Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Neeli Cherkovski and I have finally completed our work on “Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco,” and the initial run has already begun to catch the attention of readers. In particular, Bob Arnold has cited two poems in his blog, “A Longhouse Birdhouse”: Aram Saroyan’s “Friendly Persuasion” and Lenore Kandel’s “Emerald Poem.”
You can find his blog, which he launched in 2009, at:
http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&max-results=50

There will be a reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, in late February, to celebrate the publication of “Cross-Strokes.” When I invited Aram to be one of the readers, he declined, saying that he was concentrating on his visual art now. I made a reference to that response when I wrote him about seeing “Friendly Persuasion” in Bob Arnold’s blog:

“(Dear Aram): …. Maybe you aren’t giving readings anymore, but I assure you that your poems are strong enough to stage their own readings. By that I don’t at all mean that your poems exhibit some kind of self-conscious theatricality. Just the opposite. They are so subtle in their candor that their integrity as imaginative enactments of human knowledge arrives intact, sound and silence working together to define the experience of the poem. I hear the poem with ease.”