Aram Saroyan @ the Poetry Foundation

Over at The Poetry Foundation website, Black Sparrow author Aram Saroyan (whose new collection of essays, Door to the River, will be available this fall) has an essay on his personal / literary experiences with Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Ted Berrigan. He writes, 'As a teenager in Manhattan, I turned to poetry because I couldn't understand what life was about and thought I might uncover some clues in such writing, which, according to Louis Zukofsky, finds an order "that can speak to all men." Howl, which I found during high school, was like an encyclopedia of the emotional and psychic life that had been driven under in me, with the result that I felt restless and bored a lot of the time. It was like finding a deep neural and psychic autobiography in the middle of the snow job of late-1950s/early-1960s America. Life is big, it said. It has a lot of colors. It's serious. It's funny. It's full of suffering that is also like bread, nurture, on a journey of the soul. I could say that reading it broke me open, so that I could discover myself in the deeper history of our time and kind.'