. 678 pp. $49.95. January 2011.

Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. A prose masterwork that begins with the story of Duncan’s initiation as a poet, over the course of its 646 pages it morphs into a visionary meditation in which H.D., the American poet born Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), remains the thematic touchstone. In The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004), Duncan writes to Levertov as he undertakes the book that he needs to guard against letting his distress over dismissive reviews of H.D.’s work by Randall Jarrell and others deflect him from his deeper purpose. Exploring the generative resources and implications of H.D.’s work, he was surely aware too that he was also setting the course and realizing perhaps the fullest expression of his major phase as a poet. The irony is that half a century later one must guard against allowing the analogous treatment of this book to deflect attention from what is here at last.

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Bringing It All Back Home

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Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process of composing a particular work, the poet. And when the work was done, so was the designation. In other words, the poet was a process one entered, not a title — not a noun but a verb. If one were to give Duncan’s idea historical application, one might say that whoever became the poet might come to stand for the particular time in which the designation fell to him or her. In the case of Allen Ginsberg, for instance, who first read “Howl” at the Gallery Six in San Francisco in the mid-fifties, the period would date from that reading into the early sixties, when he published “Kaddish,” a work of comparable power. Then, according to my personal chronology, a sort of hand-off took place, and the laurel wreath was passed to Bob Dylan, with Ginsberg’s personal blessing.

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Irrevocable

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Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 by Elizabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus. Aperture, New York, 2011. 185 pps.

During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.

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