Hard to find time to get around to longer posts, been wanting to do this one since May (already). In a blog post on Aram Saroyan, Ron Silliman noted that Saroyan's "cat / book / city" "depends entirely on scale of referents for its impact." I don't see scale as the only thing going on in this poem, especially if we're willing to grant that there's a person behind the list. But this is less a response to Ron than it is a rundown of observations toward a defense of a poem I care about and that many might dismiss because of its brevity.
In the simplest reading, Saroyan's poem sketches a familiar type: the urban cat and book lover. But the starkness of the three words, the leap from the intimate cat and book to the anonymous city, and, paradoxically, the emotionlessness of the objective list form, all suggest a lonesomeness, if not a loneliness. And the author's "why bother with it" choice not to expand on the list could reasonably be assumed to hint at an alienation from the culture in which this cat, book, and city exist.
My own first response to this poem took it as a kind of recording of a pre-reflective consciousness. Of course, that's impossible, since recording implies reflection in this sense. But with its simple words the poem evokes an experience of the referents in the way they might be highlighted during a fleeting moment of being or existential awareness. The feeling is emphasized, yes, by scale, but also in that there is a direction to the moment: a movement outward from the company of a pet, to the company of a book, to the company of that anonymous city.
While a conventional reading is not going to like all of this openness of meaning, suggestion arising from general words rather than detailed description, a postmodern reading embraces such openness, and the minimal poem, like its cousins the conceptual poem and the concrete poem, belongs to the postmodern tradition(s). Paul Carroll's 1968 anthology The Young American Poets is open to more than a few criticisms, but there's a reason "cat" is chosen as one of six poems to represent Saroyan; in that small selection of his poems, it's either the best or else a close second to the "crickets" running off the bottom trim, and it's placed last suggesting the editor viewed it as one of the stronger pieces.
So even what we have so far—a kind of haiku carved down to a list poem of three words, four syllables, ten phonemes—ain't so bad. The poem is accomplishing quite a bit within the constraint of its form. But there's more. As if to stick with its postmodernism bent, the poem privileges metonymy over metaphor. To see best how it functions at the metonymic level we have to invoke another pomo favorite: intertextuality. The context comes from another of Saroyan's minimal poems:
Impossible ever since I read "ocean" not to look at Saroyan's other stacked three-word poems and see what they yield as equations. While "ocean" is a piece of minimal surrealism, "cat" makes it easy to see an assumed plus sign and equals line because it functions literally. In the language of metonymy: animal nature + intellect = civilization. Obviously this isn't a brilliant realization, but it's another layer to the poem. A kind of sophisticated easter egg. More importantly, it's a grand counterpoint to the quiet, personal matter of this person regarding cat and book, seemingly alone in the city. Along the same lines, you can take the first two monosyllable words to equal the disyllable final word; while this might not seem to add much to the poem, it aurally grounds the "additional" reading above and underscores the poem's brief rhythm.
Readers who approach the text without a preconceived notion that this is going to be an insignificant poem because it's three words long or because it does nothing typographically (beyond being three words in the middle of a page, not a common sight—unless you're reading an early Aram Saroyan book) to draw attention to its concreteness, should be able to recognize that there isn't a wrong note. Poet-critics of almost any stripe talk about the exact word in the exact place. That's the case here. Only two sounds, both consonants from the first line, reoccur: the "c" in "cat" is picked up in the second line with the "k" in "book;" and the "t" from cat is picked up in the third line with the "t" in "city." But despite the minimal repetition of sounds—suitable as that is for a minimal poem—it's enough to keep the poem audibly together.
Some simple substitutions can show how right the words are. First, substituting for meaning:
dog bird fish cat cat dog
book book book zine book blog
city city city city town suburbs
And now substituting for sound:
bat bat rat rat rat cab
book cook book cook cook hook
city city city city pity kitty
None of these has the resonance of the original. None of them get it right. In fact, look at Saroyan's other three-word poems and you won't find one that nails it as well as "cat" (I haven't yet got hold of the recently published Complete Minimal Poems, so there are probably some I haven't seen. My memory is augmented by the books on Ubuweb and my copy of The Rest, which I just discovered is also on the Web). The minimal poem, like the found object in art, is something of a self-extinguishing form. It's relatively easy to exhibit a urinal or a shovel—it's something to do it first—but it's impossible to repeat it. At the very least there needs to be some new slant introduced. Just as there's not likely to be another one-word typo poem on the level of "lighght" or "eyeye," a three-word poem must introduce a new slant or (or possibly "and") do twice as much as "cat" by the mere fact that it's made after.
