Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner 0826362117, 9780826362117

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MOM E N TOU S I NC ONC LU SION S

RECENCIES

R E C E N C I E S S E R I E S : Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics Matthew Hofer ∙ Series Editor This series stands at the intersection of critical investigation, historical documentation, and the preservation of cultural heritage. The series exists to illuminate the innovative poetics achievements of the recent past that remain relevant to the present. In addition to publishing monographs and edited volumes, it is also a venue for previously unpublished manuscripts, expanded reprints, and collections of major essays, letters, and interviews. Also available in the Recencies Series: Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners edited by Michael Seth Stewart LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: The Complete Facsimile edited by Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston Circling the Canon, Volume II: The Selected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff, 1995–2017 by Marjorie Perloff Circling the Canon, Volume I: The Selected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff, 1969–1994 by Marjorie Perloff The Language Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman edited by Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry edited by Jeanne Heuving and Tyrone Williams Presences: A Text for Marisol, A Critical Edition by Robert Creeley and Marisol Escobar Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949–1958 edited by Graziano Krätli Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood by Sarah Hayden For additional titles in the Recencies Series, please visit unmpress.com.

Edited by Jennifer Bartlett and George Hart

Momentous Inconclusions T H E L I F E A N D WOR K O F L A R RY E IG N E R

University of New Mexico Press ∙ Albuquerque

© 2020 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8263-6211-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8263-6212-4 (electronic) Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951368 Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

L A R R Y E I G N E R’ S W O R K W O U L D N O T B E P O S S I B L E without the support of his brothers. With that in mind, we would like to dedicate this collection to Eigner’s siblings, Richard and Joseph. And to our own: George’s sister, Nancy Hart, and Jennifer’s siblings, Emma Bartlett, Marissa Kelly, Michelle Foley, and Jerry Foley.

I’d cut the warp to weave that web in the air and here let image perish in image, leave writer and reader up in the air to draw momentous inconclusions Robert Duncan ∙ “Where It Appears: Passages 4”

Derived from Larry Eigner’s versification—first appearing as a principle in my work with “Where it Appears, Passages 4”—“momentous” / “inconclusions” in that poem refers to the Eigner articulation. His specific development has not only to do with a meaning developed from the space between lines but with a meaning developed in the establishment to individual (i.e. “momentous,” “liberated,” “active”) margins. Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov ∙ August 1966

Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction ∙ Larry Eigner’s Momentous Inconclusions ∙ Jennifer Bartlett and George Hart 1 PA R T I ∙ Place, Predecessors, and Projective Verse Chapter One ∙ “What Is Here and Now in the World”: Larry Eigner’s Perceptual Place Making ∙ Marie Landau 19 Chapter Two ∙ “My Nose on the Ground”: Larry Eigner’s Civil War ∙ George Hart 49 Chapter Three ∙ “People like Radios / Radios as People”: Aural Form in the Poetry of Larry Eigner ∙ Seth Forrest 69 Chapter Four ∙ Poetry as a Scene of Decision: Larry Eigner as Distributed Author ∙ Barrett Watten 87 PA R T I I ∙ Space and Time, Sight and Sound Chapter Five ∙ Larry Eigner’s Televisual Impressionism ∙ Andrew Rippeon 123 Chapter Six ∙ Larry Eigner’s Archives in Flight ∙ Stephanie Anderson 143 Chapter Seven ∙ What Sounds: Larry Eigner’s Environments ∙ Jonathan Skinner 171 Chapter Eight ∙ Ways of Being Earthly: Sympoetic Ecopoesis and Birds in Larry Eigner’s Poems ∙ Linda Russo 192

PA R T I I I ∙ Selected Letters: 1953–1992 A Note on Transcriptions

219

LE to Robert Creeley, 08/29/53

220

LE to Paul Blackburn, 05/06/54

224

LE to Janet Eigner, 07/02/63–07/07/63

227

LE to Denise Levertov, 10/15/63–10/18/63

236

LE to Robert Duncan, 12/29/69–01/01/70

245

LE to Jackson Mac Low, 03/31/70

251

LE to Ron Silliman, 10/21/72

254

LE to George Butterick, 06/04/74–06/09/74

257

LE to Joseph Eigner Family, 02/27/75–03/01/75

265

LE to Arthur McFarland, 01/07/80

268

LE to Clayton Eshleman, 05/21/82

271

LE to “D..r folks (Mike, Paul),” 10/05/90–10/07/90

274

LE to Ruth Polansky Bloom, 08/03/92–08/05/92

276

Works Cited

279

Contributors 289 Index 291

Acknowledgments George Hart and Jennifer Bartlett would like to thank the Eigner estate, specifically Richard and Beverly Eigner, for permission to quote from The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner and to use archival material. We would like to thank our contributors who have worked so hard to bring Eigner’s work to light and continue to do so: Stephanie Anderson, Marie Landau, Andrew Rippeon, Seth Forrest, Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, and Barrett Watten. We also want to acknowledge Eigner’s archivists: Melissa Batt Watterworth at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, James Maynard at the University at Buffalo, and Elspeth Healey at the University of Kansas, and the other librarians at archives with Eigner materials: the New York Public Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the University of California, San Diego. We would like to thank Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee. At their house, Jennifer met Matt Hofer, who saw the importance of this book and helped make it a reality. Thank you to our wonderful editor, Elise McHugh, and copyeditor, Ziggy Snow. George would like to thank his wife, Susan, and acknowledge the support he has received from California State University, Long Beach. Jennifer would like to thank her family, Jim and Jeffrey Stewart, Lee and Anne Bartlett, Roxann and Michael Foley. She would also like to thank James Yeary, Sam Lohmann, and Robert Grenier. Lastly, Jennifer would like to thank her friend George Hart. Going on a life journey is difficult and it is a blessing to have someone take it with you.

INTRODUCTION

Larry Eigner’s Momentous Inconclusions J E N N I F E R BA RT L ET T A N D G E ORG E HA RT

I There is a distinct possibility that some people are born poets. If this adage applies to anyone, it certainly applies to Laurence Joel Eigner. Eigner—or Larry, as he was known—had his first experience with poetry through his mother, Bessie. A first-generation American, Bessie, who was raised in a Yiddish-speaking household, graduated from the top of her class from Salem High School in Massachusetts. She intended to go to Bates College, a liberal arts school in Maine known for its progressive values. The women in her family dissuaded her, and instead she took a stenography class that led to a brief career as a bookkeeper at a Boston bank before marrying Eigner’s father, Israel. Laurence Joel Eigner was born on August 7, 1927, at Lynn Hospital on Massachusetts’s North Shore. He later described the event of his birth: Doctor Richard Williams, Mother says, apologized for not measuring her right. If he had, she said, I would have been delivered in the Caesarean way. The doctor told my folks they could sue him for malpractice, but considering the thing an accident or something they let it go . . . either my mother was too small or I was too big. (Areas 129)

During labor, Bessie’s doctor used forceps to help guide Eigner’s birth, which resulted in him receiving brain trauma that caused him to have cerebral palsy. The paradox of Eigner’s journey into the world is that if he had been born at home, he may not have survived, and if he had not been born in the hospital, he may not have had cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is a neuromuscular condition caused by traumatic brain injury in utero, during birth, or in the first few years of life; “cerebral” refers to the brain and “palsy” refers to the spasticity that accompanies the condition. Cerebral palsy can affect a person’s speech, causing what sounds like slurred or drunken speech, sometimes referred to as a “CP accent.” It can affect balance and movement to the extent that the person does not have the strength, equilibrium, or motor skills to walk unassisted. Eventually, the Eigners would find that their son’s impairments

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were pronounced in all of these areas. Despite years of therapy, Eigner’s speech remained heavily affected throughout his life, and although he could walk with assistance, he used a manual wheelchair for most of his life. Bessie began reading poetry to her son when he was a toddler. Eigner’s favorite book was A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Stevenson’s poems were the ones that influenced him the most as he began to write. With his mother’s encouragement, he began to compose his own poems as early as the age of seven, before he was able to write them down himself. His brother, Richard, recalled that Eigner would wake in the morning proclaiming, “I have a poem!,” which someone in the family would transcribe for him. Prolific and ambitious from the beginning, he looked to Longfellow as the poet to “match or outdo by equaling a good part of his output” (Areas 129). He “took to . . . the idea of being a Boy Poet” or someone who sold “ballads or whatever in the streets (ah, Newsboy!)” (129). For a time, it was his ever-practical parents’ hope that he form a career out of it; they thought he might “make a living sometime in the future” writing holiday greeting card verse (129). His earliest poems reflect this interest in occasional writing. In May 1939, at age twelve, he wrote a poem for Bessie on Mother’s Day: Of all the pleasant times in May Is set aside the fourteenth day,

When everyone has a chance to show, His gratefulness the best he knows,

To his Mother, who from the very start, Taught him wisdom from her heart. Each has his own and separate way Of greeting Mother on her day.

And though it may be somewhat rough, I hope this poem is enough.

(Collected Poems 1: 36; hereafter CP)

In 1937, his mother assisted him in typing and submitting work for what would be his first publication. At age nine, Eigner won the Pen and Pencil contest in Child Life Magazine for his poem “When All Sleep.” His first chapbook followed soon after. Poems by Laurence Joel Eigner was a collection of twelve poems printed by his fellow students at the Massachusetts Hospital School where he lived during his middle school years. After graduation, he was homeschooled by his mother and the local high school, and he later did seven correspondence courses through



Introduction 3

the University of Chicago, noting that if his mother would have allowed it, he would have “taken them all.” While his mother was surely still typing his college papers, he was becoming acclimated to using the manual typewriter a family member bought him for his bar mitzvah. In just a few years, he would master using the machine on his own, typing with his right thumb and forefinger. During this time, he stepped away from writing poetry. Of the silence, he recalled, “At one point while I was in high school a local poet wrote or told me only a ‘master’ would attempt blank verse, you had to rhyme. There was a block” (Areas 129). Fall 1949 brought about a shift in Eigner when his brother, Richard, happened upon the radio program This Is Poetry, hosted by local Boston poet Cid Corman. After hearing the program and disagreeing with the non-declamatory way Corman presented the work of Yeats, Eigner wrote him a postcard telling him as such. This one postcard, which has since been lost despite both poets’ attention to archiving, started a nearly forty-year relationship between the two and was Eigner’s entry into contemporary poetry and poetics. In short order, Corman introduced Eigner to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Of these, Corman aside, the poet who would have the most profound and lasting influence on Eigner’s work was Charles Olson. Eigner’s first interaction with Olson’s work was through This Is Poetry. After hearing Corman read Olson’s work, he wrote that he found the poetry was “very clean,” with “efficient idiom” and “no humps to get over.” He proclaimed, “What a movement! (Very mysterious!)” (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut]). In addition to connecting with the style of Olson’s writing, Eigner felt an affinity for his work based on their shared cultural and geographical context. Like Eigner, Olson had significant ties to Boston’s North Shore; his family began spending summers in Gloucester when he was five years old, and he went back to live there for long stretches throughout his life. In February 1950, shortly before commencing work on The Maximus Poems, Olson began writing his manifesto “Projective Verse.” Olson wanted to depart from the work of his predecessors: he “realized that Pound and Williams, and especially Eliot . . . would not suffice; he had to draw up his own ars poetica” (Butterick xxvi). The manifesto was a call for contemporary poets to turn away from traditional form and toward what Olson called “composition by field,” or a poetics based on breath (Collected Prose 239). He was introducing an alternative to conventional poetry, which he believed ignored “the fruits of the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams” (245). In November of that year, “Projective Verse” appeared in Amiri Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones) journal, Poetry New York. In “Projective Verse,” Olson made a distinction between “closed” poetry—poetry

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written in uniform meter and rhyme—and “projective or open verse” shaped by the individual poet’s breath and physiology (Collected Prose 239). He urged poets to be wary of similes, adjectives, and other devices and argued that “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open” (244). Olson insisted that a poem derive from “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings” (239). When composing, the poet is able to “declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination” (242). Eigner became utterly absorbed with Olson’s work and ideas after reading “Projective Verse”; he later noted in an essay that even before he read “Projective Verse,” he understood how “immediacy and force have to take precedence over clarity in a poem” (Areas 15). Olson was not merely presenting new ideas but validating the ones Eigner was already considering. Through his early readings of another poet Corman suggested he read, E. E. Cummings, Eigner discovered the “simplest and most immediate” tool in a poem could be punctuation; “once words were forceful enough,” he could use “the distances between words” as powerfully as the words themselves (15). Coincidentally, in November 1950, shortly after Eigner read “Projective Verse,” Corman pressed him to find his “own language in his poems.” Clearly under the influence of Olson, he argued that Eigner should pay close attention to his “way of talking (not merely in vocabulary, which is secondary) in phrasing and content” (Cid Corman Papers). Eigner was invested in the poem’s pattern of energy, in its “flow from writer to reader, speaker to listener, if not an exchange between them” (Areas 15). The poet could create the rhythm of a poem through his breath; the reader would have to use intuition to follow the poem’s progression rather than rely on typical grammar. For the sake of “immediacy and force” in the poems, it was important for Eigner to enact what he referred to as “elliptical” within the poem, or using spacing with the same weight as punctuation and leaving out any words that struck him as superfluous. This would mean forming a new syntax that departed from what he later called “every day speech” in the work of William Carlos Williams. On a physical level, Eigner wanted to walk without the assistance of devices or other people, but this was not possible because of his impairments from cerebral palsy. He could walk short distances while holding onto the bar his parents had installed along the outside of their house, pulling his wheelchair behind him with his foot, but he did not have the freedom of movement he may have desired. He could, however, achieve a kind of unconstrained movement in poetry. For Eigner, the freedom to rely on his own breath was deeply compelling. This was particularly poignant in light of his speech impediment, which gave his speech a



Introduction 5

quality of fragmentation. The concept of breath embedded Eigner’s disability in the construction and form of the poems themselves. In contrast, more reductive interpretations ignored Eigner’s poetic agency by focusing on his cerebral palsy as autobiographical detail. As Eigner’s style was developing, poetry that focused on the writer’s personal experience and trauma was beginning to appear. In 1946, Robert Lowell reached acclaim with his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle. Later that year, another Harvard poet, Elizabeth Bishop, published her first book with Houghton Mifflin, North & South, which was republished with additional poems nine years later and won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1960, Lowell’s fourth book, Life Studies, would win the National Book Award and be considered one of the first books of what would soon be called confessional poetry. In February 1954, a cousin visited the Eigners from “up at U of Iowa” where he was studying with Lowell. The cousin showed Lowell From the Sustaining Air, and Eigner reported to Creeley that Lowell said this was “abt the maximum reached by young poets but few working in this style ever get any farther.” Eigner called it “the academic touch here” (Robert Creeley Papers). Eigner did not want to follow the lead of the confessional poets and make his disability, or his experience as a person with a disability, central to his work. When he did write about disability, in his early work especially, he typically wrote about it as the experience of the “other.” Later in his life, when he was approached about being the subject of a documentary that focused on his disability, he wrote to Corman that he did not want to be portrayed as “overcoming” his cerebral palsy, which is how he considered someone like his contemporary, the “palsied” Dublin novelist, Christy Brown. Throughout his career, Eigner would continue to move in the direction of Olson, and despite the vast difference between Eigner’s breath and Olson’s booming voice and presence, he would become the exemplar of “Projective Verse.” It was the voice that Eigner found through Olson that would later connect him to the so-called Language poets. In 1978, after his father died and his mother could no longer care for him on her own, Eigner moved to Berkeley, California, to be near his brother Richard. Through a series of events, Eigner would come to live with Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin for ten years. Through Eigner’s relationship with Grenier, and later with the poet Jack Foley, he would situate himself to become a solid influence on a new generation of poets and their work, including Grenier’s later “drawing poems” influenced by Eigner’s unwieldly, palsied script. What follows, in this collection, is a glimpse into the worlds that Eigner inhabited.

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II Academic interest in Larry Eigner’s poetry and poetics has expanded greatly in the twenty-first century, stimulated in part by the publication of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner by Stanford University Press in 2010. The literary-critical reception of the work of many of Eigner’s mentors and peers—most prominently, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan—was clearly emerging during their lifetimes, or, in the case of Olson, within years of his untimely death. Although his contemporaries immediately embraced Eigner’s work when he started publishing in the mid-1950s—and one of the most innovative post-1960s movements, Language poetry, adopted him as an important forebear—it was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that academic critics and scholars began producing a significant body of work that could be collected under the rubric of Eigner studies. The present volume is a collection of the most recent and compelling work on this poet. Early Eigner studies can be divided into three distinct but related approaches: the literary-historical, with a primary focus on experimental form and Black Mountain or projective verse poetics; an interest in language and embodiment, in which disability studies and phenomenology are primary methods; and an examination of space and place, in which phenomenology and ecocriticism have been productively employed. Of course, there are overlaps and interfaces between these three areas that destabilize them as categories, but academic Eigner criticism has up to this point been largely focused on one of these three topics or a blend thereof. Three early essays exemplify each approach. The earliest, Barrett Watten’s “Missing ‘X’: Formal Meaning in Crane and Eigner,” included in Total Syntax (1985), initiates the literary-historical or formalist approach to Eigner’s poetry. Attention to disability in Eigner studies begins with Michael Davidson’s “Missing Larry: The Poetics of Disability in Larry Eigner,” first delivered as a lecture in 2000 and later included in his collection Concerto for the Left Hand (2008). The ecocritical interest begins with George Hart’s “Postmodernist Nature/Poetry: The Example of Larry Eigner,” included in Reading under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (2000). Watten’s “Missing ‘X’” argues that an Eigner poem achieves a “formal meaning” distinctly different from, though related to, Hart Crane’s poetics of reference that “constructs a particular relation between language and an idealized object” (Total Syntax 173). Using speech act theory and Russian formalism, Watten reads Crane’s “Royal Palm” as forming a subject-predicate structure that makes both poem and palm tree autonomous elements: “The grammatical order of subject



Introduction 7

and predicate reinforces the struggle between poetic conventions and inherent form in Crane, a struggle that can be read in the autonomy of elements within the conventional, illusionistic space” of the poem (175). According to Watten, “Eigner’s reading of Crane contributed to an entirely different poetic idiom, one in which the system of reference is oriented around a different axis” (175). From these observations, Watten proposes three “formal properties” of Eigner’s poetry: it should be considered one long poem; because his poems are assembled word by word and line by line, rather than using more conventional structures such as stanzas and traditional forms, they “do not create an illusionistic space”; and “in Eigner form and content are the same, and the time of the poem is one of constant attention. The poem does not defer a present but, rather, is a present, and for this reason the poem does not possess an outer boundary or box-like limit” (175–77). The “missing ‘X’” in an Eigner poem is the referent itself, though, as Watten acknowledges, the referent can often be deduced. The different axes to which Watten attends can be seen as vertical and horizontal in this case. Crane, by using subordinating syntax and grammatical structure and by giving his poem a title, emphasizes the vertical. The illusionistic space of the poem is in part a product of a vertical reading that would start with the title and follow the sentences through the stanzas, rhyme scheme, and metrical pattern. Eigner’s compositional practice of adding dedications and epigraphs by typing them to the side of the main text indicates the other referents that may not be included, and this is the reorientation of formal meaning that Watten identifies in his work. In this way, an Eigner poem has no limiting frame around it, and the missing X’s can be found by the diligent reader. These formal features of Eigner’s work are never related to disability by Watten, and he makes no mention of Eigner’s cerebral palsy in his essay. Indeed, since the terms of his formalist reading are themselves purely linguistic, and he has no need to connect Crane’s formal meaning to his embodiment, there is no reason for him to do so with Eigner. Nonetheless, the next move in Eigner studies was to insist that embodiment matters for Eigner’s poetics. Michael Davidson’s “Missing Larry” hails Watten’s essay in its title, and he points to three absences that he wants to address: the recent loss of Eigner himself, who died in 1996; the absence of Eigner in discussions of postwar American poetry, especially Black Mountain and Language poetry; and the lack of interest in his cerebral palsy as a condition of his poetics. Of course, nothing can be done about the first, except to remember and celebrate. The second gap is starting to be filled in, but still too many studies of these movements omit Eigner. Davidson’s intervention in this essay has effectively eliminated the third absence, but, ironically, in order to do

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so, he has to argue against a particular bias in disability studies. As Davidson observes, the Americans with Disabilities Act would not have been passed without representations of disability that could be deployed in the political struggle. Yet, Eigner rarely represented his disability in his poetry (his prose provides more explicit descriptions of his disability experience), so his “missing” status within disability studies is not surprising. For this reason, Davidson makes the case for a “poetics of disability” to complement the “politics of disability.” To turn to poetics from politics, according to Davidson, means “theoriz[ing] the ways that poetry defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within language” (Concerto 118). Recognizing disability in Eigner’s poetics readjusts the way we see him in the literary history examined by Watten to the extent that postwar poetics was a poetics of embodiment: “A poetics of disability might unsettle the thematic of embodiment as it appeared in any number of literary and artistic movements of the 1960s” (118). Situating his reading in the context of Watten’s formalist analysis, Davidson proposes that the “missing ‘X’” of an Eigner poem may indeed be a reference to his embodiment. “The danger” of this, of course, is to “make Eigner’s poetry a compensatory response for physical limits rather than a critical engagement with them” (122). So, even though Eigner’s poems typically “do not address cerebral palsy directly . . . they embody its effects on the poet as he registers the world from a stationary vantage. So attentive is Eigner to the processes of measuring thought and attention that the subject often dissolves into its acts of perception and cognition. This gives the work an oddly unstable feel as lines shift from one location to another” (132). In this way, Davidson connects the form of a poem on the page with the “form” of Eigner’s extraordinary body, extending Watten’s formalist terms and pointing out the phenomenological dimensions of the work. The third area of Eigner studies to emerge in the late twentieth century can be seen in George Hart’s “Postmodernist Nature/Poetry: The Example of Larry Eigner.” Similar to Davidson, Hart proposes to address an absence in studies of modern and contemporary nature poetry—the “missing” status of poets who use experimental forms to engage with environmental issues. For Hart, embodiment is also central to Eigner’s writing about the natural world, and it links him with other contemporary nature poets such as Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. However, his embodiment implicitly critiques the environmentalist requirement of able-bodied encounters in the wild and his reliance on the typewriter in composition “offers a mechanistic twist on the organicist theories of language’s biological connections” found in Snyder and McClure (Hart, “Postmodernist Nature” 317). Hart distinguishes Eigner as a postmodernist from



Introduction 9

these poets as representatives of a “neoromantic” strain of nature poetry: “The neoromantic attempts to reground or rediscover the roots of culture in nature. The postmodernist attempts to reveal that nature is culture and culture nature. The postmodernist poet rejects the mythic separation and return of the romantic and neoromantic poets, suggesting that there is nothing to return to because it is always already around us” (320). In this way, according to Hart, Eigner’s poetics, which is an embodied poetics as Davidson shows, erases the difference between subjects and objects, inside and outside, self and other. The backslash that Eigner often uses to indicate the separation of and connection between terms becomes one way that he writes both nature and culture: “In writing one he writes the other, and the shape of his poetry is the confluence of inner and outer. He writes nature/poetry” (329). In this way, Hart makes the case for Eigner as central to a postmodernist tradition that mainstream ecocriticism has ignored. (Around the same time Jonathan Skinner began publishing his journal ecopoetics, which presents a range of postmodern ecopoetics, and his work on Eigner is included in this volume.) Hart’s and Davidson’s essays were first published in 2000, fifteen years after Watten’s “Missing ‘X.’” Three articles in a decade and a half . . . Eigner studies may have been a little slow to get started, but in the intervening fifteen or so years since the millennium, at least ten scholarly articles or book chapters have appeared (not including two major essays published online and collected here for the first time). In 2010, Hart extended his ecocritical analysis of Eigner with “‘Enough Defined’: Disability, Ecopoetics, and Larry Eigner.” As the subtitle indicates, this article integrates material from the rapidly expanding field of disability studies with the developing conversation about ecopoetics. Arguing that disability studies’ constructivist approach to the body should be hybridized with ecocriticism’s essentialist emphasis on biology, Hart makes the case for Eigner’s resistance to environmentalism’s “ableist” tendencies (which can also be found in the poetics of embodiment as discussed by Davidson) and his engagement with environmental values in the figure of “enough.” Jessica Lewis Luck’s “Larry Eigner and the Phenomenology of Projected Verse” quickly followed Hart’s article in the same journal, Contemporary Literature, in 2012. Luck combines Watten’s interest in form with Davidson’s attention to embodiment in an explicitly phenomenological context drawn from the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Luck argues that Eigner’s poems evoke a sense of the fourth dimension, time, and they incorporate it into the embodied experience of space. In this way, time is not linear but layered, and it therefore has depth that can be experienced in spatial terms. Luck calls this Eigner’s “non-Euclidean poetics” because rather than producing an

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illusion of depth as in the classical representation of space by vanishing points and perspective, by which a viewer is placed outside the scene in an ideal position, a non-Euclidean sense of space includes time: “Traditional verse happens in a two-dimensional x/y with a horizontal and vertical orientation and movement; Eigner’s poems create the phenomenological effect of a diagonal, a z axis, as they drift across the page” (470). In this way, according to Luck, Eigner revises Olson’s projective verse poetics into a projected verse, in the sense of an image projected onto a screen or wall. The experience of reading an Eigner poem is not just to encounter it as a linear string of words in time but also as an experience in space: “Rather than selecting some part of an event, Eigner’s poems work to become a kind of spherical event in their own right, an object projected into space-time in which readers can move around as they move in space” (476). Luck’s article demonstrates the fruitful interfaces among the three areas of Eigner studies that we have identified: in recognizing the embodied experience behind Eigner’s poems, she combines an interest in disability and environment (in the most basic sense) in order to read for form in the work overall. A book published the same year as Luck’s article, Alan Ramón Clinton’s Intuitions in Literature, Technology, and Politics, examines Eigner’s work in comparison to John Ashbery’s as examples of the poetry of “wireless spaces”—“spaces without wires . . . where both reader and writer simulate the freedom of the programmer without orders” (136). Clinton argues, as Luck does in her article, that Eigner’s poetics create a non-Euclidean sense of space, and he proposes the concept of “parability” to address Eigner’s embodiment rather than disability (159). Citing J. Hillis Miller’s account of para- as an “uncanny” and “antithetical” prefix that signals both proximity and distance, Clinton defines parability as “the ability to tell improper stories, write improper poems, whose leaps from one image to another cannot be ‘justified’ in traditional ways” (1). He explains that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “the body without organs” and the etymology of the word tract can be combined with “what the study of cerebral palsy has taught us about the uncanny workings of not only ‘damaged’ pyramidal tracts but ‘normally’ functioning pyramidal tracts as well. These three perspectives, which are all connected in strange and various ways, can help us see how Eigner’s work, which seldom addresses cerebral palsy, represents a series of parabilities that allow us to imagine writing and thought processes that exceed traditional forms of poetry and observation. Eigner’s poems are a panoply of paralogical tracts/ traces/tracks (all related etymologically) without organs which, unlike traditional tracts, evade continuity, theme, and predictability” (153). Parability produces the possibility of a global ethics because of its radical openness and the erasure of the



