Aram Saroyan and the One Word Poem
LE LIONNAIS, two of France's most significant postwar literary experimentalists, wondered to one another "how few words can make a poem?"1 According to LE LIONNAIS, this question would preoccupy the two until QUENEAU's death fifteen years later. Even in 1976, they doubted that a poem could be constructed from fewer than several words. Perhaps because their backgrounds were not primarily in experimental poetry or postwar art LE LIONNAIS was a mathematician and QUENEAU primarily a novelist and editor) the two oddly overlooked concrete poetry. The two also seemed unaware of the work of ARAM SAROYAN, whose mid 1960s poems explored and broke the limits proposed by QUENEAU and LE LIONNAIS. Though the Oulipo's founders may have been underinformed about concrete poetry (which did not have as strong a presence in France as it did in Latin America, North America, or German speaking countries) their skepticism is telling: setting aside concrete poetry in the 1950s, for the most part it was not until the 1960s with the coeval emergence of pop art, minimalism,