A few grafs into a review of a book of poetry by Aram Saroyan in the Book Review this a.m., I was taken up by the lucidity and flow of the writing:

The resulting pages, tapped in Aram Saroyan by his typewriter, were succinct. Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since.

[…]

Saroyan and his poetic cohort mostly lived in New York, and it was an exhilarating time for poetry — one of those extended moments, like the advent of Cubism in Paris or rockabilly in Memphis, where the artists who got it could do no wrong. Even the least writers of this Second-Generation New York School, as it’s sometimes called, were gorgeous and exciting for a while there, in the general vicinity of the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project circa 1966-71.

I looked up and the writer was Richard Hell, of Voidoids fame. Saroyan, by the way, was a minimalist poet of the so-called Concrete school, most famous for a one-word poem—”Lighght”—that earned him some notoriety when some yahoo elected officials made fun of it after Saroyan for an NEA grant.

It seems to have been his first review for the paper, though the Times published a decidely less interesting op-ed piece, an encomium to CBGB, when the club closed, in 2006. (”Many of us were drunk or stoned half our waking hours, after all. The thing is, we were young there. You don’t get that back.”)