Introduction 11

binary of abled/disabled. Clinton’s reading of Ashbery and Eigner is one of the most theoretically ambitious contributions to Eigner studies, and his attention to technology in the poetry, in this case how his and Ashbery’s poetics anticipate the advent of digital communications in the late twentieth century, initiates the growing interest in Eigner and recording technology that we will see in the last two articles discussed in this introduction. In 2013, Larry Eigner’s work made its way to China when Hank Lazer presented “The Peculiarities of the Making of Cross-Cultural Literary History: Poetry of George Oppen and Larry Eigner” at the second Convention of the Chinese/ American Association for Poetry and Poetics at Central China Normal University in Wuhan. Lazer proposes that the work of Oppen and Eigner, based as it is in objectivism and projective verse, will appeal to Chinese readers. Lazer’s published lecture puts Eigner into his literary-historical context as a participant in the Black Mountain school of poetry and as a predecessor to the Language poets, and he also acknowledges the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s work as a way of engaging his poems. But Lazer’s most significant intervention is to begin the discussion of Eigner in a transnational context. Drawing on descriptions of Chinese grammar and the poetry of Tu Fu, Lazer sees the limitations imposed by Chinese grammar—the omission of prepositions and conjunctions—and the minimalism of the haiku form as correlatives to Eigner’s poetics: “rather than using the natural world as a resource for ‘more important’ symbolic assertions, the natural object, intensely seen, becomes an end in itself ” (18). In working on translations of Eigner’s poems into Chinese with his collaborator, Lazer writes, “I thought it would be easy because . . . Larry’s poems are often very much a poetry of the noun. . . . At first glance, we think we are getting a haiku-like poetry that gives us an instant of precise vision. In fact, Eigner’s nouns dissolve or live in a multi-directional enigmatic space” (20). Such a conclusion also sounds much like Luck’s “non-Euclidean” poetics, and although Lazer warns against a too simple account of the poetry’s Chinese-like qualities, he does believe that such similarities ought to “provide an occasion for some very invigorating cross-cultural and cross-linguistic conversations” (21). Another 2013 article, Ondrea E. Ackerman’s “Wandering Lines: Robert Grenier’s Drawing Poems,” examines the work of Eigner’s longtime editor, caretaker, and friend, providing one of the first discussions of Eigner in relation to a poet of the following generation. Although the essay focuses on Grenier, Ackerman’s analysis of his hand-drawn poems indicates the significance of two of the main fields of Eigner studies, combining the interest in formal experimentation with a poetics of embodiment. Considering how Grenier’s awkwardly drawn letter forms disrupt the

12

Bartlett and Hart

transparency of language and question the structure of the poetic line, Ackerman writes, “as idiosyncratic as Grenier’s drawing poems may seem to be, they are in fact the logical extension of an important development in contemporary poetry toward the spatial reorientation of the poetic line” (135). In this view, Eigner’s work is a central conduit for a spatial poetics adapted from Olson’s “composition by field” that younger poets used to launch even more radical revisions of poetic form: “it is important to note that Grenier’s particular version of projectivism is indebted in many ways to the ‘typewriter calligraphy’ of Eigner, which itself revises Olson’s notion of ‘composition by field’” (144). Ackerman notes the stutter-like characteristics of Grenier’s drawn alphabet, acknowledging an implicitly embodied aspect of the poems beyond the explicit emphasis on the pen-in-hand. In this way, a nonidealized (i.e., nonnormate) body is present in Grenier’s work, making it a disability poetics in effect. She observes, “To de-form or to de-viate is to wander with intention, to change orientation, and to confound expectations, which are means of defamiliarizing not only the ways in which language is normalized, embodied, and socially encoded, but also the ways that it serves as a corrective to larger categories of impediment” (149). In other words, as Davidson notes, such a poetics “defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within language” (Concerto 118). Along with Davidson, Ackerman finds that the embodied poetics of Black Mountain and projective verse poetry is radically revised in Eigner’s work and that this reorientation can be taken up and extended by poets who do not have the same physical limitations as he. In this way, she offers a reading of Eigner’s and Grenier’s poetics that echoes Clinton’s “parabilities.” Eigner studies had a bumper year in 2014 with no less than five new essays. The three areas of Eigner studies that we have outlined are represented, with disability/ embodiment being the main focus of three of the five, but there is also significant productive overlap among all three in these latest examples of Eigner studies. The late Hillary Gravendyk’s “Chronic Poetics” is a case in point. Gravendyk combines disability and phenomenology in order to propose a version of Davidson’s poetics of disability that she calls “chronic.” “This idea of a chronic poetics,” she writes, “—one that acknowledges simultaneity, chronicity, duration, and other forms of embodied perception—makes use of phenomenology’s experiments with and theories of embodiment and consciousness” (7). By describing a temporality that is also associated with diagnosis and disease, chronic poetics offers a way to read both time and space in an Eigner poem. Gravendyk’s central example is a late, long poem by Eigner about a documentary he saw on television about the Buddha. Its spatial arrangement on the page in multiple columns and irregular spacings evoke a sense of the chronic:



Introduction 13

Not only does the poem record multiple, simultaneous perceptions (and memories) and ask the reader to encounter them as such, the poem is also structured to make reading something that cannot be conducted without attention to the act of reading; the unconscious aspect of interpreting that which presents itself to one’s consciousness is undone by the formal encoding of choice, variation, indecision, confusion, and disconnection into the poem. Here we find a compositional and legible openness that alters itself as it repeats and yet endures—a chronic poetics. (12)

Gravendyk’s article not only provides an additional way of theorizing the relationship of Eigner’s embodiment to his poetic form, it also offers a prime example of a close reading of one of Eigner’s longer poems—something Eigner studies needs more of. Rebecca Gaydos’s “Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework” is something of a companion piece to Gravendyk’s “Chronic Poetics”— both articles appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature titled “Disability and Generative Form.” Gaydos makes a valuable contribution to the study of embodiment in Eigner by discussing cybernetics in relation to disability and phenomenology. One of the cornerstones of Black Mountain poetics is Olson’s fascination with Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and its theory of feedback loops. Gaydos aligns Wiener with John Dewey’s biological theory of art in order to examine “Eigner’s affiliation with projectivist poets exploring the isomorphy between spatial configurations of words on the page and the rhythmic pattering of the poet’s vital, bodily processes” (167). This is “bio-writing”—not biography or writing as compensation for physical disability, but a way of seeing poetry “as a genuinely life-like configuration” (167). In this way, Gaydos exposes how deeply intertwined Eigner’s writing and life actually are, insightfully showing us how this connection is at the center of his work: “Issues of individuation—how entities begin, end, and connect to what lies outside, the ways in which they perpetuate or dissolve their borders, whether or not they complete themselves (or, are, in essence, capable of completion)—are at the very heart of Eigner’s poetics, as well as his reflections on life” (174). Gaydos’s article demonstrates how important it is to be wary of dividing Eigner’s work into individual parts, just as we should be careful when dividing Eigner studies into separate fields—poetic form, embodiment, and environs are always in relation in his work. Coauthored by an art historian and a literary critic, “Into the White: Larry Eigner’s Meta-physical Poetics,” also published in 2014, is the first instance of a truly interdisciplinary approach to Eigner’s poetry. Drawing on art history, literary history, and phenomenology, Sarah Juliet Lauro and Lindsay Waggoner

14

Bartlett and Hart

Riordan propose that Eigner’s poetics is “meta-physical” in that it creates “an abstract space within the poem, which invites the reader/viewer to confront the sensory experience of apprehension, enabling a shared, extra-linguistic experience of the poem” (sec. “In What Sense”). For Lauro and Riordan, Eigner’s poetics is meta-physical in multiple ways: it reaches “beyond” language to gauge physical experience, it is self-referential (as in metafiction), and it extends to the reader’s own embodied experience of the poem. Although Eigner did not attend Black Mountain College, the authors link Eigner’s approach with the intense focus on abstraction that pervaded the visual arts there and that can be associated with the poetics developed by Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and others in the pages of the Black Mountain Review. Abstraction in the work of Black Mountain artists such as Josef and Anni Albers, and the gestural aesthetics of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, provide models for a sensuous response to Eigner’s poems on the page. The authors propose that the spatial arrangement of the text should be read as producing meaning that engages the empathy of the reader/viewer visually: “the spaces in Eigner’s poetry—indentations, caesura, spacing between letters, double-spacing between lines—must be read pictorially, phenomenologically” (sec. “Larry Eigner’s Visual Poetics”). Reading—or, more properly, seeing—the poems as abstract forms themselves allows for an embodied response to Eigner’s scoring of his embodiment in the text. The last two pieces of Eigner criticism from 2014 and Lytle Shaw’s chapter “The Eigner Sanction: Keeping Time from the American Century,” in Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018), share a common interest in sound and recording technologies as they relate to open form poetics in the mid-twentieth century. Raphael Allison’s Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading investigates the significance of the popularity of poetry readings in the postwar period and the implications of considering the recorded voices of poets as alternative forms of existence for poetic texts. Allison finds a dialectical tension in the public performance of poetry—readings can reinforce the authenticity of the human voice (he calls this the humanist poetry reading) or they can introduce a skepticism about the permanence and stability of subjectivity (this is the skeptical poetry reading [xv]). In the chapter “The Disability Poetics of William Carlos Williams and Larry Eigner,” Allison presents his reading in the context of the major fields of Eigner studies—Watten’s formalism, Davidson’s disability poetics, and Hart’s ecopoetics—making a compelling argument to break from reading strategies that see Eigner as only a poet of the page and graphic letter:

Introduction 15



To what extent does Eigner’s [recorded] voice muddle the carefully wrought strategies so radiantly articulated by Davidson, Watten, Hart, and others? Allowing Eigner to actually talk suggests that his reading voice proposed a distinct alternative to his other various strategies of embodiment. Listening to Eigner in this way also asks us to rethink some of the most fundamental suppositions about Eigner’s use of language, which is often read more for syntax than semantics. (174)

Another significant discussion of Eigner and sound can be found in Seth Forrest’s “Aurality and Literacy: The New American Poets and the Age of Technological Reproduction,” which appeared in a collection of essays assessing The New American Poetry anthology fifty years after it was first published. Although Eigner is treated only briefly in this essay, Forrest demonstrates his central participation in a “poetics of aurality” that emerged after World War II as poets had readier access to affordable and portable tape recording equipment (201). For Forrest, an Eigner “poem is a recording” because its “effect is achieved by rendering a graphic representation of hearing as opposed to listening, of open aurality like that of the indiscriminate tape recorder” (215–16). And from this, Forrest indicates a significant overlap with the literary-historical—the “poetics of aurality” as it is manifested in The New American Poetry points the way to the “very rigorous experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s by the loosely-termed Language writers and that continues to be developed today by writers like Christian Bök, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith” (216–17). In Narrowcast, Shaw’s chapter on Eigner focuses both on the poet’s reception of actual sounds he heard in his environment, especially radio broadcasts and airplanes, and on recordings of Eigner and others reading his poems aloud. Shaw argues that Eigner had a “profound engagement with his own mediascape” that reveals him to be much more aware of the rhetorical and political manipulation of media in the Cold War era than previous readings of his work have supposed (78). Shaw’s account of the recorded readings of Eigner’s work reframes the rejection of speech-based poetics that is attributed to Eigner by the Language poets, demonstrating the complex relationships between Eigner’s environment in his family home and his negotiations between textuality, aurality, and temporality. We hope this brief history of Eigner studies indicates the range of interests in and approaches to the poetry and poetics of Larry Eigner. In the critical essays that follow, we are happy to present readers with new forays into this wide open and exciting field.

PA R T I

Place, Predecessors, and Projective Verse

C HA P T E R ON E

“What Is Here and Now in the World” Larry Eigner’s Perceptual Place Making M A R I E L A N DAU

an enormous binary figure so what so what

(CP 3: 1132)

a measure of vast space

Writing from the sustained vantage point of his parents’ house in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and the neighborhoods of Berkeley, California, where he moved at the age of fifty-one, Larry Eigner evoked in his poems an enduring intimacy with the sun, trees, shadows, and telephone wires that populated his vista. These neighborhood objects are near constants in Eigner’s poems, positioning him, broadly, as a poet of place among the ranks of several of the Black Mountain school poets with whom he was associated. Like his Black Mountain contemporaries, he published extensively over the span of several decades and established himself as a significant voice in the New American poetry. But despite this poetic kinship and his clear import for the American avant-garde, Eigner has been relatively neglected in scholarship about this moment in American poetry, especially in discussions about the poetics of place.1 This lacuna has recently begun to be filled by scholars of the New American poetry, and this essay aims to contribute to this growing body of work a specific argument for Eigner as a poet of place whose method departs from his peers’ emphasis on mobility and travel and centers instead on sensory perception. Employing definitions of place rooted in phenomenological inquiry, this essay explores the relationship of Eigner’s work to the place-making poetry and poetics of three of his widely recognized contemporaries: Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, and Robert Creeley—avid travelers who were conspicuously concerned with the (sometimes abstract) ideas of place and individual places. Examining

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phenomenological texts, Eigner’s critical and creative work, and the critical and creative work of his contemporaries shows that Eigner’s poems do not forgo place making, as his peers’ longstanding poetic focus on the able, mobile body might suggest.2 Rather, they create place by privileging acute sensory perception, the type one develops through sustained attention to a limited field of observation, over the ability to physically traverse space and thus perceive more phenomena. Specifically, by turning everyday objects into artifacts of intimate value, Eigner’s poetry affirms place as something that can be established temporally through individual perceptions, provided that those perceptions are proprioceptive and not merely exteroceptive—that is, that they employ both a sense of the external world and the embodied subject’s particular experience (“‘one’s own’-ception” as Charles Olson put it) of the world (“Proprioception” 1). Literally speaking, proprioception requires sensing the position and respective relationship of one’s own body parts, which enables people to regulate their movement through space, but the concept allows for broader interpretations of how a conscious body responds to and shapes the space it inhabits.3 Eigner’s poems continually gesture toward exteroceptive objects—those external to the body—as a means of incorporating them into a more intimate field than the one merely inhabited by those objects.4 To articulate external objects as integral to one’s subjective experience of the world is “to experience oneself in the world,” to trouble the otherwise strict distinctions between the internal and the external that can work to rhetorically exclude a person with cerebral palsy from experiencing “the body” as “the ‘field’ and equally . . . the experience of it” (Creeley, Collected Essays 498).5 In the following poem from his 1969 volume Valleys Branches, Eigner’s subject synthesizes perceptions of different sensations in order to describe fully the experience of a particular moment:

light

trees

flying one leg

birds in

the leaves

which thick sound

ready ready ready, will stream away or a taste

(CP 2: 466)

quiet, smelling of height



“What Is Here and Now in the World” 21

While the poem’s first lines focus on objects situated at some distance—trees, birds, leaves—“which thick sound” begins to draw those objects of perception closer to the experiencing subject. The subsequent “ready ready ready” appears as a rendering of the “thick sound” the birds make as they prepare to “stream away”—just as the sound will stream away upon their departure. Providing a different account of the sensations the subject perceives in the birds’ wake, the final “a taste / quiet, smelling of height” internalizes the experience of witnessing this activity. Moving inward from objects the subject can see and hear toward what he can taste and smell, the poem shows how a relatively still body can operate as a field (the source of “‘one’s own’-ception”). Just as crucially, the alternative rendering of the subject’s perception—the sudden shift, facilitated by the coordinating “or”—suggests an ambivalence on the part of the subject that, as described below, is characteristic of Eigner’s fully realized poems and contributes to a sense of place that is dynamic and ephemeral, rather than static or permanent. Eigner’s poems, as they discriminate among observable objects, reveal what is important enough to the poet’s experience to include in his articulation of the world, a valuative process that serves as a touchstone in contemporary place studies. Describing how we create place through such valuation, cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues in his landmark Space and Place that the move from space to place is, in essence, a move from the abstract to the concrete. He posits that the concept of place hinges on our ability to perceive and establish a relationship with our surroundings: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). To a brand-new observer, a neighborhood is a mere “confusion of images . . . blurred space ‘out there,’” but as the observer becomes more settled, “objects and places [become] centers of value” (17–18). Tuan’s distinctions between space and place employ the whole of experience—physical, mental, emotional—but he does assign particular importance to mobility, contending that a subject becomes aware of space through movement, through the ability to “kick one’s legs and stretch one’s arms,” through “reaching for things and playing with them [to] disclose their separateness and relative spacing” (12). While these provisions assume a subject’s unhampered mobility, Tuan’s language invites nonliteral interpretations—for example, of “reaching” and “playing” as literary gestures instead of physical ones. He offers equally capacious definitions of place as “an object in which one can dwell,” a “concretion of value,” and an “organized world of meaning,” all of which depend on the extrapolative powers of the mind as well as the physical movement of the body (12, 179).6 Tuan’s adaptable definitions are especially fruitful to literary place studies and readings of Eigner’s work in particular, which reflects the nonliteral possibilities of movement and poses an implicit challenge to the notion of a dwelling place as

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contingent on able-bodiedness. Close readings of Eigner’s (mostly middle-period) poems make this challenge explicit, showing that his work creates centers of value through perception, attention, and habituation, through metaphoric “reaching” and “playing.” A later generation of thinkers aids in these readings by offering a more expansive vocabulary for parsing space and place that avoids prescriptive assumptions about mobility. A surge of interest in place studies in the last decade has focused particularly on the relationship between place, ontology, and phenomenology. Spanning literary, cultural, and geographical studies, place making emerges largely as a perceptual project, rather than a project grounded in travel or physical mobility. Space thus emerges in phenomenological terms as “inanimate,” “abstract,” “uninhabitable,” “quantitative,” and “uniform” (Addyman 115–16).7 Place, however, is “lived [and] qualitative,” “experiential,” and intimately connected with feelings of subjectivity (Addyman 116; Prieto 23; Malpas 5).8 For the phenomenological thinker, place “requires the presence of an experiencing subject to be activated as a place” (Prieto 29). In this regard, contemporary studies have moved beyond earlier arguments that privilege the ability to traverse space, to focus more on the ability to consciously perceive and transform the uniformity of space into a textured place. Read through this lens, Eigner’s poems reveal a subject constructing accounts of temporal place from the relationships between objects (Tuan’s “centers of value”) and between those objects and the person perceiving them. Eigner’s method draws from phenomenology’s imperative to report on our environment as we perceive it, expressing place as the cumulative effect of an individual moment—of how sights, sounds, and smells operate in and mark the passage of time. In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines phenomenology as a philosophy that “tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is” and perception as a “re-creation or re-constitution of the world at every moment,” a “living system of meanings which makes the concrete essence of the object immediately recognizable” (vii, 240, 151). The act of perception originates not in consciousness but in the body and the senses, gateways to the world that enable a person to form “that familiarity with the world born of habit” (213). For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not merely the “pure impression” of things we can observe with our senses (something “imprinted” on us) but a synthesis of how we experience those things as an embodied subject (4). He is careful to avoid equivocating perception with the analytic activities of interpretation, positing that “the real”—that which is perceived—must be described as we experience it in a “knowing-body” rather than “constructed” through “judgements” or “predications” (280nx). This distinction between perception and interpretation,



“What Is Here and Now in the World” 23

particularly his emphasis on description in time, applies to Eigner’s persistent representation of “presence”—both the temporal present and deliberate act of being in the moment. Presence is indeed essential to Eigner’s place-making poetics: if place is activated by a perceiving subject, then each perception becomes instrumental to transforming “the spatial realm” into a “qualitative environment of action” (Casey 238). Eigner acts upon space by focusing intentionally on the sounds, smells, and sights that he can perceive in a given moment. This kind of deliberate attention, Merleau-Ponty asserts, “presupposes a transformation of the mental field, a new way for consciousness to be present to its objects” (29). Such presence, an opening of the consciousness to objects in its field, resonates with George Hart’s claim that Eigner’s later poems reveal an “I” that is “environed, stable among the kinetic objects occupying the chora around him”—a subject awash in the elements of “the surround” (“‘Enough’” 172, 167).9 Such an environing, however, need not render the subject passive. As Merleau-Ponty contends, we are capable of acquiring habits that “express[] our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments” (143).10 In other words, we choose what we pay attention to, and Eigner’s sense of presence—his sustained, habitual attention to objects in his surround—becomes an activity that turns the environmental surround into experiential place. Experiential place is a distinguishing theme in the work of Eigner’s Black Mountain contemporaries, emerging both in literal locales and as a perceptual construct. Analyzing how these poets conceive of place in their critical writings and express place in their creative work, in contrast to Eigner, shows how Eigner shares and innovates upon their concerns, adapting the perceptive imperatives of their work to a less mobile embodied subject position. Specifically, it becomes clear how Eigner, working outside the contexts of travel or historical narrative, more perfectly enacts the projectivist aim for the poet to treat objects “exactly as they do occur therein [in the moment of composition] and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem” (C. Olson, Collected Prose 243). Using the objects of composition to express his everyday experience of the world, Eigner creates a sense of place that is more radically local than that expressed by his contemporaries. Among Olson, Dorn, and Creeley, Olson’s poems are arguably the most overtly preoccupied with the specificity of place, particularly as a product and living organ of history.11 For Olson, place was largely concretized in the physical setting of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which he took great pains to construct in The Maximus Poems and where the seemingly banal details of everyday life became for him a

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“threshold to the world” (Polis Is This).12 For Olson, these details accrete into a historically grounded, ongoing narrative of place rather than disperse into the individual impressions of place that animate Eigner’s work. In the tradition of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s epic Maximus gives voice to Gloucester in the form of the formidable titular narrator, insisting upon the relationship between the poet (who, in this case, towered at six foot eight), the poetic subject, and the place being described. In the first poem, “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” Maximus proclaims Gloucester “my city!” and presents that speaking “I” as “a metal hot from boiling water,” the fiery arbiter of his polis—“this place where I am” (1). While Olson’s focus on Gloucester is hyperlocal in its content, it speaks to his broader conception of the local as the “immediate, and particular life of a polis that [he] thought essential to a proper vision of the world and existence in it” (Young par. 8). Although Olson’s depiction of Gloucester depends largely on his (and his narrator’s) ability to walk the city’s streets, explore its buildings, and stand on its piers, it also depends on the value he assigns to these objects, the way in which his body moves through Gloucester’s spaces not as an “objective” body but a “knowing-body” (Merleau-Ponty 280n). In What I See in the Maximus Poems, Dorn emphasizes the subjective tenor of Olson’s Gloucester project: “I am certain, without ever having been there, I would be bored to sickness walking through Gloucester. Buildings as such are not important” (“What” 298).13 He explicates the argument implicit in Maximus—that place is not established by the accidents of geography but is “brought forward fully in form conceived entirely by the activation of a man who is under its spell” (298).14 Gloucester means little to a secondhand observer; it means everything to Olson, the witness who “brings” it to others as a phenomenal “structure of place” (296). Olson “brings” place as rootedness, a historical product articulated by an unambivalent narrator. Maximus tells readers not only what he sees and hears but how his sensory observations contribute to a larger narrative. Peppering historical narrative with direct description, in “Maximus, to Gloucester” Olson introduces the story of a house by describing how natural light behaves at a certain street corner: the light, there, at the corner (because of the big elm and the reflecting houses) winter or summer stays as it was when they lived there, in the house the street cuts off as though it were a fault, the side’s so sheer

“What Is Here and Now in the World” 25



they hid, or tried to hide, the fact the cargo their ships brought back was black (the Library, too, possibly so founded). (Maximus Poems 9)

Olson’s expression of visual perception here explicates the relationship between the elements at work in the image: the light, which should change with the seasons, persists through the weather and the years because of the intrusion of the big elm and the reflecting houses. Employing analogy to compare the abrupt meeting of house and street to a fault, he transitions into the more pressing issue at stake: the fact that the house had once quartered black servants, descended from slaves imported as cargo (Butterick 17). Through Olson’s careful weaving of past and present, Gloucester emerges as a locus of value that, as Eric Prieto explains, must be experienced directly and contextualized to be “activated” as place. While Olson engages these themes­— especially man’s proprioceptive stance in relation to the larger cosmos15—in a heuristic mode that seeks to immerse the curious reader in the concerns of the poet, Eigner employs a paratactic spareness that invites the reader to step quickly in and out of the poem. Olson’s poems describe how moments constitute a history—Eigner’s poems describe what constitutes a moment. Like Olson, Eigner was concerned with cataloging the passage of time—the interplay between the past and the present, the ephemeral and the constant. But innovating beyond Olson, Eigner expertly carved the present into discrete perceptions that serve as ends in themselves rather than as means for treating other topics. In this poem from Valleys Branches, for example, a collection of seemingly banal objects function as crucial landmarks of temporal place: the shadow of the tree

in the morning on the street

hedges small the small wind the tree is almost

steady like a clock or face

twigs

cracking

the tops of trees

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26

and the wires, through

and on either side

(CP 2: 550)

In this account of “the morning,” the objects of perception are significant for what they reveal about the moment they inhabit, not for how they can aid reflection on proximal historical events.16 They speak to an intimate construction of place that captures both the temporary—the specific moment in which shadow, tree, wind were perceived—and the constant. That “the tree is almost / steady like a clock” suggests that this scene, while particular to the time in which it was observed, occurs continuously: “the morning” may refer to one morning or to the subject’s experience of every morning. Thus, the moment is cataloged not as scaffolding for the type of concrete historical narrative that characterizes much of Olson’s work but as a touchstone of the subject’s lived experience—both immediate and ongoing. Ed Dorn, Olson’s Black Mountain mentee and a self-identified “poet of the West” (Okada 301), was also concerned with place as a phenomenological construct, particularly how the political-historical roots of a place gave way to its present incarnation. Unlike Olson, whose concern for “saturation” in a place anchored his attention in Gloucester, Dorn found value in the “condition of having no place” (Hofer 100, 98). In his introduction to the recent reissue of The Shoshoneans, Matthew Hofer describes Dorn’s conception of being lost as a ripe condition for discovery: “The value of travelling outward without nostalgia—without any prospect of nostos, or homecoming—resides in a hope of encountering something ‘initial,’ something ‘without reference’” (98). Indeed, for Dorn the activation of place requires an awareness of how place is carved out by appropriation and “political assumptions” but also, just as important, “embracing the phenomenology of landscape” (Dorn, Idaho i; Sauer 320). He shared Eigner’s imperative to be present wherever he was: “Dorn, without a specific there to inhabit, posited that to exist a poet ‘has to be there as much as possible’” (Hofer 101). Dorn’s writing shows that as he traversed the once “raw spaces” of the West, he strove to express place as the full product of his initial encounter, integrating his perceptions of the barren landscapes with their sociohistorical undercurrents (Okada 301). Dorn’s travelogue The Shoshoneans illustrates the multivalent approach the poet took to cataloging place. Throughout, Dorn provides vivid descriptions of the land he traverses, focusing particularly on the bleak terrain: “And the landscape

“What Is Here and Now in the World” 27



at first is hard. Cruel with bold fingers of shadows reaching out in the violent slant of the morning sun and then diminishing toward noon as the high glaze of the horizons shatters the eye” (30). After giving a direct physical description of the landscape, Dorn explains how the people populating it constitute the real difference between states. In contrast to the truck-driving women of Nevada, who had a “weird sexiness about them, all in tight jeans and cowboy hats,” Dorn reports, “I’ve seen women driving pickup trucks in Idaho and they didn’t strike me much either way. Not so sexy as all that” (30). In this specific distinction, Dorn reveals how his perception of the objects and characters of Nevada and Idaho enacts Merleau-Ponty’s “synthesis” between “external” and “internal” perceptions—that is, he incorporates what he observes exteroceptively into an intimate self-understanding that manifests in what he chooses to include in his record of place (Merleau-Ponty 341).17 Eigner makes similarly subjective distinctions in his poems, but while Dorn engages the “bold fingers of shadows,” the “violent slant of the morning sun,” and the “high glaze of horizons,” Eigner engages a sparer style that places images together paratactically, letting their proximity do the work that would otherwise be achieved by metaphor and simile. In the following 1989 poem, Eigner avoids prescriptive coordination and comparatist tropes in favor of a collage-like construction that allows for multiple readings:

3 - h o u r ride and

no clocks

but sun and shadow the sea, the sea road-ribbon up and down,

reading

(Chinese) newspaper (CP 4: 1625)

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This poem could be intimating that there are no clocks, only sun and shadow; or perhaps it suggests there are no clocks except the dials the sun creates as it moves over objects and casts shadows in different directions. The ambiguity here becomes integral to the poem’s sense of perceptual place: the slippery role of “sun and shadow” reaffirms how place shifts depending on the experience of an active subject, whose perceptions are not singularly oriented. Similarly, the interjection of “the sea, the sea” precludes a definitive reading “road-ribbon,” which could be describing the sea as such—a ribbon decorating the road—or could be describing the road itself as a ribbon. Constructed in these images, place is not fixed or permanent but emerges as intersubjective, changing with and influencing the subject’s perception. Dorn’s work is equally invested in cataloging the fluid experience of place, though it focuses more explicitly on his experience in different places, a project that finds less value in ambiguity than the work of a poet like Eigner, who thrilled at the ability to “stop anywhere” (Areas 147). Dorn’s project of capturing places and placeness in his poetic work is well represented by his long poem Idaho Out, a work that embodies Carl O. Sauer’s assertion that the natural landscape “becomes known through the totality of its forms.”18 The poem conceives of Idaho’s placeness—its qualitative, lived value—as something that depends on more than the poet’s ability to “measure and value space” by moving through it (Hart, “Enough” 162). Describing a scene in Florence, Montana, Dorn’s speaker notes that Florence “is hardly a place” but then goes on to show that what ultimately makes it so is what he can feel and see there—in this case, a “wildly built girl” in a bar (Idaho 9): The girl of the not quite believable frame returns . . . She is as ripe and bursting as that biblical pomegranate. . . . She, in the tavern, in Florence (10)

Just as the wildly built girl becomes fundamental to Florence’s placeness, she herself emerges as rooted to that place, an intersubjective product of perception and place that animates much of Dorn’s writing.

