Armenian Poetry Presentation by Danielle Mikaelian

1. Armenian Poetry
Project
By Danielle Mikaelian

2. Background
● I am 100% Armenian and currently act as Columbia’s Armenian Society
President
● My great-grandparents were orphaned Armenian Genocide survivors who fled
to Wisconsin and then started working in a shoe factory
● As this is a poetry class, I thought it would be fitting to focus my final project
on contemporary Armenian poetry
● The anniversary of the Armenian Genocide is on April 24th (2 days away!)

3. Peter Balakian
● Author of 7 books of poems (one of them,
the Ozone Journal, won the 2016 Pulitzer
Prize for poetry)
● He is a recipient of the Anahid Literary
Prize from Columbia University, which is
awarded every year to one
Armenian-American writer
● Born in 1951 in Teaneck, New Jersey to an
Armenian family
● In 2018, the New York Times published his
piece, "My Armenia," which was his
description of his return to his ancestral
homeland

4. The Oriental Rug by Peter Balakian
● Small lines of around four to six
words in length and the frequent
use of enjambment
● Written from a first person
perspective, as indicated by the
use of “I” at the beginning of the
first line
● Poem is being written from the
perspective of a young child who
is eight years old
● Meaning of wasp-nest-like cells
breathing in their tubular ways
inside his ear and further back?
The ghost of past injustices?
● Emily Dickinson is one of his
main influences...seen through use
of short poem with a single
speaker expressing their thoughts
and feelings...they also both use
dashes as well

5. Silva Zanoyan Merjanian ● Grew up in Beirut, Lebanon
● This poem does not feature any
distinctly Armenian imagery or
any Armenian references
● Fire imagery resonates throughout
the entire poem, as seen through
lines like “there’s a flame sliding
over the rain”
● She breaks the piece into 15 lines
with four stanzas
● Each stanza does not possess the
same amount of lines, with
couplets being featured in the
second and fourth stanzas
● The narrator most likely references
a man’s image, as she then rises
from it
● Final stanza seems like a
combination of a success and a
loss, as the narrator ensures that
the other person will never have
her death. At the same time, she
fades in their absence and seems to
turn into ash

6. Nancy Krikorian
● An Armenian New York City-based writer
● Recipient of Columbia University’s Anahid Literary
Award
● She has taught at NYU, Barnard, and Columbia

7. The Survivor
● Four different stanzas of six lines apiece
● Begins the poem in a dream, choosing to incorporate
Armenian imagery by the fifth line with the reference to “a
map of Armenia.”
● The poem seems to focus on a survivor of the Armenian
Genocide, who wakes up to this dream where everyone but
them is dead
● The narrator speaks of what should have happened, saying
that the person who they are talking to (the unnamed
survivor) “should have been the hand of God reaching into
the school, [with] the children [climbing] into [their
palm].”
● Due to the devastating reality of the genocide, the children
are no longer living and can only knock at heaven’s door
● This poem reminded me of Louise Gluck’s poem, “The
Drowned Children.” Both pieces mention children dying
without providing them with names, identities, or any real
character traits.

8. William Saroyan
● Saroyan is widely known amongst
Armenians and he remains one of the
most famous Armenian novelists. He was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in
1940. One of the main topics he covered
was the experience of Armenian
immigrants in San Francisco.
● William Saroyan attempted to write works
which portrayed a “tradition of
carelessness.” As a result, he often chose
to write pieces that consisted of formless
ruminations

9. ● “To Write a Poem” does not define
what a poem is. Instead, it touches upon
the individuals that write the pieces,
speaking about the life of poets. The
word “poet” appears in the piece 14
times.
● The poem is structured interestingly,
with one line standing separate from
the large block of text before and after
it.
● We see that poems take readers to
places, with the writing process
deciding where they go. At the same
time, the people who write poetry come
from very different places, as explained
by Saroyan.
● His final line, “to write a poem is to
examine, eat or throw eggs” shows how
the poetic process consists of both
analytical and random elements