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While Eigner was similarly engaged with cataloging place, his poems aimed to treat the subjects (objects) of place directly, rather than to use them as a vehicle for illustrating place (as in the example of Dorn’s “bursting” “pomegranate”). Though he veered distinctly from the narrative and historical impulses in Olson’s work, in his own estimation Eigner held more affinity with Olson’s treatment of place objects than with what he saw as Dorn’s explanations of place. In a May 25, 1960, letter to Cid Corman, Eigner offered: I dont much fathom the mystique of place, which Dorn expostulates on, but the way Olson cuts back to the land and sea, unbroken by buildings, and, forward etc, gives awareness of the buildings too, changing purpose, and so forth, is clear. (Cid Corman Papers)

Eigner adds to this letter that “Dorn lauds the abstract,” a critique that illuminates the more indirect qualities of Dorn’s treatment of place—not only in the challenging What I See in the Maximus Poems (which Eigner tells Corman he “understood . . . a little”) but also in works like The Shoshoneans and Idaho Out, which oscillate between vivid physical descriptions of the landscape and ineffable observations about women of the place and their sexiness. For Dorn, being present meant also being in the past, and layering the past onto the present to make a living palimpsest—which, as Eigner seemed to observe, can obscure as much as it illuminates about a place. Eigner departs from Olson’s and Dorn’s “present uses of the past” (Dorn, Idaho i) by avoiding his peers’ narrativity and explicit subjectivity. He innovates upon their phenomenological creation of place precisely by omitting the lyrical “I,” implying a perceiving subject by way of direct description of experience but rarely lingering on the “who” of that experience.19 His poems do not offer background information to establish a sense of the place he is writing from (and of)—rather, place in his work emerges almost entirely as a product of attention to what he can perceive sensorially. Resisting hypotaxis and fixed chronological structure, Eigner not only achieves the immediacy called for in “Projective Verse” but realizes an even more radical form of projectivism, wherein each unit of the poem functions independently of and in cooperation with other units. Seth Forrest usefully describes the projective focus in Eigner’s work as creating “moment forms,” a phrase he uses to signify pieces of language that “separate time into a series of present moments,” which, rather than “‘lead’ to any other perceptions,” as Olson would have it, “simply follow each other in time and space” (“Body” par. 20, 21). Phenomenological place in Eigner’s poems is similarly carved into fragments,

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each housing a discrete perception (or series of perceptions) that engages with and adds depth to other perceptions described in the poem. In this regard, Eigner’s mature work is more akin, formally and in spirit, to that of projective verse’s cotheorist, Robert Creeley. Like Eigner, Creeley wrote sparely, employing short, enjambed lines and crisply distilled images. Such focus was imperative to his goal of establishing the “sense of a poem—that place, that meadow” that would keep the poem from collapsing into abstraction (Collected Essays 497). Indeed, Creeley argues that “poetry not only creates [place] but itself issues from” it, a proprioceptive place-origin stemming from the notion that the “body is the ‘field’ and is equally the experience of it” (498). To return to this body is to “‘return’ not to oneself as some egocentric center, but to experience oneself in the world . . . through this agency or fact we call . . . ‘poetry’” (498). His conception of the poet’s relationship to the poem is exemplified in Pieces (1969). In the poem “Having To,” Creeley demonstrates his attention to both the place of and the place in poetry, using spare, concrete imagery to evoke the place-time of the perceiving subject: H AV I N G T O what do I think to say now. Nothing but comes and goes in a moment. * * * Cup. Bowl. Saucer. Full. * * * The way into the form, the way out of the room—

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The door, the hat, the chair, the fact. * * * Sitting, waves on the beach, or else clouds, in the sky, a road, going by, cars, a truck, animals, in crowds. (Pieces 382)

In these unadorned lists of objects, Creeley evokes Williams’s dictum, made famous in Paterson, that there are “no ideas but in things” (14).20 “The door, the hat, / the chair,” are “fact[s]” of reality—a term he defines as “the specific content of an instant’s possibility” (Collected Essays 501). Creeley’s rigorous appreciation of the present converges with his conception of place as an activity governed by how we perceive the spatial realm in time—how we carve dwelling places from the moments that shape our encounters with space. For him, despite (or perhaps because of) his extensive travels across the United States and in Europe, “the local is not a place but a place in a given man—which part of it has been compelled or else brought by love to give witness to in his own mind” (Collected Essays 479). Creeley found the local, in his poems—and­, as the previous quote suggests, in his mind—in Black Mountain, North Carolina; New Mexico; New Hampshire; Mallorca; Buffalo, New York; and dozens of other locales where he lived, worked, or visited. For all his travels to different places, Creeley was not a travel writer: his observations of place were expressions of being in place. Working in this ethos, Eigner’s poems conjure the local, that sense of place wrought by his habitual perception of objects in space and his intentional articulation of their value on the page—and more forcefully than those of the Gloucester-anchored Olson, the westwardly pulled Dorn, and the well-traveled Creeley. Eigner ascribes value to objects by using them to measure space and time, expressing the local through the close valuation of details that such measurement requires. A hallmark of this method is his use of stationary objects to observe the sun’s activity, as in “down the street in the sunlight.” Projecting natural light onto a man-made object, he observes how “the sun cloud changes / hydrant sides”

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(CP 2: 309). He does not linger on the image of the sun (or use it, à la Olson, as a vehicle to reflect on the past) but suggests its relation to both the clouds that pass beneath it and the objects it illuminates. While the verb changes suggests that the cloud is moving, and thus affecting the way the sun’s light lands on the fire hydrant, the spacing between the first two units of measurement, as well as the line break separating them from the third, ambiguates the action being performed on the hydrant—it could be that the sun is moving, causing “cloud changes,” or it could be that the clouds are moving, disrupting the sunlight’s trajectory. By carving the moment into three visually discrete parts, Eigner gives the impression (even more forcefully than the spare, yet philosophical, stanzas in Creeley’s “Having To”) that each perception—of sun, of cloud, of hydrant—is significant even as it contributes to the larger perception of how the objects interact with each other. The above moment appears as an interjection within a larger, similarly spare, scene:

down the street in the sunlight in the sunlight,

the back seats

it always looks like new the moment was strange the bare shot branches the flat-jacketed boys the sun

cloud changes

hydrant sides

wearing their knees

in the cold,

not their houses

doored flames down to the ground

glassy

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nourishing dogs rough a local cloud strays out freshened the hill without snow

a slant way from night, on those branches where the roofs twist leaves burrowing distance

(CP 2: 309)

The otherwise nondescript “back seats” are understood to be illuminated by the sunlight, though Eigner uses no verbs to explicate this. Instead, he implies the relationship by simply placing the back seats in proximity to “in the sunlight.” This proximity is somewhat startled by “it always looks like new,” which reiterates that the back seats refer to a car—but by eliding any explicit mention of a car, Eigner reinforces the power of both the visuals at play and the reader’s associative abilities. As few words compose this moment, its significance to Eigner is clear: he was compelled to present it in a way that ascribes levels of meaning and value that are particular to the place-time in which he is observing the scene, and to do so before it is “all melted into an undifferentiated space forever” (Creeley, Collected Essays 443). The moment Eigner captures here is “strange” perhaps because it is full of so many objects and events that compete dynamically for the observer’s attention. The image of the “flat-jacketed boys” is subtly interrupted by “the sun cloud changes / hydrant sides,” while the image of the boys “wearing their knees // in the cold” gives way to a “local cloud” affecting the appearance of “the hill without snow,” which, finally, melds into one of Eigner’s most frequently iterated images, “branches where the roofs twist // leaves burrowing distance.” In Eigner’s work, branches and roofs accrete across volumes and years as signatures of his preoccupation with “high surfaces” and “relentless gravity” (“What a Time Distance” 443). Their position in the poem’s arc magnifies their significance in this

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particular scene: appearing in the very last lines, they complete the circle that begins with the image of “the bare shot branches,” descending into the action of the “flat-jacketed boys” only to rise again into “those branches where the roofs twist.” The sustained focus on high-surface objects reveals a subject who is not merely situated amid objects in space but who creates from his relationship to those objects a distinct, if fleeting, dwelling. In this sense, not only do objects become Tuanian centers of value, but the subject himself emerges as a perceptual agent who “command[s]” and transforms those objects into temporal indicators of place (Tuan 34). Eigner’s attention to “primary situations” (Creeley, Collected Essays 501), those scenes and objects that inform his perceptual field, was partially a response to his restricted ability to travel within that field. In the essay “Not Forever Serious,” written after he moved to Berkeley, he describes his long-standing desire to access objects and vistas beyond his reach. This desire, he explains, stemmed from both his limited mobility and his difficulty controlling his movements: My eyes still big for my head, most things were always tantalizingly beyond or almost beyond sight and hearing, out of reach . . . and often enough barely managing to reach/grasp things when I have, no doubt due to inability to explore much on my own from babyhood on, my curiosity exacerbated, as I got cerebral palsy when I was born. Especially before the cryosurgery that tamed my wild left arm and leg . . . in order to relax at all I had to keep my attention partly away from myself, had to seek a home, coziness in the world. (Areas 25)

Focusing on external objects out of necessity, Eigner’s attentive “seek[ing] a home . . . in the world” appears in his poetry as the creation of a dwelling place that constantly adapts to his perception of the world.21 As “down the street in the sunlight” shows, Eigner’s work enacts Creeley’s “reality”: “the specific content of an instant’s possibility.” More broadly, Eigner’s mature poems reveal a consciousness trained to be present to sensory perceptions—or rather a consciousness that has trained the senses to fixate on the possibilities ripe within each moment. By maintaining acute perceptual presence, Eigner also achieves a strong temporal presence in his poems, a sense of how perceptions can both remain discrete and compose a larger lived experience.22 In his critical writings, he discusses finding a middle ground between planning, on the one hand, and attention to the present, on the other: “There’s a balance, anyway, a ‘due proportion’ . . . or happy gold medium mean which is fine to be struck between purpose, intent, looking forward (too much of that and you’re fanatical with one-track mind, or otherwise

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hung up on the future and the end, which in fact can’t ever be absolute and huge), and involvement, care for, concern for and interest in what is here and now in the world or part of it (too much of everywhere and you’re nowhere, too much feedback and you’re knocked out, lost)” (Areas 52). Such balance characterizes his mature poems, which focus on a small number of objects that make up “what is here and now” while also suggesting the possibility of those objects’ significance for the future. The following poem from 1993, for example, provides an image of branches and “leaf shapes,” capturing a particular moment and describing, generally, how these objects form part of an everyday landscape:

Branches against the sky, leaf

shapes on the wall, restless shadows and dawn soon

through streets, trees, houses (CP 4: 1665)

Suggesting a painting in which branches and leaf shapes foreground canvases of sky and wall, this poem focuses on the present—the immediacy of “restless // shadows” and the coming dawn—but also intimates innumerable predawn hours in which to observe such shadows. In doing so, it captures both the primacy of the subject’s perceptions and the fixed vantage point that informs those perceptions. The most successful of these efforts are not simply “chorographic” accounts of space, as Hart attests, but lively activations of time and space that yield qualitative place. Perhaps more than any other collection, Another Time in Fragments (1967) demonstrates Eigner’s remarkable ability to turn Tuan’s “objects of space” into temporal landmarks of place. The following poem, “Stand on one foot,” perfectly demonstrates how Eigner both assigns value to the objects he perceives in a given moment and acknowledges the very impossibility of transporting anyone else to the particular place-time of his experience:

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stand on one foot like a tree the law is

gulls change the angle air

pressing through leaf you cannot mount the green

sound of

(CP 2: 407)

While the poem begins with a conspicuously rare use of the comparative “like,” it then moves into a more ambiguous image of the gulls interacting with the image of the tree—it is unclear whether they are changing the appearance of the tree by moving in space or if they are merely changing their own angle. The final, stunning lines enact Merleau-Ponty’s observation that “the world is not an object that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions” (x). Eigner’s closing lines, in other words, suggest he cannot exactly re-create the sensory perceptions he experiences. The “air / pressing through leaf ” is a sound so delicate, so particular to the moment in which it is heard, that it cannot be dominated or preserved for later examination. The word mount implies a power imbalance between subject and object, which the poet rejects in order to preserve the perceptual object (air pressing through leaf) as subject. These lines do not express frustration—that the poet cannot achieve perfect mimesis—but testify to the inimitable intimacy of a moment. This exquisite sound simply existed in the place-time of its perception; it can be described but never re-created. Precisely by expressing the inexpressibility of what one perceives when one is intent and meticulous, Eigner reinforces the importance of acute attention, as if to say, I was here, but here no longer exists.23



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The place of the present depends on maintaining presence, that sense of “beingin-the-world” as the world ceaselessly reconstitutes itself. By focusing on what he can observe from a particular place-time, Eigner limits the feedback, attending to the here rather than the everywhere. In “Not Forever Serious” he reaffirms this focus, placing discrete moments on a larger timeline that he inevitably must grapple with: “While the future is inescapable . . . maybe the most a poem can be is a realization of things come to or that come together. At moments. (Nothing lasts forever . . . and it’s a question how much can or should anything last or occupy attention. A single line can register as a poem, monostich, the line ‘break’ take effect from the practice of poetry)” (Areas 25). Eigner explicitly resists the notion that poetry should narrate the contingent future: not only would this sort of speculation strip the poem of its immediate impact, but it would compel the objects in the poem into the position of symbols, things that “occupy attention” and signify beyond the moment they were meant to capture. Rendering particular moments with direct description, rather than reflection or speculation, Eigner’s poems forgo both the supremacy of a lyrical “I” and what W. J. T. Mitchell describes as “the notion of a metalanguage or discourse that could control the understanding of pictures”—a language that, in other words, seeks always to explain pictures rather than let them “attempt to represent themselves” (24). Avoiding a metalanguage that imposes a distance between “language and imaging” (24) is, for Eigner, not only an aesthetic question but an ethical one. After moving to Berkeley, Eigner discussed environmental degradation in language that echoes his commitment to direct description: “ecological problems, which I for one am increasingly aware of,” he explains, derive from “fatiguing the earth, clogging it up with extras” (Areas 148). Eigner’s ethos is to employ only what is necessary, refusing extras that might “clog” the poem or attempt to explicate its images. By giving primacy to the perceptions presented in the poem, Eigner instead creates fluid registrations of place that encourage highly subjective readings. In this sense, the local, too, has ethical implications: by rendering phenomenological place without the omnipresence of an experiencing subject, the poems foreground place as a product of perception rather than as a mere background to experience. Eigner’s poems eschew traditional lyricism largely by virtue of his spare, paratactic method, which renders scenes and images that are not only ambiguous, inviting multiple interpretations, but suggest ambivalence on the part of the subject.24 His arguably most famous poem, “Again dawn,” in Another Time in Fragments, is a sound example of how he preserved, as much as possible, the direct impact of his perceptions:25

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Again dawn the sky dropped

its invisible whiteness we saw

pass out

nowhere

empty the blue stars our summer

on the ground

like last night another

time

in fragments (CP 2: 357)

Here Eigner refuses prescriptive grammar: It is unclear whether “invisible whiteness” functions as a direct object of the “the sky dropped” or as the object of the subsequent “we saw pass out.” Similarly, the lone “stars” may serve as a noun, modified by “blue,” or it may be a verb describing the way in which “the blue” acts on “our summer.” Barrett Watten makes a convincing case that nouns in Eigner’s poems are “hinges in the process of thought” (Total Syntax 183). He rightly argues that nouns are foundational in Eigner’s work: “Other levels of the poem (line, stanza, phrase structure, complete figure), rather than working from the top down . . . are built up from the noun, which is the basic unit of perception in language for Eigner” (183). In addition to acting as a basic unit of perception, the noun functions as an elemental component of place for Eigner. By smattering “Again dawn” with “hinging” nouns, for example, Eigner captures the moment of a changing sky and assigns value to it but allows the placeness of this moment to shift, accounting for the

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subject’s own mutability in perceiving a changing sky. He allows for the possibility that the next day’s dawn may evoke a different “concrete essence,” a different sense of place colored by a new set of perceptions. Eigner’s sense of place underwent a more literal disruption in 1978 when, his father deceased and his mother no longer able to care for him, he relocated to Berkeley. This move not only heralded changes in Eigner’s poetry but also accommodated a much more active social life among fellow poets, including many Language poets who were influenced by his innovative treatment of typography and space on the page (which, as discussed below, becomes an avenue for making microplace[s] within a poem). Arguably in part due to the radical change in his lifestyle and locale, Eigner’s body of work from this period shows a shift in focus: while an acute perception of trees, skies, shadows, and birds still motivate a good deal of his later work, many poems treat objects he encountered while traveling through the larger Bay Area, moving beyond what he could perceive from the vantage point of a house. While Eigner’s more perceptually broad Berkeley poems edge closer toward achieving “the visibility of a polis” (Hart, “Enough” 173) than do his mature Swampscott poems, he retains his characteristic spareness, discriminating among perceptions instead of clogging his poems with “too much to realize” (Areas 25).26 In Olsonian terms, in Berkeley Eigner was able to reorient his “‘own’-ception” to new experiences and respond with different data. With access to more spaces and objects through which to establish place as a “concretion of value” (Tuan 12), many of his later poems express a gradated sense of place, developed through perceptions of both close-up and faraway objects. Just as important, they express a sense of how the close-up and faraway complement each other to compose a moment. This 1991 poem (one of twelve poems in a series designated #1697) is a rich example of the way that Eigner’s later work evokes micro- and macroplace, tapping into both the larger landscape of the Bay Area and the miniature landscapes therein:

dirty

leftover newspaper

in the stand window at the booming intersection while the sky’s clear blue

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with some faint cloud

over all these streets for the third straight day

(CP 4: 1642)

The visual perceptions rendered in the poem each get their own stanza, creating the sense that each perception holds a discrete value; yet they all contribute to the subject’s larger experience “at the booming intersection,” where he can see and hear in multiple directions. While the first two stanzas offer hyperlocalized images—newspaper, intersection—the third and fourth stanzas extend the poem into a visual field accessible to an entire neighborhood or even city. The last stanza envelops the scene in familiarity, showing that the subject has an ongoing investment in the images, but it is unclear whether the sky has merely been blue “with some faint cloud” three days in a row or if the subject has experienced the scene in its entirety—dirty newspaper included—three days in a row. This uncertainty amplifies Eigner’s focus on “what is here and now,” how the present place is constructed through fleeting perceptions that accrete in a way that cannot be expressed unambiguously. By rendering these perceptions paratactically— fragmenting place—the poem suggests that place is an amalgamation of different lived experiences, no matter how big or small. Eigner’s later poems are a fully realized testament to his attention to the material and metaphoric relationships between the poem and the page, a point of interest for the Language poets with whom he came to be associated. Robert Grenier notes in his editor’s introduction to the fourth volume of Collected Poems that this last group of poems reflects Eigner’s heightened confidence, demonstrated in his ability “stop, any time,” to leave the poem to the page and not feel compelled to carry it “‘onward’/beyond itself ” (in Eigner, CP 4: introduction). In other words, Eigner began to more deliberately utilize the poem’s capacity to make meaning as an object and not only as a series of references to “an already constructed world of ‘things’” (Andrews and Bernstein ix). Grenier describes the volume as a culmination of Eigner’s increasing typographical innovation over the decades: these “poems ‘strip down’ to an actual rendering of ‘fact.’ . . . They ‘go through’ the ‘real-world-space-&-time-span’ they have on the page, in an immaculate ‘relation’ to/with the ‘actual substance’ of life—that which ‘shows itself ’ to be said” (in Eigner, CP 4: introduction). The following additional iterations of poem #1697 in

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the Collected Poems demonstrate how Eigner manipulated typographical space to mimic “real-world-space-&-time” and disrupt the stratifications between poetic language and the off-the-page realities it is typically meant to represent:

#1697.w n o

m o r e

p o e t r y

!

?

out the window #1697 x2 G o i n g

O u t

all these small worlds #1697.zz I n d o o r

O u t d o o r

“roughing

L i f e

it ”

(CP 4: 1637, 1640, 1641)

These poems’ visuality creates a disjunctive synthesis of the words’ sounds, appearances, and references. If the line is a unit of measure and a line break denotes a pause in the reader’s breath, then spaces between letters elongate the pronunciation of words, complicating their references and turning them into concrete artifacts of the poem.27 In calling attention to the spacing between and positioning of letters, words, and lines, Eigner suggests that language can function nonreferentially to become a phenomenological dwelling in itself, a lived concretion of value. In his increasing attention to the materiality of language, Eigner found formal

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kinship with Language poets. Once he was settled in Berkeley, he began to attend and give readings, with the help of Grenier, Kathleen Frumkin, and Jack Foley, among others, and was thus integrated into the Bay Area poetry scene, where the West Coast wing of Language poetry was newly becoming a significant force in the American avant-garde (Davidson, Concerto 116). Eigner had already been published in Grenier and Watten’s seminal little magazine, this, and in 1978, his essay (of sorts) “Approaching Things / Some Calculus / How Figure It / Of Everyday Life Experience” appeared in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a magazine published by East Coast Language poets Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews.28 Channeling the magazine’s radical conceptualization of “horizons of language” (Andrews and Bernstein ix), the essay refuses the concretization of meaning in language, suggesting instead a “forest of possibilities” that allows meaning to shift with time and perspective: “Forest of possibilities (in language anyway)—ways in and ways out. . . . Your neighborhood and how much of the world otherwise. Beginning, ending and continuing. As they come, what can things mean? Why expect a permanent meaning?” (Areas 3). The forest of possibilities described here also houses potential for even smaller places, “ways in and ways out,” that, like the meaning in language itself, are ephemeral, changing as they are encountered one day to the next, from one reader to the next. Portraying place (literal and metaphorical) and language as concentrically layered, Eigner alludes to his own long-standing depiction of his surroundings in Swampscott and Berkeley, showing an awareness of how the shifting meanings at play in his work reflect an ever-shifting perceptual activity. Language poetry shares Eigner’s appreciation of impermanence, of how words and sentences can both introduce and retract meaning, acting as material ends in themselves rather than functioning solely as conduits for extratextual meanings. Andrews, in “Text and Context,” interrogates normative treatments of language as a means to an end, challenging, “How much are we willing to destroy our attentiveness to the way words act and interact in order to gain the advantages of description or of representation and a phobia toward what is present?” (Andrews and Bernstein 34). His word choice here resonates not only with Eigner’s attention to the present moment and active participation in it but also with his growing appreciation for the material presence of words on a page, their capacity to occupy space as centers of value. Andrews describes Language poetry’s aim to exploit this materiality actively by “organizing the language around . . . features which make present to us words’ lack of transparency, their physicality, their refusal to be motivated along schematic lines by frames exterior to themselves” (35). Eigner achieves such disruption in the three poems noted above (#1697):



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the appearance of the words on the page and the sounds a reader must make to say them displace the objects depicted in the poem as centers of value. Deviating from normative typography, Eigner engages the efforts of the readers such that they are able to create subjective dwellings out of the experience of the poem. His middle- to late-period poems, especially, refuse to prescribe meaning, creating opportunities for readers to linger in indeterminacy—pausing uncertainly at the end of a radically enjambed line or laboring through the extra spaces in “h o u r s”—and ultimately to carve out a qualitative relationship with the poem they can revisit (and revise) again and again. Watten convincingly argues that in Eigner’s oeuvre, “the poem does not defer a present but, rather is a present, and for this reason the poem does not possess an outer boundary or box-like limit” (Total Syntax 177). If the poem is a present, not delimited by anything but the deliberate attention of a reader, it can be continually acted upon both as an object of perception (sensory and cognitive) and as an object in space. Creeley relates his own serious engagement with texts in precisely this way, describing “books as a very real place to be” (Collected Essays 497). They were “not merely an escape from the world,” he clarifies, but “a place very deeply open to me, at moments of reading, in a sense few others were ever to be” (497). Eigner proposed that poetry ought to fulfill phenomenological ends of direct description in time, that it ought to be able to stop at any time, that it ought to invite multiple meanings—it appears he aimed to create precisely the kind of readerly experience Creeley so earnestly describes: “forest[s] of possibilities” for the reader to return to and experience as a continually new place. The ambiguity in his work—a formal expression of ambivalence about the possibilities present in each moment—indeed seems to be a deliberate attempt to draw readers back to the poem, a repeated sojourn that would transform the poem from an inanimate object on the reader’s horizon into an intimate, yet perhaps ephemeral, center of value. Just as a reader’s experience of Eigner’s poems is never fixed, the place he evokes there is not a permanent monument to travel but an expression of what the poet was able to perceive in a particular moment. He deviates in this sense from Olson, for whom Gloucester was a long-standing locus of value; from Dorn, who was drawn to the embedded histories and landscapes of the West; and from Creeley, whose work, while akin to Eigner’s in many ways, was more explicitly inspired by the poet’s experience in various cities across the United States. While Eigner’s Swampscott poems reflect the particularities of his experience there, they could be poems about almost anywhere; what makes them place poems (rather than simply “environment-poems”) is that they articulate Eigner’s activation of the space around him, which he achieves not by moving upright through it but

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by perceiving its objects and incorporating them as functions of his experience. Rendering these perceptions in formally innovative fragments, Eigner enacts projective verse’s dictate for “composition by field, as opposed to inherited stanza,” composition driven by the poet’s direct, energetic experience in the world (Olson, Collected Prose 239–40). And eschewing narrative presence to express this experience, he more perfectly realizes the projectivist imperative that the poet should recognize himself as an object among other objects in the universe, in order to gain access to the “secrets [they] share” (247). Eigner’s poems are neither prescriptive nor proscriptive in their endeavor to express the poet’s direct experience of the world—perceptions are particular but not binding. Rather, they enact the claim, auspicious to both ecocritical and phenomenological studies, that “to experience in the active sense requires that one venture forth into the unfamiliar and experiment with the elusive and the uncertain” (Tuan 9). Eigner ventures forth in his poetry by way of the senses, remaining continually attuned to the potentialities of “what is here and now in the world.” In doing so, his work dispels the notion that the construction of place requires unhampered movement through space—the ideal realization of proprioception—or the ability to reconstruct a polis. Instead, his poetry affirms place as something that can be established temporally, through meticulous attention to those sights, sounds, tastes, and smells that constellate into one’s own intimate experience of the world. NOTES 1. Michael Davidson puzzles over this absence in his essay “Missing Larry: The Poetics of Disability in Larry Eigner,” a piece that aims, in part, to recuperate Eigner’s centrality to Black Mountain poetics and his influence on later poets: “Although he was centrally identified with the Black Mountain movement . . . he is seldom mentioned in synoptic studies (including my own work) of that generation. . . . And although he was aligned with Language writing later in his life, his name seldom appears in books or articles about that movement” (Concerto 120). Davidson’s title, “Missing Larry,” refers to Davidson’s own feelings of loss over Eigner’s death, Eigner’s absence from scholarship, the absence of cerebral palsy as a topic in discussions about Eigner’s work, and, lastly, to Barrett Watten’s earlier essay, “Missing ‘X’: Formal Meaning in Crane and Eigner” in Total Syntax. Davidson argues that the attendant effects of cerebral palsy can be identified as a “missing ‘X’” in much of Eigner’s work. 2. George Hart, in “‘Enough Defined’: Disability, Ecopoetics, and Larry Eigner,” argues that Eigner “discovers how Emerson can be used for an embodied poetics by converting the [ecopoetic] emphasis on place into an environmental account of space” (157). He



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asserts in particular that Eigner’s more mature poems eschew the ableist place-making embodiment prevalent in the epics of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, which he argues depend on “giant-heroes (Dr. Paterson and Maximus) to measure and value space and turn it into place,” in favor of an embodied subject position that “reveals space by being environed in it” (168). 3. Examples of proprioception include the ability to touch one’s nose with one’s finger, to walk in a straight line, or to sit down in a chair. All of these acts require a sense of the body parts in relation to each other and in relation to space and objects. While the neurological effects of cerebral palsy made it more difficult for Eigner to execute these acts, he describes in great detail how his body functioned in space in his autobiographical “What a Time Distance.” 4. A very brief poem from 1979 demonstrates Eigner’s own sense of metaphoric gesturing: “reaching for the sky / and a few stars” (CP 4: 1370). 5. In “Proprioception,” Olson locates the ability to “get about etc” as “central” to “the self ” (2). There is a “depth implicit in physical being,” he argues, “built-in space-time specifics, and moving” (2). Like others arguing for an embodied poetics, Olson assumes an unhampered body: it is through the “movement of [the body’s] own tissues” that someone properly “conceives his relation to nature” (Collected Prose 247). 6. Tuan’s rhetoric here resonates with the experiential dictates of nature writing, especially his proclamations about the primacy of bipedalism: “Upright, man is ready to act. Space opens out before him and is immediately differentiable into . . . axes in conformity with his body” (35). It is worth noting that when Space and Place was published in 1977, public conversation about disability was still relatively marginal. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and the gradual implementation of disability studies as an academic discipline have undoubtedly influenced the way later writers on place have framed their discussions. 7. Addyman’s terminology draws from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Edward Casey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jeff Malpas. 8. Malpas is particularly concerned with “intersubjectivity”: “It is through an individual’s interactions with his or her environments that both subjectivity and place arise. Subjectivity cannot be conceived apart from the subject’s sensorimotor capacities, which cannot be isolated from the surrounding environment that shapes them” (33). 9. Hart adapts the term chora from Angus Fletcher, who proposes a “new theory for American poetry” that revolves around the “‘environment-poem’” (Hart, “‘Enough’” 166– 67). Hart explains that the environment-poem is “‘chorographic,’ a term that ‘emphasize[s] its sense of space rather than place, as the ancient Greek word chora means space, while the word topos means place” (167). Applying these terms to his analysis of Eigner’s work, Hart asserts that “the fact of Eigner’s disability turns the proprioceptive stance of Olson’s upright poetics to the chora rather than the topos. His disability poetics produces environment poems, emphasizing the environing surround in relation to the subject rather than the subject’s conversion of the surround into place” (167).

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10. Merleau-Ponty stresses the corporeality of acquiring habit, arguing that it is the “grasping of a motor significance” (e.g., being able to gauge whether the car one is driving will be able to fit through a narrow opening), but allows that it requires cognition as well, and is not merely “some external process of association” (142). 11. Olson’s unwavering interest in Gloucester earned him a shrine there after his death (Polis Is This). 12. Quoted material from John Stilgoe, professor of landscape history at Harvard University, who was interviewed for the film Polis Is This. 13. Portions of this essay also appear (in slightly altered form) in “Ed Dorn in Santa Fe,” in The Shoshoneans, 127–40. 14. Dorn lived in Santa Fe when he wrote this piece, and he critiques the “cultured people” he found there: “This is the point: you don’t have a place just because you barge in on it as a literal physical reality, or want it to prosper because you live there. . . . Place, you have to have a man bring it to you. You are casual. . . . You might just as well live in Buenos Aires or Newfoundland, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference” (296–97). 15. In “Proprioception,” Olson addresses how the body is the locus of experience and perception, “giving the data of, depth,” (1) a theme that he picks up with much more rigor in “Projective Verse.” There, he explicates not only how the body arbitrates poetic form (through “the acquisitions of [the] ear and the pressures of [the] breath [241]) but how this process cultivates the poet’s sense of himself as an object among other objects in the universe. “If he sprawl”—that is, if he disengages from his role as a “creature of nature”—“he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing . . . by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share” (247). 16. Regarding the difficulty of rendering everyday objects in art, Williams asserts in his prologue to “Kora in Hell” that “the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity” (14). 17. Merleau-Ponty elaborates on how external perceptions cooperate with inner perceptions to inform both our sense of the world and our own subjectivity: “All inner perception is inadequate because I am not an object that can be perceived, because I make my reality and find myself only in the act. . . . It is through my relation to ‘things’ that I know myself; inner perception follows afterwards, and would not be possible had I not already made contact with my doubt in its very object” (341). 18. Dorn quotes Sauer in his epigraph to Idaho Out: “The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the totality of its forms” (1). See Sauer 330. 19. Notably, it is not only the lyrical “I” that is omitted; other people very rarely appear in Eigner’s poems, while Olson and Dorn rely heavily on social relationships to render place. 20. Williams first introduced this notion in the poem “A Sort of a Song” in his



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introduction to The Wedge. There, it appears as a parenthetical to the imperative “Compose”: “(No ideas / but in things) Invent!” (Collected Poems 55). 21. This deliberate shift of his attention away from his body might be described as a sort of negative proprioception—a refusal to perceive the unpleasant stimuli at work in his body—that paradoxically became as integral to his poetry as positive proprioception (in which bodily mechanisms become an unhampered source of “depth” and “data”) became to Olson’s. 22. In “Missing ‘X,’” Watten examines the instantaneous and continuous qualities of Eigner’s work, arguing that “Eigner’s work can be seen as one long poem, with the separate parts as autonomous instances. . . . The temporal sequence of the entire work gives a value to the beginning and the end of any of the individual pieces. . . . The poem has value both as its own occasion and in the entire work” (Total Syntax 175). 23. Even as subjective presence is integral to Eigner’s evocation of place, an “I” is rarely made explicit. Some of his early work, particularly in From the Sustaining Air (1953), engages the presence of a lyrical “I” to describe negative emotions about his cerebral palsy, but his mature work mostly avoids this. 24. Subject is in some ways a problematic term to use in describing the work of someone who eschewed traditional lyric, but the term effectively connotes the active, nonprescriptive (or nonproscriptive) perception of the poet and of the viewer present within the poem. 25. In 1993, three years before Eigner died, “Again dawn” was inscribed on the wall of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, attesting to his significance to the Bay Area poetry community. 26. In “NFS,” Eigner discusses feeling overstimulated after his move to Berkeley, not being able to keep up with the faster pace of his new environment: “There might be too much to realize as well as too little, the atmosphere might get or be too thick, things, life, go too fast, whirl past. A few years back I could feel in things a lot more than I’ve been able to since I moved to Berkeley. . . . it seems, I felt the world a neighborhood, or two dozen square miles of it anyway, (home) township neighborhood” (25–26). 27. In “Arrowhead of Meaning,” Eigner reports that he had “found an echo in what Robert Creeley said in a twenty-year-old review of Charles Olson’s first booklet (Y&X), of the idea of poetry as deliberate, purposeful not to say pointed speech. . . . As Creeley put it, the line is the means to focus . . . says ‘how’ we are to weight the various things we are told. Thought voiced and/or in the mind” (Areas 47). In “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson praises the typewriter as a machine whose “gain . . . leads directly on toward projective verse and its consequences”: “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work” (Collected Prose 245).

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28. Bernstein and Andrews explicate that one of the goals of the magazine was to “provide a place for essays and reviews that were neither expository nor narrowly evaluative—that is, where the actual language work that goes into poetry writing is not set aside in writing that ‘discusses’” (Andrews and Bernstein ix).

C HA P T E R T WO

“My Nose on the Ground” Larry Eigner’s Civil War G E ORG E HA RT

I In 1961, LeRoi Jones published a letter from Larry Eigner in Yugen 7, along with Eigner’s poem “K[hrushchev] in the USA.” This issue of Yugen, edited by Jones and his partner Hettie Cohen, is something of a manifesto for the New American poetry, beginning with an editorial note from Jones on two current literary events: the bestowal of the National Book Award on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle. To bolster his critique of the prizewinners, a review of both books by Gilbert Sorrentino immediately follows Jones’s editorial comment. Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, had just recently appeared, and Yugen 7 seemed aimed at keeping the momentum going. Many of the New American poets have work in the issue (along with Eigner, Bruce Boyd, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Joel Oppenheimer, Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson), and it also includes Robert Creeley’s review of books by Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn, and Whalen. If Allen’s anthology was the first concerted blast against new-critical orthodoxy and the consolidation of the confessional subject represented by Lowell and Snodgrass, then Yugen 7 is another squib thrown over the walls of “the official literary hierarchy,” as Jones dubs it in his editorial (4). And, with his poem and letter, Eigner is in the thick of it. Writing to Cid Corman on July 27, 1960, Eigner explained his appearance in Yugen 7 this way: Leroi Jones wanted to use a letter i wrote im in his next issue, which is to be mostly letters etc, attempt “to get into a thicker material—focus, and editorial delineations. Well, I’ve seen plenty of those, too—i dont get it—but no other objection, if that is one, and it’s a late date for me to begin saying no, so, i sd ok. He had asked how i liked Dorn on Olson, and i wrote him what i told you (sense of ground) and what

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you sd; also talked abt the c. . war poems, and sent them to him, among others which appertained. (Cid Corman Papers)

Eigner folds a number of issues together in this comment. By 1960, he had been reading Olson’s work, especially The Maximus Poems, for at least five or six years, had met and talked with Olson in Gloucester and Boston, and had been corresponding with him and other Black Mountain poets such as Corman, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, and Paul Blackburn. Eigner’s apprenticeship in projective verse poetics was about as thorough as it could be without attending Black Mountain College as a student, yet he continued to express bewilderment at some of Olson’s writings and the methods and techniques of projective verse. Therefore, he was eager to read other poets’ accounts of Olson’s influence or significance, and Ed Dorn’s “What I See in The Maximus Poems” was one of the first such documents. On May 25, 1960, Eigner wrote to Corman: Yugen #6 has a Maximus Letter in it., which has power I guess. Gael sent me a copy of Dorn’s What I see in the Maximus Poems, and I understood it a little, though ise forgetting now, etc., as usual; and went back to the “Letter” in Yugen, which was something of an instance. I dont much fathom the mystique of place, which Dorn expostulates on, but the way Olson cuts back to the land and sea, unbroken by buildings, and, forward etc, gives awareness of the buildings too, changing purpose, and so forth, is clear. He lashes together—eyelashes Quite remarkable, I’d say. Dorn lauds the abstract, in a sense I never tht of giving to the word—ekstasis perhaps, ex stare, cold eye, hm! standing aside, nonutilitarian “nonfunctional” is his word. Well, the words people spout and get involved with. Wanjina, no less. I’m a primitive. No use complaining. And poesy makes nothing happen. (Cid Corman Papers)

Eigner is engaged in something like a virtual seminar on projective verse, studying Olson’s epic as it is being published in small journals and first editions, corresponding with the master and his protégés, reading up on background and sources.1 Whereas Dorn stresses art’s “nonfunctional” status in his essay, to distinguish a place that is mere raw material for use with the Place produced by the act of imagination, Olson saw the project of his poetics differently (Dorn, “What” 298). For Olson, the poet is an archeologist uncovering what is hidden beneath the present, a historian who finds out things for himself.2 As Michael Davidson observes, “Using Whitehead as his source and quantum mechanics as his model for space, Olson seeks to develop a historical-poetic method that would

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not simply interpret the facts of history but that would exert an effect upon it” (On 128). Furthermore, according to Davidson, methodology is the “word that Olson often uses to describe how historical understanding . . . might be brought into alignment with language. It is Olson’s preferred term for poetics because it implies a discussion of ‘how’ as well as ‘what’ poetry might be. In an unpublished essay, he describes methodology in terms analogous to those in ‘Projective Verse,’ which stress muscular, physiological ratios in language” (128). Olson’s emphasis on physicality was never a problem for Eigner, in theory—he produced a supple and strong version of projective verse through his disability perspective—but the imperative to dig into archives, or the very ground itself, requires research methods that would be impossible for Eigner to practice in the pre-ADA era. In “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” Olson’s advice on working with “primary documents” was “to dig one thing or place or man until you know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it” (Collected Prose 306–7). For Eigner, whose disability made holding books and papers difficult, let alone limited his access to archives and repositories, such a method was not feasible.3 Nonetheless, the example of Olson’s historical poetics was compelling enough to make Eigner give it a try. As Eigner tells Jones in the Yugen 7 letter: Incidentally: I told Corman what i got of “ground..” in Olson (#6), and abt the Dorn essay, for one thing its snarled sentences, like Olson, and yin/yang sense of “abstract,” and he says it: “swims by me and misses me. Maybe it comes, on his part, from ducking experimental missiles. Damned if I can explain it. I’d say your sense of Olson is both straighter and more accurate. ‘By ear, he sd.’ When Dorn appreciates that, he will be a big boy.” ?Maybe I sd something abt ear.?4 Well. Corman’s onto it, and Olson, it look like, in/ ear/mind/breath/heart. ??? (“Letter” 45)

Eigner gets a sense of the “ground” from Olson’s poem in Yugen 6, “Letter, May 2, 1959” (Maximus Poems 150–56), agreeing with Corman that Dorn’s essay is not as helpful as it could be. The ground at issue here is New England, specifically Olson’s hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts. “Letter, May 2, 1959” is quite literally concerned with the ground in Gloucester, as Maximus begins the poem by counting his paces in order to locate a historical boundary line that he is in search of:

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125 paces Grove Street fr E end of Oak Grove cemetery to major turn of NW of road this line goes finally straight fr Wallis property direct to White (as of 1707/8) (2) 125 of curve (3) 200 paces to Centennial (150)

For fellow New Englander Eigner, this ground would be familiar even if he himself could not measure it bodily as Olson/Maximus does here. However, this also means that Olson has staked the claim on a historical-projectivist investigation of the early Republic in Massachusetts. Again, as Davidson notes, “The first book of The Maximus Poems is filled with moments in which the study of history, particularly that connected with the settlement of Cape Ann in coastal Massachusetts, is tied to the activities of poetry” (On 130). If Eigner wants to try out this method for himself, he will have to find another place for his investigations. He chose the American South during the Civil War. Sending Corman new poems in a letter dated February 11, 1960, Eigner writes: At any rate here are more of my mss. Some of them evidence of my reading up the Civil War during January—this hallowed ground, by Br Catton, for a general acct ((pedestrian, eh?)), a bk of Brady photos et al., and most of vol. i de Freemans Lee’s Lieutenants. Maybe I’ll dig fiction a little more after this. In war and peace, red badge, I recall the battles didnt seem quite graspable—I think perhaps emphasis on smells and glints etc to the detriment of the ground, dispositions, mts, . . . besides Pierre, the unhistorical character and largely spectator, an unnecessary superimposition, fogging the way. Though not for Tolstoi’s purposes, i gather. Here, its legs moving landscape. Well, I had enough of it after a while. Inhuman, senseless by now, and destructive. Topography. My nose on the ground. Geography. (Glad to get Dixie under my skull: somehow more important than the West. That hole i got filled in anyway. Maps. Blue Ridge and Appalaichan, Nose on the ground Sometimes I’ll get the bk Compromise of 1880. Someday maybe Theory of Functions Shallows are pleasant after all. And everything except missiles are toys.) (Cid Corman Papers)



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His anxiety about using popular books as sources is evident, but more important is the motivation for his research in the first place. Reading fiction such as War and Peace and The Red Badge of Courage, Eigner is unable to grasp the battle scenes, the geography and landscape is too abstract. In the Yugen 7 letter, Eigner mentions his civil war poems and explains: They may form quite a group, some of em. The Civil War bits I show you on acct of Olson’s letter,* [*May 59] the sight of ground, back and forth, which i get out of it after reading the Dorn appreciation of Maximus ; “theatre ..,” eg, is sort of the glimpse i got from First Bull Run of Virginia, or N. Virginia, panorama and terrain, moving with lines of men, masses , space/time , from Brady photos, bk Lee’s Lieutenants (in the front of which is quite a set of full-page pictures of em) , and the map in there and one in this pop. general history of Bruce Catton’s, This Hallowed Ground, where the rail lines, crosshatched, like spurred, spooring, appear to foot it down. Little choo-choo, this is apt to end in child-like scenes. And Olson is more pile riveted, of course (I just spread out, in great part, it seems)—he is enough. h i t e m b r a s s—which seems casual—kind of fits with the C War stuff. (“Letter” 44)

So, in trying to get a sense of the ground in the Civil War, and finding some clues as to method in Olson’s Maximus, Eigner begins to think of these poems as a group or sequence. This notion stuck with him into the mid-1960s. Writing to Hettie Cohen (now Hettie Jones) on April 29, 1966, Eigner informs her that “the ‘Frederick Douglass’ thing sort of an unexpected grand climax to th CWar pieces, for the likes of me (I’m carrying on as if the series was 50 pp. long!), getting T Roosevelt, remote vertebrate cousins and all in there. One of my best, I guess” (Amiri Baraka Papers). Eigner’s Civil War sequence offers a unique perspective on his work and poetics, then, because it is the one instance in which he proposes a grouping of his own poems based on subject matter rather than chronological association. Because of his disability, Eigner often relied on others to help select and organize his collections of poetry (Creeley, in the first case, and then Olson and Levertov for his On My Eyes [1960], and later Robert Grenier for many collections). And, for the objectivist-projectivist line in which Eigner is taking part, the sequence is the means by which epic-length poems are possible. We can see his anxiety about this undertaking—he feels his education is deficient, his sources are “pedestrian,” and his ability to write extended sequences is limited. But, for a poet who is typically associated with the recording of immediate, sensory experience, the realizing of things in language, a foray into Olson’s methodological historicism is an interesting experiment.

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What is more, in trying his hand at Olson’s method, Eigner engages in what Stephen Fredman calls the “grounding” of American poetry, a central practice of the Emersonian tradition. Because they lack a literary tradition that would provide context for their work, Fredman asserts that American poets, especially in their prose statements on poetry, continually engage in grounding their work in facts and reality. Olson’s definition of history as “finding out for oneself ” makes him the central midcentury figure in this tradition, and Fredman aligns Olson’s historical grounding methods with Thoreau’s: Olson and Thoreau use the epistemological imperative that one find out the facts for oneself as a primary approach to the problem of groundlessness, an approach that can be adopted as spiritual discipline, as political program, and as poetics. . . . As poetics, this approach encourages both the visionary practice of recognizing principles or laws within actual facts and the formal practice of building artistic wholes from an organic series of such recognitions. (34)

The grounding of American poetry also must theorize its own language, and Fredman observes that “American poetic cults from the Puritans to the present have given allegiance to the broad doctrine we have called ‘picture-writing,’ the doctrine stating that words for things also signify inward reality” (144). This notion of “picture-writing” runs through the romantic and modernist poetics of this tradition: In the course of writing whole books about placement, Thoreau, Williams, and Olson move through three levels of engagement with the place: a pacing of the actual ground; a gauging of the human activities that occur upon on it; and a posing of principles consonant with the lessons learned by extended attention to place. In seeking to reground metaphors in reality, as Emerson urged, these poets explore their places through complex and extensive episodes of picture-writing. (146)

As Fredman explains, these poets required an actual location on which to perform the grounding of their language and poetics: “Discussions of poetics by all of these poets are so freighted with metaphysics because the act of measurement involves placement upon a ground” (147). As his comments in the letters above show, Eigner had his doubts about his ability to do both of these things—the discussions of history in The Maximus Poems were too abstract for him at times and he had a difficult time “seeing” the ground when he read about Civil War battles. However, as he tried to “get Dixie under [his] skull,” Eigner shows no sign of recognizing



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“principles or laws” in his historical research, and, because he never published the poems as a sequence, he apparently did not “build[] artistic wholes from an organic series of such recognitions.” Indeed, what Eigner did discover in this experiment is the exact opposite. Eigner’s poetics, in fact, constantly questions the poet’s ability to recognize laws and principles, or to build artistic wholes, in language; rather, it seeks to let things and words mingle in the space of the page without the imposition of an order or telos from the poet. What this Civil War sequence demonstrates is that Eigner grounds his poetics in ecology, which examines the interconnectedness of life-forms in an ecosystem, rather than history, which seeks to construct a chronological account of cause and effect. His poetics do not exclude history in order to be ecological, just as Olson’s poetics do not exclude ecology to be properly historical. Eigner’s sensitiveness to interconnectedness means that history is a part of ecology. Instead of arriving at a sense of place, with his nose on the ground, after his experiment with Olson’s historical method, Eigner’s “grand climax,” the poem about Douglass, is “one of [his] best” because it is produced ecopoetically rather than historiopoetically. The historical matter is not subsumed into ecology; rather, Eigner’s historical research adds a significant textuality to the phenomenological elements of the poem, and the dissolution of the boundary between text and context enables Eigner’s ecopoetic treatment of subjects such as slavery, civil rights, food shortages, overpopulation, air travel, and freedom. II The Civil War sequence appears to be the five poems that Eigner mentions in his letters to Corman and Jones (“theatre charged with” [CP 2: 372–73], “as soon as you lay down” [374–75], “the confederacy, you have to” [375], “hit em brass” [390], and “the steep town” [413]), plus the later “Frederick Douglass” (620–21), though, as the third section of this essay will demonstrate, other poems of this period are informed by Eigner’s research into nineteenth-century American history. That this “sequence” remained an incipient idea for Eigner is underscored by the fact that he allowed the poems to be published in collections that presented different arrangements. Three of them were published in Air the Trees (1968), two in Things Stirring Together or Far Away (1974), and one in The World and Its Streets, Places (1977); “hit em brass” was not published until the Collected Poems. Nonetheless, he consistently refers to a “group” or a “series,” and in the letter to Hettie Cohen Jones he implies that there is some kind of arc to them if he thinks of the poem on Douglass as a “grand climax.” If there is a “whole” here, in Fredman’s sense, then it must have a beginning, middle, and end. My sense of the trajectory is that he

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begins in the mode of Olson’s historical poetics, drawing heavily on his research into the Confederacy and specific battles, but this methodology diminishes as the “sequence” progresses, and Eigner’s own brand of projectivist poetics—which is his ecopoetics—emerges as the dominant method by which he composes his poetry. In this way, his poetics does not “exert an effect” upon the facts of history, as Davidson indicates Olson would have it, but rather it registers how these historical facts impinge upon the present in ways that are social, political, and ecological. The “grand climax” is unforeseen because Eigner himself never posited an organizing principle for the sequence. Rather, his ecopoetics emerge from the Olsonian experiment refreshed with a new approach to textuality—his ecopoetics is an emergent effect here, because his grip on these materials (literally and figuratively) was less than firm, the Civil War material begins to mingle with his other daily and poetic concerns, his other reading and media consumption. So, one of his key ecopoetic elements, serendipity, comes into play.5 Paradoxically, Eigner cannot begin to ground his poetry until he actually leaves the ground himself on his first airplane flight in 1964, which is the impetus for the Douglass poem. So, in my interpretation, the sequence begins in the Olsonian mode of a historical poetics based in reading and research, but it concludes by arriving at Eigner’s distinctive ecopoetics, which is based in the interconnections between text and context, past and present, self and world. The earlier poems in the series draw heavily on Eigner’s textual sources. For example, the poem that inaugurates the series begins:

theatre “

shapes

names

tined

black

charged with

mountains that loom

lump surfs ace

red

the blinding

from inside

(CP 2: 372)

clog

As Eigner told Corman in the letter quoted above, this is “the glimpse i got from First Bull Run of Virginia” as he read Catton and Freeman and looked at

“My Nose on the Ground” 57



Brady’s photographs. He wanted to get a sense of “panorama and terrain, moving with lines of men, masses , space/time” and these lines evoke the illustrations of “the rail lines, crosshatched, like spurred, spooring.” Further into the poem, the speaker says:

I will be a bee above the local I will if the trees were higher under the white,

or the moon

the sky thrown wide arms climbing positions or through branches that is a hill

july leaves

the western grade where they grew pigs

Looking at the maps and charts in the Civil War histories that he is reading gives the speaker the feeling of hovering above the scene—in his imagination the poet is gaining “the sight of ground, back and forth,” seeing from a bird’s (or bee’s) eye view.6 As he said to Corman, this is the sense of the local he was looking for in The Maximus Poems and that Dorn’s essay helped him understand somewhat. The poem concludes:

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and there are generals like birds

of arms

with captions

there are different speeds the path changes scale

As he mentioned in his letter to Jones, Lee’s Lieutenants had “quite a set of full-page pictures of ” the Confederate generals, which reminds Eigner of the illustrations he has seen in field guides to American birds. In concluding with the lines “there are different speeds // the path // changes / scale,” Eigner uses this omniscient position above the local to get a sense of “masses , space/time.” He can zoom in on the particulars through research and reading, and he can also rise above them and see the bigger picture. The poems that make up the middle of the sequence follow a similar pattern. There are clear references to the South, slavery, battles, maps, and military terms. The second poem links Eigner’s research with his earlier attempts to understand battles represented in fiction, “there are improvisations when / government burns // the purposes / played out like a fiction,” and lines certainly echo his continuing reading in his sources: “silence the cannon for / slaves are free / and we have joined / to turn home” (CP 2: 374). The next poem begins with a direct reference to the Confederacy, and Eigner begins to reflect on his own connections to the history he is reading: “lines there down the map // if you recognize yourself // still / roads // colors of your state” (375). Are the roads empty and quiet after the war? Or is it that these roads are still there, still connecting north to south? Other lines from this poem might be making the connection between the war and Eigner’s frustration with Dorn’s essay and his study of Olson: “the sheer slavery / of abstruse thought” (375). As the sequence progresses, small references to current events begin appearing in the historical references, for example, “the (bus) back seat” in “hit em brass” clearly references contemporary civil rights, but the majority of images and phrases appear to come from Eigner’s research. The penultimate poem, written in July 1960, is still concerned with producing



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an impression of the Battle of Fredericksburg derived from Catton and Brady’s photos. As Eigner reported to Denise Levertov in December 1961, “the steep town” “was based on Civil War photos, etc., mainly a shot of Fredericksburg, I think it was” (Denise Levertov Papers). He also expresses his feeling that the poem fails: “seems far from redemption, way out past the cliff, anyway, since September” (Denise Levertov Papers). From one angle, this poem would be a fine conclusion to the short sequence, even if Eigner judges it irredeemable, in that it returns to the ground from the omniscient overview of the bee. The view of the town focuses in on a field hospital, and then what appears to be a comment on the weather in Swampscott (the Battle of Fredericksburg occurred in December 1862; the poem was written in July 1960) is interpolated: “the heat / passes and / has come again” (CP 2: 413). The poem continues: “no more towers / a prostrate eye // terrors may be in the sky” (413). It is now Eigner’s eye, not his nose, that is on the ground if it is prostrate. It is no longer a view of the ground but the view from the ground. Eigner’s position here may be a reflection of the battle itself. As Catton explains, the Union army failed to take the town because the Confederate forces occupied the high ground of Marye’s Heights, “the hills are just high enough to make an ideal defensive position” (188), and the weather was not advantageous: “on a night of wind and sleeting rain, the [Union] army gave up” (190). The middle section of the poem is drawn directly from Catton’s details:

night’s wet level

stalks

pressed row of pain a safe high part inside displaces

the shambles

At this point, Eigner seems to shift scales again and widen the view as the poem concludes:

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nice shelving of earth plates the ships

of the surface and flags (CP 2: 413)

“Shelving of earth” could refer to the hills that protected the Confederate army in Fredericksburg, but “plates” could also be a reference to the tectonic plates of the earth’s surface, which might be considered “ships / of the surface.” Or “plates” could also refer to the Brady photographs he was looking at, which would have been made on glass plate negatives. Yet, the poem ends on an image evocative of armies, battles, and wars, which seems to bring it back to his sources. Catton’s description of the armies in action seems to be the source of this image: “it moved with flags and with bands and with a great rumbling of moving cannon” (188). At this point, Eigner appears to have abandoned working on the sequence any further, settling for circulating the poems along with others on various topics to his friends and potential publishers. That he only suggested that a publisher like Jones might be interested in them as a group, but allowed for the poems to be published separately, indicates that the sequence was not the only context for them. It was not until two random events coincided a few years later that the Civil War series seemed to reach its conclusion for him. His first airplane flight—a trip to visit his brother Joe’s family in St. Louis—was an exciting prospect for Eigner because he would obtain his first view of the earth from above. In June 1964, a few months prior to his trip in October of that year, these lines appear in a poem: “elude the 4 walls / tenuous I’ve / wanted to fly / for the view” (CP 2: 573), and he commemorated the actual event in a poem written on October 20, 1964, which begins, “Last day on earth / for a while at least” (603). The other event was the January 31, 1965, broadcast of the PBS show Profiles in Courage, which featured the life of Frederick Douglass and resulted in the poem that he sent to Hettie Jones:

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Frederick Douglass

took his chances when we fly?

I don’t know

like

the landing gear

far from my mind I

was trying to see

where there was anything but a large ship only

that appeared small Do you love Maryland that state there

how

would you like to go back

where you didn’t come from

Most

have something they can

take shame from withdraw it fish life lurks in the sea

we eat it, what

is germane the St. Louis slave mart

something to remember is

still there

days

after the War—

of the Rugged Individual when man was man the

head of the family and so on couldn’t have gotten along why risk your shirt no

hands to pick the cotton no gin

we

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in a man’s thoughts Faneuil

Hall after what happened the slave likes

what’s in the air the free wonders

as well what

there might have been don’t often lose sight of the ground a cruise is expensive no tall dark face in the air no porter

 what

have I to do with

what I don’t see

(CP 2: 620–21)

The poem truly is one of Eigner’s best of this period because it demonstrates how fully realized his ecopoetics had become by the mid-1960s. The opening juxtaposes Eigner’s airplane flight with Douglass’s “flight to freedom,” both, as the poet sees them, risky endeavors. His ability to see things is raised in the next stanza, and getting his first view of things from above takes precedence over his fears about the functioning of the landing gear, though he cannot see much at all. His thoughts turn back to Douglass, who was fleeing from slavery in Maryland, and perhaps to the African repatriation movement in the Reconstruction Era (“would you like to go back / where you didn’t come from”). As he thinks about the history of slavery, racism, and civil rights, Eigner determines that most states “have something they can / take shame from” in their past. Considering these issues as he recalls his first time in the air, Eigner thinks about what is “in the sea,” the life he cannot see but that is consumed by humans. This thought may be prompted by his reading of Rachel Carson’s The Sea around Us the previous



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fall, which produced a poem about ocean ecology and species extinction in November 1964 (“Small, flightless birds” [CP 2: 609]). In asking “what / is germane,” Eigner poses an ecological rather than historical question. Derived from the Middle English germain, which means having the same parents or being closely connected, asking what is germane is to inquire about interconnectedness. What is the connection between all these things and the poet who sees or thinks of them? Missouri is connected to Maryland by “the St. Louis slave mart,” the something it “can / take shame from,” and remembering slavery and the Civil War means remembering what came after: Reconstruction, Theodore Roosevelt’s notion of rugged individualism that asserted a direct link between “Manhood and Statehood” in his address at the quarter-centennial of Colorado in 1901, and so on. For Eigner, as he himself took his first trip west, this frontier thesis is unworkable, “we / couldn’t have gotten along,” and offers no solution to the issue of slavery and freedom. The lines “the slave likes / what’s in the air” appear to refer to the “freedom songs” of the Civil Rights movement, which were slave spirituals with updated lyrics, such as “Freedom in the Air.”7 Eigner thinks of himself “in the air”—“don’t often lose sight of the ground”—and the fact that airlines did not have African American porters as cruise ships and trains would have. The concluding implied question returns to the point about visibility and invisibility, what can be seen and what cannot. What does the poet, the perceiver, “have . . . to do with” what he cannot see? If we are connected to the life under the surface of the sea, through consumption but also through evolution (as he wrote to Hettie Jones, he was happy to get our “remote vertebrate cousins” into the poem), even if we cannot see it, we are responsible for it. If Eigner cannot see the ground, or a “tall dark face,” while he is in flight, does that mean he is not connected to such things? Eigner’s ecopoetics finds endless interconnectedness, so the implied answer to this question is no. In “los[ing] sight of the ground” that his nose was on for so long, Eigner gains a deeper sense of coexistence, not just in space but also through time. III If he does not ultimately succeed in the historical “grounding” that Fredman attributes to the Emersonian tradition, what does Eigner achieve in these poems? Rather than grounding his poetry in an actual place, Eigner’s experiment with Olson’s historiopoetics adds a dimension of textuality to place in his poems. Reading the Civil War histories that he detailed in his letters to Corman, Jones, and Cohen led Eigner deeper into nineteenth-century literature as well, particularly Whitman and Thoreau. A poem written about a month before “Frederick

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Douglass,” in December 1964, is largely a collage of quotations from Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which Eigner described to Corman as “my 1st quotation-style poem” in January 1965 (Cid Corman Papers); “Foxes stepping” (CP 2: 613) derives mostly from A Week’s “Saturday” chapter, in which Thoreau describes the sounds at night around their camp: “As we sat up, kept awake by the novelty of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass next to our tent” (34).8 Thoreau’s earlier thoughts about the effects of the river’s dams and factories on the fish—“Who hears the fishes when they cry?” (32)—and his reflections on sound that night—“All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature’s health or sound state” (35)—are combined into Eigner’s stanza: the dogs

the cocks

the fishes

cries in the water

sealed

off from us

(CP 2: 613)

The connection between sound and health, and the lack of sound and environmental degradation, may explain why our “remote vertebrate cousins” were included in “Frederick Douglass” and also why fish, food, and hunger appear in one of Eigner’s great ecological poems, “the music, the rooms,” written in April of 1965: how distance is to some birds in the wind fishing pinpoint the circling air food (CP 2: 634)

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And why the unheard cry from the fishes evokes food shortages and starvation a few lines later:

a malnutrition Kenya

straightens hair it turns blond scurvy is wiped out (CP 2: 635)9

A year later, hunger and food shortages are still in the news. In a letter dated April 16, 1966, Eigner writes about India, “where reportedly 1,000,000 slowly starving people bed down in the streets of Calcutta at night” (“Letters” 782). A poem called “calcutta” begins “Night // prone / bodies” and includes the lines, “how much // food / is brought in // what to do with / heaps of it” (CP 2: 708). Another “quotation-style” poem follows “calcutta” in The Collected Poems, and it draws from Eigner’s reading of Whitman’s Specimen Days, specifically Whitman’s memories of the Civil War:

Whitman’s cry at starvation in a land of plenty

prison camps

South

the mean

six ways the big problem is

of saying it

consumption and conservation and population population consumption conservation conservation population consumption

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population conservation consumption or what about

bringing others in conservation consumption population consumption population conservation

(CP 2: 709)

Eigner’s opening lines quote from Whitman’s “Releas’d Union Prisoners from South”: “over 50,000 have been compell’d to die the death of starvation—reader, did you ever try to realize what starvation actually is?—in those prisons—and in a land of plenty” (764). The letter of April 16 and this poem demonstrate how Olson’s historical method is integrated into Eigner’s own projective-verse ecopoetics. Rather than uncovering the history of a place through research and fieldwork, Eigner’s ecopoetics reveals the interconnectedness of ecology throughout time and space. Trying to find a balance between thought and action in the April 16 letter, Eigner writes, “There are times for living, or let’s say purposeful action . . . and times for contemplation of the world, which includes the self ” (“Letters” 782), and later he includes a long quotation from George Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States that makes the case for reflection as the most intense form of action even though nothing physical is being done. “But,” Eigner continues, “we have to live not only in the present (in enough of it, which is impossible if we’re too personal or anyway introvert or perhaps selfish, egotistical or hard-up), but also the past and (least of all, it had better be, probably—or how fast does life go?) future, and different times come together in memory, all sorts of times” (“Letters” 784). To live in the past, present, and future means that Union soldiers dying of starvation in the 1860s is connected to Indians starving to death in the 1960s. The unheard cries of the fishes are manifest in “Whitman’s cry at starvation,” and our “vertebrate cousins” are “germane” because the expanding population will further diminish them as a food source. Eigner’s first time leaving the ground is connected to Frederick Douglass’s risky escape from slavery, and whether or not the poet sees a black face in the air he is connected to those who fight for civil rights in the present. And “consumption and conservation and



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population” are problems of the future as well as the past and present, even in a “land of plenty.” Olson himself proposed that “the present is prologue, not the past,” which is a way of stating his position as a “post-modern” writer (Collected Prose 205, 207). That is, to be postmodern is not to come after but before, and the method of understanding this position is his poetics: “This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession. I am an archeologist of morning” (206–7).10 Eigner’s experiment with Olson’s historicism expanded and fortified his own method of how and what, further confirming his “profession” as the ecologist of the postmodern morning.

NOTES 1. This is not to suggest that Eigner’s curriculum was limited to Olson. His correspondence of the late 1950s and early 1960s documents a wide-ranging reading list that included Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Dante’s Inferno, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Rachel Carson, among many others. 2. In “The Present Is Prologue,” Olson refers to himself as “an archeologist of morning” (Collected Prose 207), and in The Special View of History he writes, “History is story. It means nothing else as a noun. Herodotus was the first to use the word . . . and he used it as a verb: to find out for yourself ” (26). 3. For example, writing to his sister-in-law Janet in July 1963, Eigner remarks, “This brings to mind Lectures given at Black Mtn College by Olson (I have specially unmanageable photostats on left/right curly paper)” (Larry Eigner Papers [Stanford]). Olson’s The Special View of History is the “photostat” he was likely trying to read. 4. Eigner misses Corman’s reference to “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” the first of Olson’s Maximus Poems. Olson published different versions of this key poem, one beginning with the line “By ear, he sd” in the 1953 Jargon Press edition, which Eigner owned, and in The New American Poetry. In the first version, published in Origin in 1951, the line appears in the third section of the poem (Forrest, “Aurality” 203). 5. Charles Bernstein notices this key aspect of Eigner’s ecopoetics: “Eigner’s is a poetics of coincidence, where ‘serendipity’ (contingency) takes its rightful place as animating spirit, displacing the anthropocentric sentimentality of much verse of our time” (86). 6. Eigner may be punning on the last name of Confederate General Barnard E. Bee, who was featured in Lee’s Lieutenants. 7. “Freedom in the Air” was the first song featured on Radio New York’s Folk Music Worldwide program titled “Civil Rights Movement Songs,” broadcast on August 10, 17, and 20, in 1963. As a voracious consumer of educational programs on TV and radio, Eigner may have heard the song through this shortwave radio program.

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8. A note in The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner identifies A Week as the source text and includes this note from Eigner: “the fish cries sealed off from us due to reading Rachel Carson” (4: ix). 9. Eigner writes to Corman on April 4, 1965, that he had heard on the radio “M Redgrave narrating a program abt hunger. One hospital worker, in Kenya, spoke of a protien deficiency that straightens the hair (of african kids) and turns it blond” (Cid Corman Papers). For a more extensive reading of “the music, the rooms,” see Hart, “Walking.” 10. Matthew Cooperman convincingly argues that “archeologist of morning” prefigures Olson’s role as an “ecologist of evening,” which also becomes another form of Fredman’s grounding: Olson’s “poetics ground us as Americans in our native tradition of landscape and promote an ecological sensitivity that must be considered as necessary for global survival” (214).

C HA P T E R T H R E E

“People like Radios / Radios as People” Aural Form in the Poetry of Larry Eigner SETH FORREST

In “Who Speaks,” the afterword to Close Listening, Ron Silliman writes that “the test of projectivism’s commitment to voice must be the poetry of Larry Eigner”: Due to a birth injury, Eigner suffered a severe case of cerebral palsy that rendered speech difficult. Kept largely at home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until he was over the age of fifty, Eigner’s physical limitations and simple lack of practice talking to people outside of his immediate family made his speech all but unintelligible to any but the most experienced, dedicated, and careful listeners. Even though his contributor’s notes and biographical data often mentioned the fact of his palsy, Eigner’s difficulties were generally not understood by readers who had not met the person. When he began to “give readings” once he moved west, visual copies of the texts to be read had to be produced, either in photocopy or as overhead projections. In some instances, other readers voiced the work, with Eigner sitting alongside. [ . . . ] But on the page, at least, particularly in the early books, Eigner’s work appears superficially as a demonstration of projectivist method. (372)

Indeed, Eigner’s vast body of poetic work asks that we turn away from the Olsonian orality and concentrate on the aural dimension of poem, text, and the act of composition. Though his work has been too often ignored in major works of criticism on the Black Mountain school and the New American period more generally, Eigner’s poetry is crucial for understanding the sense of poetic aurality being developed during the post-WWII period. In order to fully “test” the challenge posed by Larry Eigner’s poetry and his physical condition against “projectivism’s commitment” to orality, we need to ask larger questions about aurality and orality and about the prosthetics of typewriters, radios, and modern poems. In this essay, I want to synthesize the two strains of the critical writing on Eigner’s work—on one hand, the formal analysis of Barrett Watten in “Missing ‘X,’” and on the other, Michael Davidson’s analysis of Eigner’s formal innovations as they reflect the symptoms of his cerebral palsy—seeking to analyze Eigner’s

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very influential formal innovations and attempting to understand the role of cerebral palsy without going so far as to cast Eigner as, ultimately, a disabled poet. But I want to respond also to the questions raised by Ron Silliman. Thinking of Eigner’s poetry as a “test” for projective verse is certainly an important place to begin, as the notion of “speech-based” poetics is automatically complicated if not outright contradicted by Eigner’s poetry, composed in spite of the difficulties he had in speaking. Turning our attention to the aurality of Eigner’s poems on the page, I hope to extend this line of thinking to gauge what Eigner’s work can tell us more generally about the relationship between poems and bodies. “Speech / is a mouth,” says Robert Creeley’s poem “The Language.” In Eigner’s work we find that poetry is more closely associated with ears. In the essay, “Missing Larry,” Michael Davidson argues for the transformative effect that a “poetics of disability” might have on the history of American poetry in the twentieth century, which is to provide a test of the poetics of embodiment that dominate the American postwar period against the “actual bodies and mental conditions” of the poets. Specifically, his essay reads Eigner’s poetry in an attempt to diagnose the degree to which Eigner’s unique and unmistakable style is a symptom of the cerebral palsy he developed as the result of a botched forceps delivery. Davidson writes that “the absence of [cerebral palsy] as a focus for critical examination of [Eigner’s] poetry leads me to ask how we might theorize disability where it is least apparent and retrieve from recalcitrant silences markers of a neurological condition that mediated all aspects of Eigner’s life” (Concerto 121). He reads form in Eigner’s poetry as a rejection of the “sentences” of the dominant ableist rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s. Davidson’s article is a response, at least in part, to Watten’s chapter on Eigner and Hart Crane in Total Syntax. In that chapter, “Missing ‘X,’” Watten contrasts Crane’s grammar and syntax, which works constantly to reinforce a poem’s treatment of a central image or idea, with Eigner’s “suppression of predication and syntactic closure,” which results in an avoidance of centralized reference that opens the possibilities of signification within the poem (Davidson, Concerto 121). Davidson, interested in the “implications for the disabled poet,” asks: “Is the mobility of noun phrases strictly a function of indeterminate syntax, or a register of alternate modes of mobility and cognition in a world based on instrumental performance?” (121). This essay adds an additional layer to the foundations of Eigner’s unique and influential poetic. In addition to indeterminate syntax and registers of alternate modes, this poetry records a radiophonic listening marked by de- and recontextualized sound forms moving in and out of space and time.

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I want to begin, then, with a brief formal reading of several poems from across Eigner’s prolific career. The most cursory glance at a typical Eigner poem, in this case “The Fine Life” from On My Eyes, reveals a strikingly visual style. The poem stretches horizontally from the left margin even as it extends vertically down the page space. Spacing, between lines, between words, and toward the center of the page, builds on the visual layout of Pound’s Cantos and Williams’s late experiments with triadic line structures:

THE FINE LIFE when you search

the

spontaneous thing

Objects

the belief

shuts the air

like the whole world, wanting to be serious

but how can we

in the future

the parts to the whole I saw some sparrows today

disappear in a slope of dirt below the road

the trees were bare like clouds that’s true we appreciate children

the confused harbor

(CP 1: 263)

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The first line presents what sounds like a subordinate clause; “the / spontaneous thing” might well begin the necessary independent clause, finding its verb in the next line, “objects,” and a parallel clause in the following two lines, “the belief / shuts the air.” Line breaks and spacing, however, confuse the syntax, making the grammatical relationship between these lines indeterminate: Is “objects” a noun or a verb? Does the verb “shuts” belong with the subject, “belief ”? Lines 6–10 could connect to and complete the ongoing hypotactic sentence (if we supply some missing commas): “When you search, the spontaneous thing objects, the belief shuts the air, like the whole world, wanting to be serious, but how can we in the future.” Or they may not. The remainder of the poem certainly becomes more paratactic and discrete. The poem hovers between a paraphrasable, coherent statement if we read lines one through nine as a hypotactic sentence, the disappearing sparrows suggesting an image that bears out the impossibility of “search[ing]” for the “spontaneous thing.” But such a reading is made that much more difficult by the hesitations generated by line breaks and spacing, not to mention the very mobile word choice. Making sense of the lines “the belief / shuts the air // like the whole world, wanting / to be serious” proves next to impossible, and making a coherent reading of the entire poem is out of the question when the last four lines take us far from the idea that might be represented in the image of the sparrows. This poem is typical of the way Eigner’s work extends and pushes to its limits the modernist sense of collage. The paratactic arrangement here offers just enough for the reader to get a glimpse of coherence, but spatially, aurally, and syntactically, the poem does as much to ensure an excess of signification. The pleasure, as Barthes would put it, of Eigner’s writing comes in the tension, active on all levels—visually, aurally, and semantically—between continuity and discontinuity. Eigner’s paratactic arrangements also call into question a frequently quoted but seldom explained assertion of “Projective Verse,” that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception” (C. Olson, “Projective Verse” 240). To expect that Eigner’s poetry can be broken down into a series of “perceptions,” one leading into the next, though, would largely lead to frustrated reading. For music theorist Jonathan Kramer, much of twentieth-century music operates on the tensions between continuity and discontinuity. Citing the early twentieth century as a period in which “the dissolution of triadic tonality after about 1910 removed the a priori of continuity,” he argues that composers have experimented with ways of combining “implications” of continuity with outright disruptive stretches of discontinuous sound (177–80). He goes on to say that this

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experimental play between continuity and discontinuity has radically altered musical thinking about time, resulting in the development of what Karlheinz Stockhausen calls “moment forms” that separate time into a series of present moments. “Moment form” complicates the idea that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” particularly the implications of the verb lead and the logic of the adjective further. Eigner’s work comes closer to a sense of moment form than any of the other Black Mountain poets. The “perceptions” in his poems rarely “lead” to any other perceptions, rather they simply follow each other in time and space. My analysis of the poems of Eigner, Olson, and Creeley leads me to believe that Olson’s assertion above is actually an endorsement of moment form, though it admittedly suffers from bad choice in verbs. This difference is important for a poet whose work is oriented more in the direction of aurality and objets sonore than to orality and the utterance. Taking a look at a longer poem, “Clouds complicated as stars,” originally from the wonderful little mimeograph chapbook Look at the Park, we see that Eigner surpasses even Olson in the irregular appearance of his poem on the page:

clouds complicated as stars

high

in the air

like mountains,

one in the middle

the

evening, because of the sun above the swimmers, the beach men

those free relations mirror the moon in the west ah, those bird-watchers

have a new object Boston

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hills the sign of the earth after a rain

colors November the road curved the road straightened that coast lifted off another brief shower the earth seas sound history is tall clouds the lost space clouds, the moving doors the wind breaks on the corner the day in the house (CP 1: 271)

In this poem, double-spaces break the poem into discrete groupings of lines that move unevenly away from the left margin, making it visually disjunctive. The disjunction occurs semantically as well. Eigner’s lines do not come near grammatical completion here except in small two- or three-line groups—“clouds complicated as stars / high in the air // like mountains, one in the middle,” for example. Here the three lines complete an image that may or may not be related to the subsequent lines, “the / evening, because of the sun.” Lines 22 and 23, “sound // history is tall,” refuse assimilation into any of the nearby syntactic clusters but

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without seeming to depart altogether from the field of associations, semantic or aural. “Sound” finds consonance with earlier sibilants, “shower / the earth seas,” and assonance with the repetition of “clouds” in lines 24 and 25. “History is tall” fits, if loosely, with the associations of verticality, clouds, mountains, birds, the sun and moon, to the point that the line feels climactic. Again, the shifting of the lines away from and back to the left margin along with the inexorable movement down the page make the comparison to moment form in music an attractive one. Incomplete hypotactic clumps mix with paratactic associations in another poem from Look at the Park, “Do it yrself,” offering somewhat more continuity than Eigner offers in “Clouds complicated as stars”:

D o

i t

y r s e l f

Now they have two cars to clean the front and back lawns bloom in the drought

why not turn the other radio on

the pious hopes of the Red Sox

yes, that’s a real gangling kid coming down the street he’ll grow up he’ll fill out sponges with handles we got trinaural hearing -they are taller than their cars

(CP 1: 253)

Here a number of observations are thrown together paratactically, the neighbors with their cars and their overwatering, the proposal to listen to the game on the radio, the awkward boy walking by, back to the cars, to a very oddly placed

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reference probably to a hearing aid, and then back to the cars again. The spacing on the page reinforces the cognitive and grammatical distances between the lines in the poem, and typography and lack of grammatical cohesion work together to avoid what Watten calls “illusionistic space” (Total Syntax 176). That is, the poem is at all points open. Watten argues that the discrete, grammatically fragmented evenhandedness with which the poem moves from one object to the next suggests a destabilization of the lyrical subjectivity that might be associated with but moves beyond that of Crane or Williams, the “I” or “eye” that focuses closely and singularly on the object or event that is the poem’s primary concern. Watten celebrates the lack of grammatical closure and syntactic cohesion from line to line in Eigner’s work for exactly this reason, saying that the subjectless predicates and predicateless subjects that compose the poems are evidence of a new poetic idiom that embraces the suppression of reference within the poem (Total Syntax 176). From Watten’s formal perspective, then, Eigner’s poetry represents a conceptual framing of objects, the meaning of which is severely limited in the poem. The context necessary to complete the meaning lies somewhere outside the poem’s frame. The poem is paradoxically representational but nondeictic, or perhaps its deixis is hovering close by but is ultimately slippery. As such, Eigner’s poems are perhaps the purest demonstration of the Black Mountain poetic. Creeley’s equation of form and content finds its most literal manifestation in Eigner’s paratactic distribution of grammatical and semantic units, as does Olson’s notion of “composition by field.” The appearance of black typescript sprawling across the page space demonstrates the notion that the poem can be an open field, and the arrangement of disconnected (or provisionally connected) objects, observations, and quotations of found poetry evince a poetry that embraces an open field of thought, not a closed, focused system. Because the “content” of Eigner’s poetry is so often clipped from its context, any easy distinction between what are usually termed form and content is complicated. Is the clipping and placement of words and phrases in “Clouds complicated as stars” a function more of content or form? In Eigner’s work, Williams’s “machine made of words” has become self-sustaining and autonomous, unconcerned with referring to any “absolute object” outside the poem (Watten, Total Syntax 179). For Davidson, the formal qualities we have been discussing are not absolutely separable from reference. The reference point Davidson has in mind is Eigner’s cerebral palsy. He reads form in Eigner’s work as “a register of alternate modes of mobility and cognition” (Concerto 122). Beginning with Eigner’s own descriptions

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of his experience as a “shut-in,” Davidson goes on to describe the poet’s writing process in relation to three “interrelated spaces: the page on which he worked, the room in which he lived, and the weather or landscape he saw from that room” (12). Though a cryosurgery in 1962 minimized the spastic movements of the limbs of his left side, Eigner typed most of his hundreds of published poems using only the index finger of his right hand. Using manual typewriters that he could lean against while focusing very closely on the paper, Eigner used his right hand to retrieve and load paper. For Davidson, the “careful spacing of letter and word” and “indentation and double columns” serve as “cognitive maps of [Eigner’s] internally distanced relationship to space” (Concerto 124–25). This “distanced relationship to space” refers both to the poet’s body with its palsied and spastic mobility and also to his sense of “shut-in”-ness. Until he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s, Eigner lived a life largely confined to a glass porch in his family home in Swampscott, and his poems record the things seen and heard from within this room. In several early poems, Eigner seems to emphasize the pathos of his isolation and his very stationary life. Two poems in particular—“The Midnight Birds” and the title poem from his first collection, From the Sustaining Air—reference the frustrations of being isolated and shut in. In the latter poem, perceptions of “fresh” “sustaining air” and the “clarity” of sunlight playing on bright summer surfaces remind the speaker of the perception that he is “an incompetent.” The poem documents its speaker’s recognition of his position from the normative, ableist perspective. Dividing the poem into two sections, the very paratactic and imagistic first five lines counterbalance the more hypotactic, confessional four lines that conclude the poem:

from the sustaining air fresh air There is the clarity of shore And shadow, summer

mostly,

brilliance

the billows of August

When, wandering, I look from my page

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I say nothing when asked I am, finally, an incompetent, after all (

CP 1: 87)

And in “The midnight birds remind me of day,” the sound of unseen birds chirping outside the room generates associations of isolation: his inability to participate in poetic “tradition,” the similarly acousmatic sensation of listening to the radio, the voiceless “inward performance” of reading, and finally the weight of the “darkness” that presses on the poet stuck in his own bed: The midnight birds remind me of day though they are

out in the night

beyond the curtain I can’t see Somehow bedrooms don’t carry Tradition

I

and the boxed radio

is off. But what I am reading inward performance Has relevance. Allows me to hear

while something speaks. As for the bed straightened by visible hands only it is huge when I feel

down in darkness

(CP 1: 82)

Besides the thin membrane of the porch windows, Eigner’s connection to the outside world comes through electronic boxes, television and radio. Like Paul Blackburn, who used audiotape recordings and radio broadcasts as the media for

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his correspondence, Eigner found his connection to Creeley and the other Black Mountain writers via Cid Corman’s radio broadcasts, but for Eigner’s poetry, radio represents more than a McLuhanesque “implosive” medium for generating collectivist experience on a massive scale. Like Blackburn’s tape recorder, the radio and the television extend into the development of Eigner’s style. I would like to shift now into a reading of Eigner’s poetry that locates a balance between Watten’s formal reading and Davidson’s focus on registers of the palsied condition. In his prose, Eigner states that “radio and TV have been audio-visual prosthesis,” bringing sights, sounds, and information to the poet from a world that was and still is often physically inaccessible to those who use wheelchairs and other ambulatory aids (Areas 163). But the radio not only closes the distance for a stranded Eigner, it serves as a model for the important formal innovations, the creation of the new poetic idiom that Watten so carefully describes. The radio’s aural qualities offer a model for the visual and aural parataxis that is Eigner’s formal signature. Radio listening, especially when one scans the dial quickly, offers a similar aural experience to that of listening to discontinuous music and moment forms. Though the radio plays an important role in Robert Duncan’s articulation of a poetics of “dictation” as phrased by Jack Spicer, who famously conceived of the poet as a sort of radio antenna that received the poem from the airwaves, I want to distinguish the radio as an influence on Eigner’s form/content matrix from the Spicerian sense of dictation. In the readings that follow, I want to emphasize my contention that the radio is for Eigner a model for paratactic form and a source of found material. Where Spicer’s poet-as-radio “tuned in” to the poem and transmitted it from a spiritual, Platonic ether into material form, the great effort at the typewriter that Eigner put into his lines, with their athletic spacing and placement in relation to the margins of the page, suggests a greater sense of individual poetic craft than perhaps Spicer would be willing to entertain. The poem “4 t h 4 t h” demonstrates both the prosthetic and formal functions of the radio in Eigner’s work: 4 T H

4 T H a bird gropes

a branch

the direct sun

on the clouds

the more read jump

more

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at the firecrackers after what jets

knowledge

blades

these days n b c

from above there’s no bird like a bell

the road of life

is it still going the Isle

is full the

pony express? people like radios radios as people

he claps

she swings

they’re passing somewhere between bursts (CP 3: 854)

The poem is a vast collage of discrete chunks of language, distributed irregularly on the page, with few clear syntactic and semantic connections. The first line frames the rest in ways we can only guess at: the Fourth of July? April the fourth? The grouping that follows presents an image outside the window in haiku style, birds, sunlight, and clouds. The fifth line again is nearly inscrutable, detached as it is from any grammatical reference point. So are the solitary verb and

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prepositional phrases that follow in lines 6, 7, and 8. The reference to NBC in line 11 suggests that some of these phrases might be clipped—“sound bites,” to use our contemporary vocabulary—from radio or television news. Eigner’s work regularly employs such elements of found poetry. Further below, lines 19 and 20, “people like radios / radios as people,” are particularly suggestive. Eigner modifies the phrase in order to ensure the semantics of the sentence, sacrificing the true chiasmus, “people like radios / radios like people,” to make sure that the lines may be read as similes. The “like” in line 19 may be a verb, but it may also be a comparison between humans and radios. In comparing the poem to a radio, I want to focus on the shifts in attention that the poem registers. The arrangement of syntactic elements is quite similar to the act of scanning the radio dial or channel surfing on television. We hear only a moment of the signal before moving on to the next channel or frequency. We could compare the form of “4 t h 4 t h” to John Cage’s “Williams Mix,” a piece that randomly splices together reel-to-reel tape recordings in very small increments and that demonstrates in its absolute melding of form and content the disintegration of sound made possible by electronic audio technologies, or to Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” in which twelve different radios are performed by twenty-four different artists, who adjust volume and tuning in a manner determined by chance operations, resulting in a piece that is a doubling of noise, chance, and indeterminacy as the chance operations of the performance reveal the unpredictable sounds being received by the radios. Notice also that as the formal qualities of radiophonic listening become more pronounced, the subjectivity of the poem becomes less and less clear. From the lyrical “I” in earlier poems like “The Midnight Birds” and “From the Sustaining Air,” we move through increasingly disrupted syntax in “Clouds complicated as stars” and “The Fine Life” to the exceptional fragmentation of “4 t h 4 t h.” We can see the shape of things to come as early as “The Midnight Birds.” The first four lines set up the scene, “The midnight birds remind me of day / though they are / out in the night/ beyond the curtain I can’t see.” The following ten lines, quoted above, continue to offer a reasonably unified expression of Eigner’s sense of being immobile and isolated. The poem tracks several enjambed sentences, though lines 6 and 9 offer parenthetical elements that do not fit into any of these sentences grammatically: the “I” of line 6, several spaces away from “Tradition,” and the “inward performance” of line 9, separated from lines 8 and 10 by double spacing. These two parentheticals play very elegantly into the poem’s theme, separation and isolation. The single line, “inward performance,” seems to refer to the act of reading and might remind us of the sense of performative orality with

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which “Projective Verse” seeks to imbue the text. Notably, though, the “boxed radio / is off,” throwing into question the nature of the “inward performance.” Is the speaker hearing silently or speaking silently? I want to keep discussion of this question at bay for the moment. If “The Midnight Birds,” from Eigner’s first collection of published poems, shows the beginnings of his abandonment of the sentence as a poetic element, the process is already well developed in his next volume, the self-published Look at the Park. This volume is particularly well suited for demonstrating the way Eigner’s poems register the processes of listening. The poems of Look at the Park regularly deal with sound in their subject matter and in their increasingly paratactic, radiophonic form. We have already considered two poems from the collection, “Do it yrself ” and “Clouds complicated as stars.” “Do it yrself ” uses double spaces to separate unconnected clauses and phrases, “why not turn the other radio on the / pious hopes of the Red Sox // yes, that’s a real gangling kid coming down the street.” The effect is to replicate the experience of hearing part of a conversation that bleeds into the voice of another speaker entirely, the attention shifts so suddenly. The penultimate line, “we got trinaural hearing,” refers to hearing or recording from three “ears” and so refers to the listening that is registered by the poem: the remarks about the overwatering neighbors, the request to tune the “other” radio to the Red Sox game, and the observations focusing on the kid walking by. The sense of aurality in “or fear itself” goes further. In this poem, the constitutive aural elements are even more fragmented than in “Clouds complicated by stars.” Like that poem, “or fear itself” hovers around a network of references, this time to Franklin Roosevelt:

OR FEAR ITSELF o l d

s i l v e r y

The gentle voice, whining a people

joy in their moment that it was

t o n e s

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some vigor Crippled Coasting today

Dear Mamma .. look at tomorrow

not dangerous

the unconquerable men, these

at the table, faith B

o

o

m

!

(the Xmas tree a “good education” and a “useful job” any man Mamma, a great lady – does not come back “for the 7th consecutive time” to a worn present “my little dog resents it” on the same side you should pardon me when I sit down (CP 1: 267)

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From the partial quotation of Roosevelt’s first inaugural address to the invocation of a standard, synaesthetic description of music, the poem skips across the ear as it skips about the page. Line 24 refers to Roosevelt’s famous speech refuting the Republican claim that his dog, Fala, had been left on the Aleutian Islands and rescued by naval destroyers at significant cost to taxpayers. Saying that he was accustomed to character attacks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt joked that his “little dog, Fala, does resent them.” The reference in the final line brings us around again to Davidson’s connection of Eigner’s radio and his cerebral palsy; it offers an inexact quotation from Roosevelt’s “Report to Congress on the Crimea Conference,” which he delivered sitting down. This speech, describing the arrangements made with Joseph Stalin at Yalta, was the first time Roosevelt allowed his polio-weakened body to be prominent in the public awareness. Eigner makes this connection as quietly as possible by way of line 8, the single word, “crippled.” The poem’s listening traces the tuning of the “boxed radio” that appears again and again in this volume. Though it clusters around the references to Roosevelt and his increasingly obvious disability, the poem records snippets of voices out of context, interrupted by noises, “B o o m !” in line 15. The first poem in the collection, “He didn’t really want . . . ,” offers slightly longer, but still incomplete, bits of story: an interview with a boxer, a travelogue describing a hike, a reference to “the murals of picasso,” voices that resist our readerly urges to make connections in any way other than through the radiophonic sense of aural contiguity. The radio, as a stationary receiver and transmitter of signal information, serves as a likely model for Eigner as a poet with cerebral palsy. Capable of unlimited scanning of the frequencies, transmitting whatever is received, the radio also provides a model for the radical parataxis of form that is the signature prosodic quality of Eigner’s poetry. Eigner describes this in a passage from “Rambling (in) Life,” reminiscing on childhood scenes: You’d ask him (my father) to get a station on the bedside table radio, and he’d go and switch rapidly back and forth across the dial and ask, as if you could see through him, Is this it, is this it, is this it. (Areas 131–32)

That back and forth squelching across frequencies would have produced literal waves of static and white noise coalescing into moments of acousmatic voices, music both live and prerecorded, insipid jingles, decontextualized sound from across bandwidths and distances. We can see in poems like “4 t h 4 t h” and “or fear itself”—to say nothing of dozens and dozens of Eigner’s massive collected writings—that this radiophonic aurality intersects and overlaps with the

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indeterminate antisyntax that Watten describes and the conditions of the poet’s body that Davidson indexes. Connecting the aural structure of radio listening to Eigner’s formal innovations allows us to bridge the gap between Davidson’s and Watten’s approaches, meaning that we can consider the role of cerebral palsy and disruptive formalisms and media ecology. That so much of Eigner’s poetry, especially in Look at the Park, reflects the form and content of radio reminds us of his isolation and his disability but in the subtlest of ways. It also allows us to “test” ideas about prosthetics that have sprung up in the attempt to find the “projective” in Eigner’s work. Of a group of poets that are known for their paratactic syntax and visually striking lineation, Eigner surpasses nearly all, with the exception perhaps of some of Olson’s most experimental poems in Maximus Poems IV, V, and VI. Given Eigner’s cerebral palsy and the effort involved with his typing, these leaps from the flush left margin appear with new athleticism on the page, so much so that we might extend Davidson’s perspective a bit to view Eigner’s spacing and enjambment as a prosthetic device, a means via writing to project the disabled body. Sarah Lauro argues that Eigner’s form, like Olson’s, is indexical of his body, stressing that Eigner’s poems reveal an empowered disabled poet unwilling to closet his body even in his poetry: “I hope to show here that the poet’s physical body is visible in his typographic and stylistic choices, and that the choice to make this representation visual as well as linguistic is well-placed” (11). Though her analysis often labors to find references to the poet’s body in his work and pushes somewhat the boundaries of interpreting Eigner’s intentions in the realm of disability politics, Lauro’s argument offers a valid perspective that can return us to the original inquiry regarding Silliman’s notion of Eigner’s work as a “test of projectivism’s commitment to voice.” Lauro wants, but is not quite able, to distinguish her own argument from those that might see Eigner’s place in the Black Mountain school as being motivated by his attraction to Olson’s “Projective Verse” as a way to “speak” through the page space, that projective verse might have shown Eigner a way to “project” his voice by thinking of writing as a prosthesis. She argues that Eigner’s poems “approximate his own speech, hesitant, laborious” (15). Adeptly treating the typography as a figure against the background of the white page space, she reads white space, wherever it occurs in the page, as a pause set against the motion of the poem’s graphic marks; the tension generated between figure and background, typography and white space, represents the tension in Eigner’s own palsied body. It is difficult to deny that Eigner’s poems provide a sense of physical activity. Especially when we realize how difficult the act of writing was for Larry Eigner, the poems must appear even more physical, and I do

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not want to discount the extent to which physicality comes into play in his work, the physicality of letters on the page and of hand to typewriter to page. What I want to critique for a moment is the more essentialized notion that projective verse equates to prosthesis. The problem with thinking of writing—any writing, not just writing by disabled poets—as a prosthesis has been rehearsed in literary studies since the early years of deconstruction and Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and logic of the supplement. The very issue is raised earlier by “The Midnight Birds”: What is the nature of the “inward performance”? Is writing made to speak, or do we, in reading writing, listen inwardly? Garrett Stewart, in Reading Voices, responds with the latter. Seeking to analyze literary language phonologically against the “phonophobia” that has followed the Derridean critique of phonocentrism, he argues that written language is fundamentally more aural than oral, since the physiological processes involved in reading silently effect an active “suspension” of the voice. Electrical scans show that the brain hears the written text, though the musculature of the vocal passages remains forcibly closed. For Stewart, “reading voices” is a declarative sentence; the act of reading vocalizes the sound of language even as it closes off the oral production of the same sounds. From Stewart’s perspective, then, writing is not an extension of speech so much as an aural prosthetic, extending our ability to hear even when the sound is inaudible. To link Eigner’s writing to a prosthetic voice is to tread clumsily on these theoretical considerations. Indeed, to think of projective verse poems as containing the “speech-force” of orality is to miss the aural dimensions of writing entirely.

C HA P T E R F OU R

Poetry as a Scene of Decision Larry Eigner as Distributed Author B A R R E T T WAT T E N Once the observer is made a part of the picture, cracks in the frame radiate outward until the perspectives that controlled context are fractured as irretrievably as a safety-glass windshield hit by a large rock. N. Katherine Hayles ∙ How We Became Posthuman

I only want to bring you to the point where this choice truly has meaning for you. It is on this everything turns. As soon as a person can be brought to stand at the crossroads in such a way that there is no way out for him except to choose, he will choose the right thing. . . . That is why I said the ethical constitutes the choice. Søren Kierkegaard ∙ Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

In this essay on Larry Eigner, I move from my early language-centered reading of his work in Total Syntax (1985)—where I put his work in the context of firstgeneration Language writing through a detailed linguistic analysis (informed by the structuralism of Roman Jakobson and Roland Barthes, as well as by postgenerative linguists)—toward a site-specific reading of Eigner as “distributed author” by means of information theory and new media theory.1 To begin, I look at how decisions about meaning are structured into the act of communication in Language writing—in the longer version of my essay reading the work of Language writers such as Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and myself along with Eigner—on the way to developing an account of “information poetics” for language-centered writing. Seen through the lens of information theory, Language writing demands decisions about meaning—to begin with the possibility that a message will be This essay was given in earlier versions at the University of Toronto, May 2002; the University of Iowa, October 2002; University at Buffalo, SUNY, March 2004; Wayne State University, November 2004; Universität Göttingen, January 2006; and University of Minnesota, March 2009. Thanks to my hosts, especially Adalaide Morris and Thom Swiss, Walter Edwards, Frank Kelleter, and Paula Rabinovitch.

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received as a condition of its being meaningful—that have formal implications, from the semantic shifts of the New Sentence to its nonnarrative texts.2 Larry Eigner’s work—an early and continuing influence on Language writing—anticipates this movement from information to form. In articulating a poetics of information that moves from one decision about meaning to the next, Eigner explored the ethical and communicative implications of open forms of poetry to become a distributed author, based on a mode of writing that is both situated and mediated in many senses. I see Eigner’s work as a continuous moment of decision—a series of cruxes between alternative meanings—that connects the making of the work with its open horizon of interpretation. In his reception among Language writers, Eigner is to begin with the “writer in situ,” at the center of a communicative feedback system extended to those who read and published his work.3 Just such an autopoietic feedback system is described in a key passage of Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers,” influenced by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, where “the feedback is the law”—a passage likely known to Eigner and others of his generation. As the New American poet who best articulates such a poetics, Eigner undertakes in his work a mediation of multiple inputs (visual perception, overheard speech, written texts, and his contemporary media such as radio and television) through technologically specific outputs (his precisely scored work on the typewriter page; the US mail as a medium; networks of small press editors, publishers, and readers). A key aspect of the feedback system of Eigner’s work is his correspondence with small press and magazine editors, resulting in a distribution of the authorship in his work through its multiple publication sites. In my central section, I present a set of four poems that appeared in This 5 (1975) under my editorship, using original manuscripts and published versions, as a textual register of his distributed authorship. Eigner’s poetry—at the center of a system of writing, correspondence, editing, and publishing—was part of an expansion of the nature of authorship that changed the possibilities of poetry. I then position my cybernetic reading of Eigner among a number of competing alternatives, from earlier language-centered and structuralist readings to the cultural studies/disabilities studies models in Michael Davidson’s “Missing Larry.” Finally, I take up the changed horizon of reading Eigner after the appearance of his Collected Poems from Stanford University Press and apply my notion of a “scene of decision” not only to reading Eigner’s poetry but also to the edition itself, specifically the editors’ decision to publish his work in nonproportional typeface, modeled on his use of the typewriter, rather than the proportional type Eigner allowed in most published versions of his work. A theory of authorship informed by information theory and new media theory is necessary to account for this decisive choice, which might otherwise seem only an aesthetic preference



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on the part of the editors. In this scene of decision, a modernist preservation of the author in terms of the copy text immediately preceding publication weighs in the balance with a postmodern account of multiple and mediated versions—not only the many instances of publishing in proportional type Eigner approved during his lifetime but also the Stanford edition itself.4 That Eigner’s work could be interpreted through both models—in a conservation of the author that is simultaneously a retrospective reinterpretation—is theoretically significant. Seeing Eigner as a distributed author allows for that decision, as a part of the expanded authorship his work developed and that extends through many others. I N F O R M AT I O N P O E T I C S I begin with a question of poetics—the relation of the radical particularity of the avant-garde, and specifically Language writing, to the larger question of authorship.5 My point of departure is the New Sentence, the extended nonnarrative prose form developed in the first generation of Language writers.6 The central formal feature of the school, from its origins to the present, is the use of parataxis and nonnarrative to disclose, critique, challenge, and ostensibly intervene in ideological structures of everyday life under late capitalism.7 Language texts depend upon a linear sequencing of discontinuous sources for their effects: though they draw on both narrative and lyric aspects of poetry, their distinguishing feature is the use of accretive forms of nonnarration.8 By the late 1980s, Language writers (after key precursors from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Jackson Mac Low and Clark Coolidge) had produced a number of long-form, nonnarrative prose texts, of such similarity and frequency that they approach the status of a genre.9 Whether this series of works comprises a new genre is an open question; for the moment, I want to consider it as a “text type,” which at its historical origins combines Stein’s use of nonnarrative and Zukofsky’s material textuality.10 Their primary feature is parataxis: the use of a series of quasi-referential and multiply determined elements (usually sentences, sometimes noun phrases) that construct and/or contest meaning within the larger form. In these texts, the play of referential positing and linguistic canceling creates an ongoing moment of crisis for the reader that leads to a “scene of decision” that must be resolved. There is a problem, however, with this type of text and its ethics of construction, and I will try to say precisely what it is. In the absence of a conventional author as guarantor of meaning, these texts substitute a logic of identity and difference, of immanent language and heterogeneous material, as the basis of their meaning effects. For instance, in my poem Progress I juxtapose elements that have one “set to the referent,” such as “I / look out to see cold fog / Lift over damp, stucco walls

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. . . . // In Toledo” (111–12), with those that are self-referential or nonreferential: “I turn blank sheet of paper / Into Latin, / it is a quote, / The current price of semiotics” (108) or “The use of a hammer as tears // Because I am in prison” (106–7).11 The variation of semantic frames between each of these elements—the “semantic shift” of the Russian formalists—forces the reader into a scene of decision that is the ethical work of the poem and that is referred to within the poem itself: “This is a machine, / an X / Or network of concrete fibers . . . . // I decide to turn off at Y Road, / That is a decision” (215). The implicit theory of processing constructed by the poem in its line-by-line unfolding arrives at a crux with “X”: between an automatism of language production in which machinic effects substitute for authorship, and a conscious choice to make meaning out of these elements, a decision to turn off at “Y.” This is a moment of textual reflexivity that accurately describes the position of the reader when faced with such surpluses of meaning: either to experience them as alienating and impossible or to substitute one’s own interpretive thirdness, a “Y” that allows for escape (or simply to keep reading, in more or less automatic fashion, which may be what most people do). The goal of the poem is to force a perception of this decision, but at a risk that forced processing between multiple interpretive frames blurs into a univocal and indeterminate effect. This is a limit of Language writing: its presentation of frame conflicts as critique of representation unravels into the vagaries of subjective interpretation. Between the author and the work, textuality becomes the site of an inspecific subjectivity—far from the goal of dismantling the subject as a critique of ideology. I want to pursue this problem of interpretive decisions among multiple and conflicting frames in Language writing in terms of information theory, specifically how information, noise, and redundancy in communication intersect with questions of meaning and belief in the poetry of Ron Silliman, as in this excerpt At each transfer point, glimpse how lives weave past. A woman with an interesting book in her purse which I pretend not to see. Letters crowd into a thought. Green paper folded around long-stemmed roses is stapled shut. Rapid winter sunset lacks twilight. They take out the breast and part of the lymph system. I stare through a lens at the new world. Hot tea sits dark in its cup. (747–48)12



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Information theory, as it developed from a context-independent, formal calculation of the probability of signals being received to a theory of communication and meaning (and later of organisms as communication systems), offers suggestive terms for Silliman’s poetry.13 It should be remembered that, in its original development, information theory was concerned strictly with the abstract probabilities of signals, not messages, as independent of context, content, or meaning. But during the Macy Conferences in the 1950s, as N. Katherine Hayles and others show, questions of semantics and, enabling them, contexts for belief relevant to interpretation were approached in terms of information.14 I want to return to a moment midway in this history where the semantics of information was being discussed in quantitative terms, before the turn to the self-regulating holism of systems known as “autopoiesis.”15 In information theory, this semantics is based on the quantity of information as an inverse relation to probability of being received in the act of communication ( inf [h] = - log p[h] ). Otherwise put, the information contained in an element h is in an inverse exponential proportion to the possibility of h; this was extended from the quantitative measure of information to a theory of meaning with the work of the Macy Conferences.16 A semantic theory of information, thus, would show that the more open to the possibility of meaning an element is, the less information it contains, while the more restricted in possibility, the more it contains. Imagine the difference between the statements “Terrorists explode a dirty bomb in New York” and “You are now reading this essay”: these convey high and low meaningful information due to their differing probability. As probability tends toward 0, the event is specific if unlikely, and the information it conveys tends toward infinity; as probability tends toward 1, the event is inspecific but likely, and its information value tends toward 0. It follows that, though counterintuitive, the more open and indeterminate a statement is, the more replete with possibility, the less information it conveys, while the more restricted and determined it is in terms of possibility, the more information. If we apply this semantics to poetics, many of the open texts of the New American poetry or the Language school would be of low information because their statements are so open to interpretation. But it is also this risk, of making a statement even in the face of the potential leveling of meaning due to its unbounded possibility, that is ethical—even exemplary—in the texts of open field poetry and Language writing. Consider the following two short texts from Larry Eigner’s work:

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the dying man’s car the big motor He watches the Grand Prix He thinks the world is perverted

(CP 3: 788)17

Or a similar companion piece (both from the first issue of This magazine, 1971):

Looks like

a tall bird barrels the foreground

(CP 3: 843)

In both poems an initial referent—the “dying man” or “tall bird”—is open to many possible interpretations, none strictly delimited. Both references are communicated in a manner that conveys low information; each is inspecific. In each poem, the following phrases qualify the reference but often in ways that involve an ambiguity and thus a decision in interpretation. In the first, does the dying man’s car have a big motor? Does he vicariously watch the Grand Prix on his deathbed? Is his belief that the world is perverted due to his love for big motors or the result of the race cars having bigger motors than his? In the second, is the bird barreling (verb) into the foreground or are there barrels (noun) in the foreground that set off the tallness of the bird? And what is the relation of the uncertainty of perception conveyed by “looks like” to the possibility of two opposed—or connected—scenarios? Like the texts of Language writing, Eigner’s work exploits decisive moments of interpretation between elements in a way that either restricts or diffuses their value as information. Like theirs, his work depends on the way information is mediated by form.

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It is precisely this negotiation of the “forced choice” of deciding between interpretations that Eigner’s poetry exploits—in focusing on the incremental sequence of textual processing. In a longer, more complicated example (again from the first issue of This):

dream-like

varieties

the real

morning moves on the earth the rising moon, the sea

such distance holds apart Who is it the man that fails the man that failed he gets up

there used to be fields

and walks through here remembers the opening days and weeds were a wall among the houses (CP 3: 818)

The poem opens a complex field of meaning, starting with a problem of meaning itself: the choice or identity between “dream-like / varieties” and/or “the real,” located on the shifting ground of a natural scene that cannot be precisely determined. The question of meaning predicates a response in “the man that fails // the man that failed”—either a general indication of the human condition or a

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specifically historical result of changes in the landscape identified with his failure. The poem maintains an interpretive crux over the duration while producing out of it an interrogation that verges on what it means to be human on a damaged earth. The question of meaning is the uncertainty of its occasion, leading to a larger question of how meaning depends on its formal mediation, line by line. D I S T R I B U T E D AU T H O R S The possibility of meaning in relation to certainty of belief—a central concern for both Larry Eigner’s work and Language writing—demands a structural rethinking of the “author function,” which I see in the example of Eigner as a predigital “distributed author.” Eigner’s work anticipates not only the “turn to language” of Language writing but also the input/output modality, systemic reflexivity, and disjunct spatial form of new media. The concept of the distributed author in hypertext and new media theory—situated not at the origins of a monologic, linear text but spatially distributed among multiple computational processes and sites, be they human, textual, or machinic—connects Eigner’s “composition by field” to the decentered textuality of Language writing.18 Distributed authorship is an extension of the concept of distributed computing, in which computation and processing are shared between man and machine, such that machines not only provide a medium for communication but process and mediate it as well; it is crucial that the elements of distributed computing are spatially disjunct as well as connected.19 Extending distributed computing to authorship shows how literature and culture, too, may be seen as originating at multiple sites of production, be they human or machinic—constituting a medium much like the man/machine interface of cybernetics.20 The best example of predigital distributed authorship is the work of Larry Eigner, which I see as an instance of distributed poetics before the rise of new media.21 To begin with, we can retrospectively imagine Eigner’s work as split between, as it combines, the values of two disjunct literary formations, occupying a transitional zone between the New American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s and Language writing of the 1970s and later. In Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), Eigner’s work interprets the earlier period’s poetics of improvisatory spontaneity, physical embodiment, and open form. Crucial for this aesthetic is the physical setting of the poem on the page, mediated through the technology of a portable typewriter. In breaking away from the lyric address, narrative frames, and regular verse forms of mainstream poetry, Eigner constructs a poetics of temporal immediacy and spatial unfolding, interpreting the spatiality and temporality of the

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poet’s being in time. In ways only suggested by Allen’s anthology selection, Eigner’s work may turn out to have been the most realized instance of the “composition by field” called for in Charles Olson’s period-defining essay “Projective Verse” (1950), which mediates form through typewriter technology as well. In Eigner’s work from the 1950s on, the moves from a temporal point of origin, graphically represented by the typewritten page’s left-hand margin, through incremental sequences that do not return to closure (Olson’s “kinetics of the thing”), each line, and the line-to-line sequence, is a self-reflexive identification of language (usually at the level of the noun phrase) with direct observation of the poet’s world (“form is never more than an extension of content”); as a result, poet and poem comprise an integrated process where energy is translated directly into form (for Olson, “always one perception must must must move, instanter, on another”; “Projective Verse” 240). Read through Olson’s manifesto, Eig­ ner’s work is the prototype of projective verse, insofar as its distinctive features are physical and organic, entailing spontaneity and rejection of closure—and a process mediated by the fixed spacings of the typewriter. Eigner’s representation as an exemplary practitioner of open form, however, was about as far as his authorship would go for the New Americans. There is no statement on poetics by Eigner in The New American Poetry; the author’s note states that he is a “‘shut-in,’ partly” who took correspondence courses from the University of Chicago, and frames his work in terms of a politics of affiliation when he gets in touch with poet/editor Cid Corman after hearing him on the radio; Eigner’s disability is barely perceptible in this minimal sketch (Allen 436). In Allen and Tallman’s The Poetics of the New American Poetry, the companion volume to Allen’s anthology (1973), there is no statement on poetics by Eigner, amid many appeals to the American tradition.22 Eigner was seen during the period as a romantic isolato, an utmost figure of marginalized outsider, even while, as disabled, he did not claim that position himself. Now, however, aspects of New American poetics that do not privilege organic being or spontaneity give crucial insights into Eigner’s work. First among these is Olson’s valorization of the typewriter, seen as a counterpoint to organic form: The irony is, from the machine has come one gain not yet sufficiently observed or used, but which leads directly on toward projective verse and its consequences. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. (“Projective Verse” 245)

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Here the typewriter as machine, as an instance of technological modernity that also refers to experiments in modern typography, conjoins with the organic immediacy of the poet, realized in terms of breath and phrasing in Olson’s poetics, anticipating the man/machine interface of cybernetics. The ontological or cognitive entailments of the machine as extension of the body are only hinted at in its material mediation of syntax and semantics as registers of embodied intention; for Olson, the typewriter is useful as a “scoring” device to interpret his physical being and movement.23 For Eigner, whose ability to speak was very impaired in childhood but improved later in life, the typewriter was an existential lifeline to communication with the outside world. While his typewritten poems do represent physical being and movement, the typewriter becomes, more than a scoring device, literally a prosthetic device for communication. The man/machine dyad of Eigner’s typing—in which his precisely scored poems and densely written correspondence are all typed out, one letter at time, by his right index finger—is what makes possible the expressivity and communicability of poetic speech in its literal absence. As well, Eigner’s heightened focus on individual letters, words, and spaces translates organic form into the “bits” of digital computation. This is far from the goal of Olson’s demand for an organic poetics, which was framed in opposition to regular forms of the “verse print bred” that genteel magazines would publish. Olson could not have anticipated how the man/machine interface, in his work or in Eigner’s, would lead to the nonorganic poetics of what would later become the cyborg.24 It would take the focus on “language as such” in Language writing, not Olson’s holistic insistence on embodied form, to foreground the cybernetic reading of Eigner (even as such readings were theoretically possible after Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan). A corollary of Olson’s poetics does lead to a cybernetic reading when he explicitly refers to the impact of Wiener’s work in his protoepic poem “The Kingfishers” (1950). Wiener was a nominal supporter of Black Mountain College; Olson used him to promote the college in publicity materials (he is claimed as a central figure of the college’s brain trust, though it is unclear what this represented; Clark 148, 248). In its use of the structural metaphor of the kingfishers’ nest, the poem demonstrates an organic process of communication and control, an autotelic feedback system that integrates sensory input and reflexive consciousness. This is generalized as a poetics in which “the feed-back is the law”: We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and/or the machine the factors are communication and/or control, both involve

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the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time (C. Olson, Collected Poems 90)

Such a specific linkage of poetics and cybernetics is unique in Olson’s work, but we may now connect it with his valorization of the typewriter as an extension of the physical body as foreshadowing a technologically mediated, even digitized and networked, poetics. It is crucial, here, that the “message” Olson speaks of is analyzable into components that are either “discrete or continuous” as well as “measurable” and “distributed in time”—a poetics distributed in the continuous streaming of bits as much as in any real-time romance of the poet as physical being. Had the former reading been as available as the latter, Eigner’s poetry might have been seen as an early example of a technologically mediated, cybernetic feedback system, as it is evidently “a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time.” Also entailed in Olson’s structural metaphor are a posthuman poetics (“in the animal and/or the machine”) and a telling reference to the Cold War politics of “command and control” that connects cybernetics to the Mutually Assured Destruction of the nuclear defense system.25 Readers of “The Kingfishers,” in any case, had a choice: to focus on a self-undoing, Dionysian poetics of idol worship, bloodlust, and destruction (“hear, where the dry blood talks / where the old appetite walks”; C. Olson, Collected Poems 91) or to take the hint of cybernetics as leading to an encompassing systematicity of communication, starting with the via negativa of the poet’s quest for meaning where he “hunt[s] among stones” (93). In foregrounding the materiality of communication, the Language school chose the latter route, and Eigner’s work became a central bridge between a poetics of embodied immanence and distributed authorship in its development. Beginning in 1971, This, which I coedited with Robert Grenier, published selections of Eigner’s work in each of its first five issues (totaling forty-five pages by the end of its run).26 Grenier brought Eigner to Franconia College to read in the mid-1970s (I drove him from Swampscott to the event in upstate New Hampshire, a memorable trip). Eigner had early contact with Grenier, Coolidge, Silliman, myself, and many others through the pages of This and through the larger network of alternative publishing. In addition to appearing in a vast range of little magazines, Eigner was well published in chapbooks and books in the 1970s, often in elegant editions by Elizabeth Press, Black Sparrow, and Oyez, and his collection of prose writings Country/Harbor/Quiet/Act/Around appeared from This Press in 1978. Earlier that year, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E began its run with a feature on Eigner’s work, including his “Approaching Things / Some Calculus / How Figure It / Of

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Everyday Life Experience” and “Larry Eigner Notes” by Clark Coolidge.27 In the end, Eigner and Robert Creeley were the only New American poets to appear in This, and Eigner the only one to be published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.28 In this reception, I wrote in Total Syntax (1985), Eigner is to begin with the embodied writer “in situ,” a predigital version of the “man-in-the-middle” that N. Katherine Hayles theorizes as situated between linguistic and sensory input and poetic output.29 While my essay did not use cybernetic terminology at the time, it was Eigner’s poetry as both an embodied and mediated system of language that served as point of departure for the next move, away from a poetics of embodiment and presence and toward a use of language that was both reflexive and social. The input/output model of Eigner as individual poetic “terminal,” in other words, turned his poetry to language: to “the word as such” not as autonomous but in its systematic reflexivity. A two-page spread of Eigner’s poetry in This 5 (1974) demonstrates some of the cybernetic and predigital aspects of his work, as interpreted in the context of his work’s publication and reception by the Language school.30 The layout presents four individual poems, only one of which with a title, in two pairs separated by a dot, along with explanatory notes. The manuscript for the selection reveals that the poems are consecutive in Eigner’s numbering scheme, as numbers 815 and 815’, and 816 and 816’ (and they appear in that sequence in Collected Poems). Reflecting the binarism to be found everywhere in Eigner’s poetry, there is a precise degree of autonomy and connection articulated between each of these components.31 815’ and 816’ may be read, in part, as comments or extensions of 815 and 816, as typographically indicated by the dot (in the manuscript, however, the poems are separated by “a line that may be cut,” a common device in Eigner’s work that allowed him to send poems typed on one page to different editors; the poems are thus sent out formatted for distribution). Beside the first two appear marginal notes between overstruck parentheses that add commentary on their contexts or content. The poems can be read spatially as well as temporally in several ways: individually, in terms of their own sequence of words and phrases; between spatially or temporally proximate occasions of poetry, which are partially linked; and by means of such interpretants. Switching between content and context, the notes stand outside the poems and give interpretants for them; they show how spatial relations on the page map onto open horizons of meaning. In being articulated as a series of binary oppositions, both internal and external, Eigner’s selection points toward the larger scene of their distribution. To begin with, the notes link the writing and publication of the poems to their prior textual occasions: the first two, here, appeared in a letter to Clark Coolidge. While that

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letter may be found in Coolidge’s archives at University at Buffalo, a four-pagelong example from my own archive shows how Eigner’s poetry frequently would appear in the middle of lengthy, painstakingly typed letters addressed to fellow poets and editors.32 We also see in this letter Eigner’s characteristic habit of filling every last bit of the page, often by writing marginal glosses to his letters as they are being composed. Between the body of the letter, the embedded poems, and marginal glosses, an entire system of communication and control—a binary feedback system, in short, addressing the internal production of poetry to its exterior contexts, both literary and historical—appears in a process of self-reflexive, mediated construction. In a letter discussing the four poems to appear in This 5, Eigner engages the micropolitics of publishing as parallel to the micropoetics of his work—in a mix of literary network with a fractal poetics that tends toward a much greater scale: It still seems pretty senseless to print the numbers etc. I use as tags, labels to record what I mail where, though it’s been done a few times by now ‡oh, I guess you don’t mean to print them, nor the dates—fine‡. As to notes, it seems the ts of 816 you have is a carbon of the ts I made out for my ts/ms depository (collection) at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, . U . . of Kansas, where I sent the envelope with the original ms on the back. Must be I wrote in my letter to Bob G how 816 comes from realizing a “useless” knowledge is ok, not being conducive to overactivity and fatigue of the biosphere (pollution) and exhaustion on earth stores, in taking in your converse in t h i s and some of Clark’s verse, being able to take some more of it in from remarks in t h i s 4. ‡Oops, my memory . . . ‡ And a problem with the note on the 816’ I send Bob: “L . . E . . Notes” is “Larry Eigner Notes” Clark wrote and sent Calhoun to use in athanor (and in them he speaks of his preference for p . . –to-p .. continuity of my Fulcrum Press book, while others have rather disliked having a poem on more than 1 page). So look (some fun, like taking hold of two birds instead of just one, there’s accommodation and its progeny invention at any rate) - just now I’ve put two notes on your ts of 816 and on mine of 816’ added below yrs of 815, both made up fresh, which strike me as something to print. Poems and notes that are and aren’t separate things. Houses and flowers may or may not open or shut the same way twice. Integrations are welcome when they arise. Contexts, ah!33

Eigner is referring to a fair copy of his poems I typed for his approval, at which point he revised the marginal notes, deemphasizing Coolidge’s response to his Selected Poems layout but reinforcing their materiality of publication. The material

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form of Eigner’s poetry—from carefully organized sequences of numbered poems with marginal notes, to hybrid writings that combine text and commentary on the backs of envelopes or scraps of paper—becomes an autopoetic system generated at the interface of man and machine.34 The system extends outward to the world in the correspondence with poets and editors, leading in turn to publication and to feedback in circulation among readers. In another example from my archive, a postcard discussing the selection of poetry to appear in This shows how Eigner’s work occurred as a social construction, among author, editors, and texts.35 The postcard links the appearance in This to a minianthology being produced by Douglas Calhoun’s Athanor; Eigner then comments on his current reading of Stein’s How Writing Is Written and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, mentioning that the cover is torn off of his copy; he includes feedback from editor Barry Alpert on a remark I made in correspondence with him on Eigner’s poetry; and finally he discusses a possible German translation of poem 815, which reminds him in turn of two earlier poems responding to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The feedback system of Eigner’s work begins with his poems but extends outward through all the contexts of publication and reception, particularly the work of other poets and editors. While mediated by the typewriter as machinic interface, Eigner’s output generates a large textual archive on paper—the author at the intersection of poem and archive as network.36 Poetry for Eigner is a complex of occasions that constructs meaning among and between them. In its reflexive mode of positing and recontextualizing, it enacts a site-specific poetics of feedback that is a continuous “scene of decision,” both for the poet and for the reader. In turn, seeing his poetry as a scene of decision recalls how, in information theory, certainty about meaning depends on a series of binary oppositions that switch between signal and noise, language and reference, representation and belief. This series of binary switches is articulated at the level of language itself, involving contrastive relations between phonemes, words, syntax, and line that are the structural elements of his poetry, as I show in my reading in Total Syntax—which I undertake at a series of linguistic levels from the phoneme up.37 Aligning such a formal, linguistic analysis with an account after new media theory allows us to understand his forms of material production and self-regulation as a distributed network of communication. It offers a reading of his poetry that goes beyond, as it complements, a series of prior approaches—whether authorial, formalist, or in terms of subject position. Such a reading makes the most sense out of the recursive feedback system of his poems through their continually mediated linkages to other contexts—as it comments on the discontinuity and redundancy of our reading of the separate occasions of

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his poetry as an entailment of its intention and method. And this is how many readers actually do read Eigner’s work: as a displaced, recurrent, material, and self-focusing series of occasions that readers “tune in” at the discontinuous times and places of its mediated presentation. Eigner’s poetry becomes a kind of predigital podcast of poetic language that readers participate in as a feedback system that mediates self and other. We would expect, then, that the manifest content of Eigner’s work will be of a piece with its form of production and distribution, as it is. As an early instance of a fractal poetics—a formal model available from the 1970s on often used by Language writers. Eigner’s work is structured on the internal distribution of meaning that it exports, in its mediated forms of reception and reproduction, to contexts outside the text.38 We may begin reading literally anywhere: for instance, at the beginning of the series in This 5:

h o r i z o n

an end to

useful / knowledge resource proving impervious beyond supply limits Any

place storehouse sun and stars moving

(CP 3: 1178)

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As a fractal that mediates internal and external, the “h o r i z o n” that titles the poem (taken from the letter to Coolidge) refers the displaced particulars of the poem to an interpretive horizon that exceeds them. If there is “an end to / useful / knowledge,” we may read that as both a goal and a limit; the implications of “use” must be distinguished from “knowledge” itself, separated by a slash from its utility. Knowledge based on utility must be gone beyond because its “resource[s]” are intractable, “impervious” to being accessed (known?) and “beyond supply // limits”—evidently in short supply or not available. But these resources are, in short, all around us, so that “any / place” becomes a “storehouse” in which the “sun and stars” are “moving” at the limits of the horizon, both physically and cognitively—Eigner reinforces this turn toward an ecopoetics in the letter quoted above. It is important that there are contrastive relations between each of these terms, so that they cannot simply be linked in a positive account of fact or interpretation. Rather, they occur within the form of the poem as a bounded system whose outside is both the ineffable horizon and the materiality of communication (in the letter to Coolidge). As Eigner comments in his marginal note, which both is and is not a part of the distributed poem:

‡‡ Drawn from a letter to Clark Coolidge thumbs twiddled earth how large

‡‡39

Eigner introduces a feedback moment here to show the discrepancies of scale in his poetic project—between his poetry as twiddling thumbs versus the “whole earth” at large. At the intersection of multiple determinants for meaning, the system of Eigner’s poetry is autopoetic (it finds its way among resources); reflexive (rather than being merely an instance of linguistic throughput, it places its observation and knowledge within the limits of the form); spatial and temporal (involving sequential, deferred, and lateral relations to make meaning); embodied (as self-consciousness is identical to writing as a physical act); and, finally, mediated (through the possibilities and limits of the typewriter and print).

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close far open (CP 3: 1178)

The short poem that follows it, “close // far // open,” reduces to an absolute minimum the discussion of resources and horizons in the poem above, becoming a fractal that reflexively comments on possibilities of meaning, in an expanded information theory sense, even as the note refers to a material text that has specific physical properties. Which is the horizon of which? Eigner’s marginal note, interestingly, moves from the representation of space to the space of representation—namely, the space of the poem on the printed page:

‡‡ In a letter to Clark C. .

white roominess

of pages about as self-contained as

together headed by

black lines in

a book with black covers and white lettering on the front . . . ‡‡40

Eigner emphasizes the material form of the book (here, Oyez Press’s edition of his 1972 Selected Poems) against the page-to-page continuity of the poetry Coolidge would prefer to read unobstructed: context is privileged over continuity, or in a larger sense, space is privileged over time, in a move beyond spontaneous prosody. The material form of Eigner’s poetry, then, becomes a significant bridge between the internal structuring of meaning and the external distribution of the

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poem and its resources. This material questioning of the limits of statement in the production of meaning continues in the next, and longest, poem in the series, which refers to the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, likely experienced on television or radio by Eigner:

news hungry fighting green

ships in the desert

voices more genuine gunmouths

no beautiful caricature beastly appetite of a face quiet seen open skies whiffs what’s from underground besides death

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ruins so many precedents “i surrender” no hand full

empty

more people turn the field bullets

the complex

rip trees

(CP 3: 1177)

wings

In this poem, media information as input and Eigner’s cybernetic interface as condition of output intersect in multiple ways. The poet as physically restricted and of limited mobility at the site of poetic production confronts the virtual simulacra of war on television, seventeen years before the Gulf War (in Jean Baudrillard’s view, the war that, as a media spectacle, “did not take place”). The poem, as a response, interrogates the limits of statement about war from its distanced perspective, even as it constructs and makes available the possibility of thinking through the mediation of language. War becomes a question of information theory: what information can we get, what do we believe, and as a result, what can we do? Leading from fractal images of war distanced and displaced in their media

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representation, Eigner’s antiwar critique is both deeply affecting, as a testimony to the limits of language and information, and hopeful, as it practices a critical poetics within the negativity of the media barrage. Here, the discrepant images do not add up in any sequential statement but rather shatter, as “bullets” “rip” the entire “complex” of meaning the poem intends but which cannot finally represent the reality of war. The limits of representation, then, are instantiated as the present knowledge of war at a distance, and this must be informed by an entire history of the inadequacy of representing wars—a recurring topic for Eigner, from the Civil War to the Holocaust.41 In contrast (and again reinforcing the binarism everywhere evident in Eigner’s work) a brief poetic coda holds up to ironic scrutiny the context of forgiveness that was used as renewal of the occasion of war: At One Day a hot wind

in the desert

(CP 3: 1178)

The poem bitingly refers to the Day of Atonement, the high holy day of Yom Kippur. But in war conditions, atonement is not meant; the missing letter m alerts us to the gap in our understanding—or belief in the reality of war—as a gap in signification. One could pursue the signification of the missing letter in a psychoanalytic reading, which must be bracketed here; there is also a hint of forms of abstention and self-control to be practiced on Yom Kippur. But as a decisive comment on the extended meditation and reenactment of war that precedes it, the poem places judgment of the religious rationalization for war—that war serves as an atonement or rectification of wrongs done by or to a people—in the context of its material enactment and effect: a “hot wind” of the flames of war, located physically in a desert that is itself an inhospitable environment as correlative to war. The coda becomes a scene of decision of the competing claims of media information, in relation to any overarching rationalization—Eigner’s rejection of the excuses for war. The predigital, cybernetic reading of Eigner as distributed author discloses relationships between form and content that go beyond a series of interpretive horizons for his work that led up to it. In the first horizon, Eigner is 1) the embodied author of spontaneity and open form, seen in his inclusion among the New Americans, leading to the next horizon, in the context of Language writing

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and after his appearance in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, where he is 2) the writer in situ, recasting the body of the New Americans onto the man/ machine interface—his work is a form of mediation, not immediacy. After new media theory, we may see Eigner as a kind of language-centered DJ (after Lev Manovich’s account of the digital auteur), who mixes media and affects in real time, drawing from an archive of samples to create a continuous feedback system:42 No really perfect optimum mix, anyway among some thousands or many of distinctive or distinguishable things (while according to your capacity some minutes, days or hours 2, 4 or 6 people, say, are company rather than crowds), and for instance you can try too hard or too little. . . . Many/and/various/mixes. (Areas 125, 126)43

Eigner as the “man-in-the-middle” takes language in through the senses and through their media extensions to produce a distributed output: the figure of the poet as auteur is caught between input and output terminals. Moving beyond physical embodiment and situatedness accedes to a third horizon, 3) language. In my reading in Total Syntax, I undertook a detailed linguistic account of Eigner’s poetics that posits a grammatical/phenomenological “missing X” outside the dissociative/accretive noun phrases/predicates of the poetry.44 The dialectic between input and output, then, would take the form of a binary relation between the world outside the self-regulating system of the poem and the construction of the work. Here, Eigner’s binarism of communication and noise, transmission and gaps, offers a textbook example of structuralist linguistics after Roman Jakobson and Roland Barthes, in a binary articulation that works its way into the most minute decision-making processes of the poem. For example, in Eigner’s use of the typewriter to score subtle gradations of sensory intake and evaluation in the feedback system of the poem’s argument, I compared his paratactic use of staggered lines to a series of binary switches between relative autonomy and connectedness. Reading a six-line poem randomly chosen from his work, I argued that the poem is based at every linguistic level—from phoneme to syntax to discourse—on such a series of binary oppositions.45

Imagination heavy with worn power

the wind tugging leaves

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from the florist’s shop some silence distanced (CP 2: 680)

The poem becomes the kind of primitive switching device that early cybernetics used to hypothesize the human nervous system. But why is this effect articulated, in such a reinforcing way, at every level of the text? A structuralist account would answer that this is in the nature of language—a disclosure of the binary oppositions that structure language itself from the phoneme up. A structuralist account of language as final horizon of Eigner’s work, however, objectifies it in terms of language understood as a binary, synchronic and diachronic, structured whole, an inadequate account given the decades of work in syntax, cognition, information theory, computing, artificial intelligence, and neural networking to come. The total syntax of Eigner’s work is how his poetry mediates his relation to the world, through the prosthetic device of the man/machine interface—not simply as a demonstration of the binary codes of language, though there is a connection, as I have developed through my use of information theory and probability above. If “the ‘missing X’ at the outset of the poem [is] ‘the world,’” as I wrote in Total Syntax, we have not yet solved the poet’s relation to it. It is this relation that Michael Davidson focuses on in his revisionary discussion “Missing Larry,” an account of authorship at the horizon of 4) subject position. For Davidson, the “X” that I proposed as an abstract relation of autonomy and connection must be returned to the embodied condition of the disabled poet, in opposition to the “ableist” ideal of integrated sensory, cognitive, and motor functions (Concerto 121–22). Davidson opposes as well what might be seen as the reductively formalist or Jakobsonian reading in my earlier account, which cannot get past its valorization of “poetic language” to an adequate account of the relation of poet and work to the world—to identity, context, and history, what cultural studies would see as critique of the autonomy of the poem as aesthetic artifact. If the reading of Eigner as cybernetic system has the advantage of uniting a linguistic/formalist/ literary reading with an identitarian/culturalist/contextualist one, what do Eigner’s physical disability and subject position as disabled mean for what I propose here as my final horizon, 5) distributed author? What is everywhere evident is Eigner’s labor-intensive mediation of the physical limits of the man/machine interface, in his construction of a poetic feedback system and his prescient enactment of



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distributed authorship. Mediation in his work means not a disappearance of the human into clouds of virtuality but a return to his embodied situatedness, physical labor, and connections to others as a theory of its value. It is in the human use of technology that human limits require that value—poetry, literature, knowledge, all mediated access to experience—may be achieved. Otherwise put, if the technology of Eigner’s man/machine interface—the typewriter—is specific to the cybernetic system of poetic production that evolved, we must be careful to avoid arguing for an identity between poetics and technology. It is the human use of machines, not the machines themselves, that determines what kind of value will result; we are neither technological determinists nor born-again remediators. This is a claim I hope will be decisive. SCENE OF DECISION This brings us to a scene of decision in an immediate sense: if we accept a reading of Eigner as a distributed author, whose work involves a cybernetic system that mediates inputs and outputs and that resulted, in his lifetime, in an impressive record of publication, how should that achievement be perpetuated now that Eigner no longer is alive? How should Eigner’s work best be published to reflect the conditions of its production? Clearly, a theory of authorship as sublime and inaccessible in its material textuality does not work: Eigner is not Emily Dickinson; there is no comparable corpus to the fascicles; and his typewritten originals led to publication in conventional typography, in editions that he authorized in his lifetime. There is no evidence that Eigner wanted to see his work only in typewritten form after it left its desk; of the many editions of Eigner in my library, only one reproduces the equivalent spacing of typewriter type, as opposed to the proportional spacing of most typographic fonts. However, Eigner was exceptionally diligent in copying the exact typographic relation of words, indentations, line spacings, and marginal notes in each version of his poems, and he worked with editors assiduously (as in the correspondence for This 5) to translate spatial relations into typography, as well as to preserve all idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation.46 Such a practice leads to a scene of decision: on the one hand, Eigner generally published his work in typographic fonts and approved them in that form; on the other, he rigorously maintained the precise spacing of his poems as central to his mediated practice. Should the editors of the Collected Poems go with a proportional font or an equivalent font? The question, in my view, is not strictly decidable: there are advantages to each. In the former, we get a modernist edition, establishing the poem as product, a published version not

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identical to its copy text or manuscript state, in a form that Eigner liked. In the latter, a postmodern edition, we get the poem as process, a state of publication prior to the modernist one that reenvisions its mode of reproduction. We need a theory of authorship to solve this dilemma: not of authorial intention but of socially mediated authorship. As I wrote at the beginning of my study of Eigner in 2003, as long as we reach that scene of decision, in Kierkegaard’s sense, I am sure we will make the right choice. In the intervening decade, this decision was taken, with the establishment of the authoritative edition based on Eigner’s typewritten manuscripts, edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier and published by Stanford University Press in 2010. While theirs is not a critical edition in the strict sense—variants, for instance, are not usually recorded, and there is not a formal bibliography or publication history of the poems—the editors maintain a strong theory of Eig­ ner’s authorship in printing his work in nonproportional type (Courier roman), which they claim as reproducing the composition of his work on his portable typewriter (supported by fifty pages of reproductions of the original manuscripts with holograph additions and comments by Eigner). Other significant choices include the use of an 8 1/2 × 11" page, imitating typewriter paper; printing all the poems beginning with a narrow left-hand margin, so that in most instances the poems are forced left on the page; and printing as many poems as fit on a single page while avoiding page breaks. Where a postmodern editor would want an edition that would reproduce all manuscript and variant versions, on analogy to Dickinson’s fascicles, the editors have chosen to standardize Eigner’s typewritten corpus while preserving its letter spacing. This decision is editorial not authorial, as Eigner did not insist on nonproportional fonts in his lifetime and was, in fact, a participant in the mediation of his work into print. On my account, mediation is central to Eigner’s horizon of distributed authorship and is articulated at every level of his work, from language to content to reception and feedback. Thus, the Collected Poems is either an imposition of a framework for reading Eigner that he did not insist on or approve or, in a cunning of poetics, itself an example of distributed authorship. About the time I was preparing the 2004 version of this essay for presentation at Buffalo, I wrote editor Curtis Faville with concerns about the use of the nonproportional font as, potentially, an imposition of editor Robert Grenier’s aesthetics—after his use of typewriter faces in his index card work Sentences and in his evolving work in holographic forms that can never be adequately reproduced and that must be seen in the original:

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The baseline question is, did Eigner ever indicate that he would have preferred his works interpreted in equivalent spacing, in his lifetime. The theory of the typewriter text is indebted to a notion of authorial intention, which may not have been the case with Larry. . . . All his life, Larry was subject to the vagaries of various kinds of “editing.” That he was able to relinquish his work to the fate of others’ hands and visions was a necessary tolerance developed over years of frustration and futility (and ultimately a kind of philosophical acceptance). / In this instance, however, you are supplying an editorial theory in Larry’s absence that there is no evidence he would authorize. . . . Preserving the “author,” you overturn him.47

Faville’s response indicates a degree of reflection over the editors’ choices on their way toward their gradual solidification into what appears, in front and back matter of the Collected Poems, as a dogma of “authorial intention,” as he thinks the matter through: Larry had a precise vision of each poem’s placement on the page, and insisted unequivocally that each letter, each line be located precisely in relation to all the other vertical increments (equally spaced). This was the only mathematically precise way of his measuring the relations between words and stanzas as he had set them. . . . There is nothing of Bob’s ‘vision,’ or of mine for that matter, that will be ‘superimposed’ upon Larry’s work. It will be preserved and presented ‘exactly’ as LE left it.48

Faville and Grenier’s apparatus, in many ways, asserts unambiguously that setting the poems in nonproportional type is Eigner’s intention, rather than being a form of mediation. Grenier, particularly, celebrates the typewriter in a burst of editorial rhapsody: Larry Eigner’s old Royal portable typewriter, with its keyboard (think Wanda Landowska and the harpsichord keyboard, upon which she performed Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier), has enabled him to make marks in space which often have exceptional written beauty, as such (not at all ‘independent’ of ‘what the words say,’ but as the means of saying it)—one definition of beauty is that ‘it works’! . . . The typewriter, as a ‘machine,’ made all possible—with the agency of the manual typewriter, one could range round (in the typewriter page—if one could type) with ‘perfect freedom’ (inside its grid—which could come to be a ‘whole world’) and capacity to precisely indicate exactly where each letter ‘goes’ . . . and how it can be experienced also/primarily (?) as ‘beautiful’/exact letter-relations/marks in space— i.e., ‘typewriter calligraphy’! (CP 1: xii)

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Grenier’s style of visionary intensity aside, the contradictory aspects of this passage are many. For one, the “grid” and the imperative to “precisely indicate exactly where each letter ‘goes’” are opposed to the “perfect freedom” of movement Eigner could not, in fact, have experienced. The typewriter font is experienced as directly aesthetic rather than complexly recording the fact of Eigner’s restricted mobility and ability to work through it. Finally, Grenier sees Eigner’s typewriting as a kind of “calligraphy”—reproducing his own aesthetic preferences, between Sentences and his drawing poems, at the risk of a substantial misreading of Eigner’s poem and, hence, his larger aesthetic.

calligraphy

typewriters my hat (bureau) the world inside

(CP 4: 1359)

spins

Eigner’s poem does anything but say that typewriting is calligraphic; rather, it juxtaposes two words, “calligraphy” and “typewriters,” with a stepped indent to indicate their partial likeness and unlikeness—both a kind of writing, one by hand and the other by machine. The poem mediates their relationship as it sets other discrete particulars in “the world” spinning—both inside the hat and bureau and outside them, and beyond in his oeuvre as a whole. The necessity of “unlikeness” here is entirely missed in Grenier’s expressionist prose. Faville’s editorial position, in “The Text as an Image of Itself,” is more nuanced, historicizing the typewriter and describing its use as Eigner’s man/machine interface: The manual typewriter, in the form that we now know it, was invented in 1867. It used the so-called “qwerty” layout of keyboard letters (in English), which has

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remained standard through to the present day with personal computer keyboards. By 1910, after some minor mechanical adjustments, the manual typewriter achieved standardized design. . . . Larry Eigner’s career as a poet could not have happened were it not for the invention of the manual typewriter. Though he was capable of a crude kind of handwriting, this was neither rapid enough, nor controlled adequately to have permitted accurate composition. Larry learned to type as a teenager, though his ability was limited to the use of a single index finger and thumb. (CP 4: xxviii, xxxii)

Faville sees the use of the typewriter as modern and progressive, involved not only with print technology but with modernist aesthetics, from Mallarmé to Cummings. With the onset of computers, however, the rigid standardization of the typewriter grid would no longer be strictly necessary, thus evoking a nostalgia for an earlier technology.49 Thus, the choice to present Eigner’s work in typewriter face is not simply to reflect his mode of composition but to anticipate future technological developments: In order to present a valid “ur-text” or model upon which future use could be based, for posterity, it was decided to present the texts in equivalent typeface, just as Eigner had “set” them. It is possible, perhaps even useful, to imagine, that, like photographic negatives, these poems will be reimagined (printed) in other typefaces—distributed or proportional—over time. No writer can completely control how his or her work is reproduced in the future, but in order that the original designs and settings are not lost, the first responsibility to Eigner’s text, as to his present and future audiences, is to establish a reliable benchmark. (CP 4: xxxiii)

This is a defensible decision taken to anticipate Eigner’s future publication and reception—even as it is directly contradicted by Faville’s belief in the ultimate identity of the editors’ choices with the author’s intention for the work: “It is not a version of something, but the thing itself. That is both its beauty and its potential” (xxxiii). With the appearance of the 2010 edition, a brief but heated controversy arose over the Collected Poems in an online discussion on poet Steven Fama’s blog. For Fama, the edition is a “grand fraud,” a “real outrage,” and should be immediately recalled and pulped. The reason is that, while the editors respected Eigner’s typewriter spacing with the nonproportional font, they standardized the left-hand margin of the poems—far to the left—so that in many cases a large empty space would appear on the poem’s right. While Eigner’s placement of the poem of the

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page varied—between different typings of the same poem, often—his poems usually had more generous spacing on all sides, as holograph manuscripts in the Collected Poems show. Space was as much a consideration for his poetry as temporal continuity; Eigner’s authorial intention was to place his poems in a larger space on the page, on analogy to an open field of meaning (a similar effect is achieved when the poem appears in the middle of a page of densely typed prose).50 For Fama and his supporters—several of whom suspect darker politics in university publishing—the edition is a total violation of Eigner’s authorial intention and aesthetically offensive as a result: I’d of set each poem individually, of course! That’s the only true way to go, especially given Eigner’s cardinal principle that “everything on the page matters.” Yep, individually set poems would be a big job, and result in something of a mish mash on the pages, but the poems require it. So it’d be a true, accurate mishmash. As opposed to the phony, artificial, untrue-to-the poems mish mash of a mess (that looks ugly too) that was published.51

The defense of the author summons a deep core of anxiety over authenticity, likely responsible for the viciousness of the online discussion, which Faville attempts gamely to parry. Also to the point is French reader Gérald Purnelle’s objection, late in the thread, that the edition lacks an adequate bibliography or textual apparatus.52 In removing contextual information such as the marginal notes that appear in many of Eigner’s manuscripts, as well as in published versions, the editors create an autonomous author who is, apart from their intentions, standardized to create an “ur-text” with uniform typeface and margins, certainly not the way Eigner’s poems appeared in his lifetime, nor true to his larger interest in creating textual and human networks that organize vast amounts of information. In a blog post, however, Ron Silliman strongly endorses the edition: “What . . . Grenier and Faville ultimately got right was an understanding that a book, as distinct from a poem, is an inherently collaborative project. Any compromises that have been made are to the advantage here of the reader”; in a moment of grand historicism, he sees the edition as “the most powerful & substantial book of this millennium” (“Collected Poems”). In the end, the editorial controversy points to Eigner’s work as, indeed, a scene of decision between competing ways to read it—whose refusal to resolve nicely thus continues to pose new questions. With the further development of digital technologies as crucial to any form of reading or interpretation, we may extend these questions to the nature of mediation as a poetics in itself.



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NOTES 1. My early account of Eigner appears as “Missing ‘X’” in Total Syntax. Resources in linguistics for my reading include the work of Roman Jakobson, particularly “Linguistics,” and the Berkeley school of postgenerative linguistics. See Lakoff; and H. Ross. 2. The full-length version of this essay adapts information theory, after Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication, through a theory of meaning based on it, for a reading of the paratactic, nonnarrative texts of Language writing. See also my review essay of Paul Stephens’s Poetics of Information Overload; Watten, “Information Poetics.” 3. Eigner’s note on poetics, “Approaching Things / Some Calculus / How Figure It / Of Everyday Life Experience,” is the lead article of the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978); it is reprinted in Andrews and Bernstein 3–4; and in Friedlander, “Larry Eigner” 125–26. I discuss the note in Watten, Total Syntax; see notes 31, 37, and 44 below. 4. On postmodern theories of editing, see McGann, Textual Criticism; and Critique. 5. I discuss radical particularity in the introduction and chapter 2 of Questions. For a general overview, see Watten, “Language Writing.” 6. See Silliman, New Sentence. I discuss the New Sentence in Silliman’s The Alphabet in Questions esp. 87–98. 7. The claim that paratactic form was key to Language writing’s critique reification of meaning was central to its early reception; see A. Ross; Hartley; as well as my account of why this early, Marxist reception was overwritten by more conservative, literary ones in Questions ch. 2, esp. 81–87. 8. On nonnarrative and Language writing, see the two special issues of Poetics Journal and Journal of Narrative Theory titled “Non/Narrative”; and Watten, “Nonnarrative and the Construction of History,” in Constructivist Moment ch. 5. 9. Examples include Silliman’s Ketjak, Tjanting, and The Alphabet; Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, The Cell, and A Border Comedy; Steve Benson’s Blue Book; Bruce Andrews’s I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) and Lip Service; and my own Progress, Under Erasure, Bad History, and Zone. Similar works by poets who do not identify with Language writing include Clark Coolidge’s The Maintains and A Book Beginning What and Ending Away; Bernadette Mayer’s Memory; and later, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts. In the longer version of this essay I discuss such texts as instances of “distributed authorship.” 10. I occasionally make use of the term Language text, though I do not think it is adequate; see Watten, “What.” Such works are often read as forms of the “material text.” See McGann, Textual Condition; and for its extension in digital media, McGann, Radiant Textuality. I critique the material text as a “final” horizon of meaning in both Constructivist Moment and Questions. 11. On Jakobson’s use of “set to the referent,” see “Linguistics”; on his “six functions of language” in relation to poetics, see Watten, “Politics” esp. 160–61. 12. Silliman published What as a book-length work in 1988; it is collected in The Alphabet. Citations in this essay are to the later publication.

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13. On the development of information theory and its application to literature, see Shannon and Weaver; Pierce; Moles; Paulson; and Hayles, How. Gleick provides a general overview and Stephens discusses the poetics of information in avant-garde writing. 14. On the Macy Conferences, see Hayles, How ch. 3; for essays from the conference, see Pias. 15. On autopoiesis, see Hayles’s discussion of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s work in How ch. 6. 16. In the longer version of this essay, I discuss the turn to a “semantic theory of information” in relation to Silliman’s What and Eigner’s poetry. My discussion of information, probability, and belief is drawn from Jaakko Hintikka, “On Semantic Information,” and Dean Jamison, “Bayesian Information Usage,” in Hintikka and Suppes 3–27, 28–57. 17. There is a notable difference between the version published in This 1 and the text as editorially established in The Collected Poems. The manuscript Eigner submitted for the magazine version reads: The dying man’s car

the big motor

he thinks the world is perverted he watches the Grand Prix

In a note between paragraph marks Eigner used to set off comments from text, he writes: “In 67 or 68 this was taken by the ed. of el corno emplumado, which in late 69 or early 70 was suspended due to action/reaction between it and the Mexican Government, and may well be defunct”—suggesting a political reading for the “dying man.” 18. On hypertextual authorship, see Landow ch. 3; for distributed cognition, see Hayles, How ch. 11; on the distributed agency of Actor-Network-Theory, see Latour; and for distributed cognition, see Hayles, Unthought ch. 1. 19. On the man/machine interface, see Wiener, Cybernetics, for the math supporting the theory; and Wiener, Human Use, for its wider implications: “In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being” (79). 20. In the longer version of this essay, I present examples of distributed authorship in a range of Language writers, from Jackson Mac Low to Steve Benson to Lyn Hejinian. 21. See also the discussion of Nietzsche and the typewriter in Kittler; and McLuhan’s account of e.e. cummings’s use of the typewriter. 22. The note in Allen and Butterick’s updated anthology, The Postmoderns (1982), does address Eigner’s poetics in more depth—and mentions the typewriter, as well: As every day or fraction thereof is new, and you find things and their mass, weights, meanings, assays, as you come to them, realize them and within limits of possibility give them value, appreciate them—their import, with interactive, immediate feedback, intonations of speech/thought in the mind, emphases indicated by typography



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on the page (line- and stanza-breaks, lacunae, indents, commas). Not that appreciation isn’t brief enough, and maybe the more things there are the less the meaning of any one thing or group of things anyway lasts. (392) 23. Already, in Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, the typewriter conveys a certain technological regression, given the ongoing discussions of cybernetics of which he was aware. Here it is precisely the extension of the body through the typewriter—the poet can dance sitting down while typing, as Olson does in The Maximus Poems—that excites him. At that point in his developing epic, however, technology begins to recede from consciousness as Olson delves deep into mythopoeia, and psilocybin replaces the typewriter as prosthesis. 24. On the cyborg, see Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto.” 25. On the importance of “command and control” as a conceptual framework for cybernetics in the post–World War II period, see Edwards, and Franklin. 26. See the index to This in Aerial 8 (1995) for the frequency of Eigner’s publishing in the magazine (277–302); also available at eclipsearchive.org/projects/THIS/this.html. 27. See note 3 above. 28. As well, Ron Silliman dedicated his 1986 anthology In the American Tree to Eigner. 29. For Eigner as “in situ,” see Watten, “The Politics of Poetry: Surrealism and L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E,” in Total Syntax 50–52. For the “man-in-the-middle,” see Hayles, How: “We can consider the image of the man-in-the-middle. The image was given currency by World War II engineering technologies that aimed to improve human performance by splicing humans into feedback loops with machines. . . . The man is significantly placed in the middle of the circuit, where his output and input are already spliced into an existing loop” (67–69). See also the notion of the “digital auteur” in Manovich. 30. This was coedited by Robert Grenier and me from 1971 to 1973, for the first three issues, and henceforth by me, ending in 1982. While the first six numbers published a diverse range of New Americans and proto-Language writers, by number 7 (1977), a definitive representation of first-generation Language writing had emerged in its pages. 31. For a detailed account of Eigner’s binarism, see Watten, Total Syntax: “On a number of levels a pattern of simultaneous autonomy and connection has emerged. . . . The two principal axes of construction are the grammatical order built on the basis of nouns and the sound pattern created by contrast with the neutral vowel sounds. Autonomy occurs in the poem by virtue of grammatical orders other than that of the noun phrase (including the lack of a higher grammatical order, that of the sentence) and by means of regional extremes in the sound pattern; both are maximally contrastive” (185–86). 32. Eigner to Watten, 30 December 1973, private papers. 33. Eigner to Watten, 9 February 1974, private papers. 34. Manuscript contained in letter from Eigner to Watten, 10 August 1977, “occasioned in reading some of This 8,” private papers. Other typed text reads: “Bob, here Sept 4, thgt you mght get a kick out of this Hmm”; “Poverty, at least in first 2 and last 2 lines,” underneath an illegible handwritten note; and “Seems I must’ve scribbled bulch

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Or Bulck (?),” referring to the last lines of the poem, which does not appear in Collected Poems: his gut anything but

so anything goes so

what language wow! struck me in the tub

lightning bulch

at least mush

35. Eigner to Watten, 3 March 1974, private papers. 36. Two projects to explore further would be to read Eigner’s work in terms of the history of the typewriter—to know more about the typewriter(s) he used and when (it is often cited as a 1940 Royal portable)—and to see his work as an extensive archive on paper as its material correlative to the feedback system it constructs. On the typewriter, see Kittler; on the archive as material, see Gitelman. 37. Watten, Total Syntax: after translating Eigner’s poem “Imagination heavy with / worn power” into the International Phonetic Alphabet (184), I present a series of schematic diagrams of the binary relations across linguistic levels in the poem (and in his work), from its “total poetics” to “propositional act,” “structure,” “grammar,” “vowels,” and “consonants” (186). I conclude: “The poem thus appears to be a very closely articulated progression of thought in and of the words themselves.” The text of the poem is included later in this essay. 38. On Language writing as fractal, see Watten, review.

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39. As per the letter quoted above, two earlier versions of the marginal note read: ‡‡ Drawn from a letter to Clark Coolidge Ms on back of an envelope

‡‡ From letter to Clark C—vv. 1, 2, 4 ‡‡

40. The original version of the marginal note read: ‡‡ In letter to Clark – in “L . . E . .

Notes” he comes

out with a preference for the

page-to-page continuity of the Fulcrum book,

Selected Poems,

where, also, the

headings are “dis-

tractions,” extraneous. So i spoke of

white roominess in the black, covers, horizon-

tals . . .

‡‡

Note that Eigner seems to confuse the 1967 Fulcrum Press publication of Another Time in Fragments with the 1972 Oyez Press edition of his Selected Poems. 41. On Eigner and the Civil War, see George Hart’s contribution to the current volume. Eigner counts as one of the twentieth century’s preeminent poets of witness, with recurrent reflections on slavery, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. 42. See Manovich’s account of the digital auteur: “I would like to invoke a particular cultural figure, a new kind of author . . . the DJ who creates music in real-time by mixing existing music tracks and who is dependent on various electronic hardware devices. . . . The rise of this figure can be directly correlated to the rise in computer culture. DJ best demonstrates its new logic: selection and combination of preexistent elements” (134–35). 43. From Eigner’s note in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1, cited above. 44. Watten, Total Syntax: “In Eigner an absolute object is not referred to in the poem.

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Rather the entire idiom is predicated on the lack of such reference. The individual elements could either be subjects or predicates; this ambiguity gives a precise value to the autonomy of the noun phrase in the argument of the poem” (179). But later I conclude: “Let the ‘missing X’ at the outset of the poem be ‘the world’” (187). 45. See notes 31, 36, and 41 above. 46. In a postscript to Country/Harbor/Quiet/Act/Around, his Selected Prose, Eigner writes: “All variant spellings and irregularities of indent and of punctuation here are deliberate, choices as must be and were at first and till now have been available, from among possibilities thought of, come up, alternatives as few as they’ve ever been and with differences barely perceptible pretty often”—a practice extending to his poetic texts as well (158). 47. Barrett Watten to Curtis Faville, email, 3 March 2004. 48. Curtis Faville to Barrett Watten, email, 4 March 2004. The correspondence continued over the next two weeks, concluding on 13 March with Faville appreciating my notion of a “decision” in their editorial choice but also reflecting, “Somehow, reading your lecture, I have very little sense of what it is about Larry’s work that makes it uniquely fascinating and powerful. . . . Maybe your lecture is one way of understanding how they do.” 49. Faville discusses the possibility of such nostalgia at length in our correspondence of 7 March 2004: “Now that we’re abandoning the typewriter almost altogether, nearly everyone ‘writing’ is doing justified software manuscripts. So it looks as if the romance of the typewriter may well come to be seen as a short bump in the road along the transition to self-adjusting mechanical (creation of and) reproduction of text.” 50. See discussions of marginal gloss and poems embedded in letters above. 51. Steven Fama, comment on Fama, 7 March 2010, 9:22 p.m. 52. Gérald Purnelle, comment on Fama, 5 April 2010, 5:00 a.m.

PA R T I I

Space and Time, Sight and Sound

C HA P T E R F I V E

Larry Eigner’s Televisual Impressionism ANDREW RIPPEON Isn’t that a marvelous . . . Isn’t that a marvelous piece of tone painting? And that’s what it is, painting for the ear instead of the eye. Leonard Bernstein ∙ commenting on Debussy’s La Mer, December 1, 1961

This chapter develops out of my work in the archive of letters, manuscripts, and essays shared between Larry Eigner and his first major literary publisher, Jonathan Williams, of the Jargon Society Press. The extant correspondence between the two men is largely one-sided: Eigner’s correspondence has, for the most part, been preserved, while the Williams side of the correspondence has been, for various reasons, almost (but not entirely) lost. Nevertheless, the correspondence covers nearly a quarter century, and an important quarter century at that, since it represents a time when Eigner is first encountering the writers who will soon be but are not yet known as the Black Mountain school; a time when Eigner himself is in fact considering giving up writing because of his frustrations with the mechanisms of literary publication. “I would of course like to stick with you after all this time,” he writes to Williams, on March 25, 1960, “but after all this time I need something definite to keep me up. I mean definite” (Rippeon 77).1 And then this becomes a time during which Eigner’s frustration turns to objective measures of success, as he publishes his groundbreaking full-length volume On My Eyes, through the Jargon Society, and storms the avant-garde little magazines of his day; and a time when Eigner becomes differently legible, transitioning in his reception from a fellow-traveler among the Black Mountain school to one of the favored elder writers celebrated by those of the Language school. This small but significant cache of letters and manuscripts includes important commentary by Eigner on his peers, notes on his reading practices, a fuller picture of his home life, and several important essays (some of which I will detail in what follows). The exchange between the two men began in the early 1950s—but with Eigner’s admission in the first extant letter that he has lost all of Williams’s letters, and with them Jonathan’s address, and so has been waiting for the next Jargon sales announcement in order to write him back. It is clear that the exchange was more than merely one between a bookseller and a book-buyer (although it is also that;

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Eigner was an exemplary literary citizen for his support of many and varied publishing ventures). In addition to their common affinity for Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and other Black Mountain writers, Eigner’s side of the correspondence indicates that the two men shared other points of interest, too. These include the music of Ives and Copeland; the painted books of Kenneth Patchen; popular TV and radio programming; and a shared sense of their social marginality and financial instability—Eigner with regard to his cerebral palsy and dependence upon his parents, Williams with regard to his homosexuality and the perpetual contingencies of the Jargon Society. I present below materials from this archive detailing Eigner’s compositional practice and media consumption, as well as his early and largely unacknowledged departures from and compromises with the Black Mountain or projectivist framework most often applied to his poetics. Eigner was a frequent consumer of and commenter upon the various threads of audiovisual media streaming into his home. His letters are filled with references—at times offhand, while at other times offering significant commentary—on radio and television programming. Radio for Eigner, as he reports to Jonathan Williams and others, included broadcasts of classical and contemporary orchestral music, numerous staged readings of Shakespeare and other theater, and lectures and speeches by literary figures and other luminaries, from William Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech to Leo Szilard’s denunciation of nuclear weapons. Many (though not all) of these broadcasts were sponsored by the Boston-based Lowell Institute. Television and film, too provided Eigner with much to discuss with his correspondents. Eigner was attentive to news and cultural programming (again, including adaptations of Shakespeare), was an early consumer of documentaries televised on the PBS precursor National Educational Television, and also commented on contemporary cinema (including Douglas Sirk’s 1954 Magnificent Obsession, starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, and John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck). Among these more favored topics and programs, Eigner also bemoans his parents’ affinity for radio talk shows and televised game and musical variety shows (including The Price Is Right and The Lawrence Welk Show) and at one point reports of the popular media onslaught that “it keeps on of course, coming through the walls etc—(singing commercials [and] ‘Price is Right’ . . . )” (Rippeon 114–15). Eigner himself has claimed that “radio and TV have been audio-visual prosthesis” (Areas 163) and Eigner’s anecdote regarding how and why he first contacted poet-publisher Cid Corman—writing the latter to disagree with Corman’s performance style when reading poetry during his own radio show—remains a frequent point of return in Eigner scholarship (Areas 133–34). Yet readers have been too ready to accept the “prosthetic” and communicative or



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discursive role of media in Eigner’s practice, and his consumption of and engagement with the various media of his day require further attention. Eigner’s publishing history, correspondence record, and early anthologization in The New American Poetry has resulted in his categorization with the Black Mountain circle of writers; early and ongoing critical discourse on Eigner has tended to reproduce this (see, for example, Ron Silliman’s “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading”). But these circumstances of personal and literary history elide or obscure Eigner’s own skepticism regarding the projectivist project. As they connect Eigner’s practice to a broader media-based engagement, I believe the materials and remarks that follow demonstrate that his practice can be characterized as an audio- and televisual poetics. They further demonstrate that Eigner is thinking about the social and ethical overtones of such a practice, with consequences not only for projectivist discourse but also for constructions of the social self and what Michael Davidson calls the “defamiliar body” (Concerto 222–30). “GO ODIES” VS. A GHOST IN THE MACHINE The relationship between Eigner’s media consumption and his poetic practice is a topic of increasing critical inquiry: explicitly, as many of the essays in this volume attest, or implicitly, as demonstrated by essays and chapters such as Davidson’s “Missing Larry,” which hinges upon Eigner’s response to the 1985 Holocaust film Shoah and Davidson’s argument that “claims of presence that animate many of [Eigner’s] poems are often filtered through secondary voices—radio news commentators, public officials, friends and correspondents—that ventriloquize his participation” (Davidson, Concerto 134). The perennial point of return in this strand of the discourse is the anecdote about Eigner’s discovery in 1949 of Cid Corman’s radio show This Is Poetry. In his own matter-of-fact recounting of this discovery in The New American Poetry, Eigner recalls his contact with Corman as a happenstance sort of thaw: “I bumped into Cid Corman reading Years, on the radio, . . . I disagreed with his non-declamatory way of reciting, and wrote him so. This began a correspondence in which I got introduced to things, and the ice broke considerably” (Allen 436). Elsewhere describing radio and television as a sort of “audio-visual prosthesis, . . . like a fast blackboard” (Areas 163) or commenting in a 1963 letter to Jonathan Williams on the “goodies on TV . . . for me,” Eigner has characterized media as discursive, communicative, and vehicular (Rippeon 117). It is important to note that even if this were the extent of Eigner’s audio- and televisual engagements—prosthetic, discursive, “like a fast blackboard,” full of

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“goodies”—this would implicitly contradict early projectivist discourse regarding media. In his “Notes on Language and Theater,” published in the fall 1954 Black Mountain Review, for example, Charles Olson condemns “that fleshless thing radio” as a stage for New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s “own idiocies for grown up american [sic] children” (Collected Prose 257). In a similar manner, and from the same general perspective, the earliest moments of Olson’s Maximus Poems inaugurate that long project as in part a search for “that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, / . . . / when all is become billboards;” when “silence” is “spray-gunned” (6) and there are No eyes or ears left to do their own doings (all invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses including the mind (17)

Radio broadcasts, outdoor advertising, and other forms of media “appropriate[]” “eyes [and] ears” from their supposedly more appropriate “own doings.” Those “own doings” seem by implication to be contemplative, marked by a silence threatened by and under pressure from the “musickracket / of all ownership” (18). The sanctity of that space informs Olson’s condemnation of commercial audiovisual media, but it also seems to motivate Olson’s wariness regarding recording practices; in a remarkable lecture and reading less than a decade later at Goddard College, Olson responds with trepidation when he is asked about recording the proceedings: Unidentified Voice. You don’t mind using a tape recorder do you? CO. Huh? UV. You don’t mind using a tape recorder do you? CO. No. As a matter of fact I’m going to just watch it like a fire—let’s sit here and watch that tape. [Laughter] What happens if it just goes on and I don’t say anything? (Charles Olson 1)

Olson’s anxieties are later confirmed during his reading when, following a series of poems condemning ad jingles and network television, Olson interrupts himself in response to a noise he hears: “Is there somebody speaking? Did I hear voices?



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Oh,” he surmises, “it’s that tape talking back at me. I knew it would object!” (13). Close listening to the audio (PennSound) reveals only a small noise, what sounds like an irregular but periodic humming; in response to my query, editor Kyle Schlesinger suggests that “[his] best guess is that the reel-to-reel was connected to an amplifier that created some sort of reverb or echo effect” (Schlesinger, personal correspondence). Regardless of the source, the moment is instructive. Though he laughs, Olson’s anxieties are confirmed as he is quite literally haunted by a ghost in the machine: the audiovisual media and method speak for themselves, suppressing the poet’s voice and poem at the very moment the voice and poem seek to emerge into their social situation and embodied articulation. Given these anxieties and condemnations by projectivism’s leading theorist and practitioner, Eigner’s attention to media already represents a divergence. Eigner’s media consumption is, on the one hand, most definitely a response to the contingencies of his bodily experience. Media does bring him things to which he otherwise would not have had access (although Eigner went to extraordinary lengths to “find out for oneself ” when it came to reading The Maximus Poems, as demonstrated in a selection of his letters that Jennifer Bartlett and George Hart edited for publication in the December 2014 Poetry magazine; Eigner, “Larry Eigner”). What is more, Eigner’s practice demonstrates that “silence” of the sort Olson praises, or the ears’ and eyes’ “own doings” are themselves unevenly distributed and unequally accessed. The acts of “attention” that Olson praises are similarly revealed as ableist; Eigner has written in a 1980 recollection that “in order to relax at all [he] had to keep [his] attention partly away from [himself], had to seek a home, coziness in the world” (Areas 26). This diffusion of the attention, deferral to objects and processes other than the self, and celebration of the popular media—if they do not directly contradict various premises of projectivism—demonstrate the limitations (ableist and otherwise) of projectivist discourse. But Eigner’s approach to media is also a deliberate and occasionally idiosyncratic move that, as I will show in the next section, demonstrates his ethical and epistemological distances from and differences with projectivist poetics, starting from the very first years of projectivist discourse. MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION A N D “R E L IG ION I N T H E BIG WOR L D” As part of an effort to publicize and fund forthcoming Jargon publications of Olson’s work, Jonathan Williams had proposed a “miscellany” containing new works by Olson, statements from contemporary poets and critics, and a checklist

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of works by and about Olson to be published together in a deluxe subscribers’ edition with portions of The Maximus Poems. By all accounts, the project never materialized—Robert Duncan’s own subscribers’ edition, for example, is simply a deluxe printing of the proposed edition of Maximus and nothing else—but in 1954 and before the effort fizzled, Eigner sent Williams his own essay on Olson: “Religion in the Big World.” Perhaps somewhat perversely, Eigner levels his most extended critique of Olson and projectivist poetics in this essay for the proposed “celebration” of Olson’s work.2 Eigner’s essay begins idiosyncratically, with a long and detailed summary of the 1954 Rock Hudson feature Magnificent Obsession. The melodrama centers on Hudson as millionaire playboy Robert Merrick, who inadvertently causes both the death of the altruistic Dr. Phillips and the blindness of the doctor’s widow, Helen. Subsequent events concern Merrick’s initially ham-handed attempts to atone for these mistakes, Helen’s flight from Merrick and Merrick’s quest to find her, and Merrick’s development into a surgeon so profoundly skilled that he alone is able to save Helen’s life and restore her sight, leading to their reunion and romance. “It is a real compelling picture, in its way,” Eigner begins, “simply because of the events that happen, the wonderful heroine losing her wonderful surgeon husband through the unconscious recklessness of this ruin of a playboy (the hero), and then her sight, very nearly her life” (Rippeon 168). Peering through the Technicolor schmaltz, Eigner focuses on the virtuous Dr. Phillips’s specific practice of altruism: “the services, constructive doings, [must] be completely cut off from any idea of reward and hence [the doctor applies a] corollary of secrecy, as in order to, as if brought out in an analogy with electric wiring, shield the person from getting egoistic” (169–70). Here is the remarkable point of contact, in Eigner’s understanding, between Olson’s poetics and the bathos of Magnificent Obsession. As Olson had argued, the aim of projective verse was “the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (Collected Prose 247). “For a man is himself an object,” Olson reasons, “ . . . whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use” (247). The “use” of the poet and the poem is tied directly to the self-objectification of the poet and a seemingly stern self-regard; the poet’s goal, according to Olson, is “to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature” (247). Lancing the “seriousness” of Olson’s project, Eigner uses the melodrama of the film in general, and the anonymous altruism of the virtuous doctor more

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specifically, to critique Olson’s manifesto. “There are more problems involved than preventing ego elephantitis,” Eigner pointedly responds: or hero-worship or breakdown (partial or otherwise) under sorrow. Even if [Olson] were offered one fantastic deal, the Democratic nomination in a southern state, say, and no strings attached, what would that do? He might get on the armed services committee, or a crime committee. Or the food and drug committee. Is that possible? The one result might be that the constituents would bring on a Republican landslide next time. Olson[’s] great obscurity, and one in which an unabridged dictionary and phrasecompleting handbook would not help out, is that he doesn’t say, too adequately, what to.do. (Rippeon 170)

Eigner notes the interrogative character of Olson’s work but turns to suggest the difficulties of addressing problems in poems: “[Olson] doesn’t answer what is by far the biggest question in the present and the future; . . . if an answer is too definite [it] tends to be no answer, the problem, which is continuing, slips away” (Rippeon 170). In Eigner’s account, an “answer” to any “problem” quickly becomes a relic of how that problem was once articulated in a particular moment of time. If the goal of projectivist practice is to place “the thing [the poet] makes . . . alongside the things of nature,” then “Olson[’s] great obscurity” owes neither to his absence from electoral politics nor to peculiarities of style (repetitions, omissions, abbreviations, and so forth, with which a “phrase-completing handbook” might help) but is instead, according to Eigner, inherent in the structures of interrogation and address themselves as they are proposed by projectivist poetics. In the aftermath of this account of Olson’s poetics, Eigner continues to think critically about the projectivist project—specifically the problematic temporalities of interrogation and address, and the objectification of the subject. Writing in 1956 to Williams, Eigner suggests moving past the “stave and bar a musician has” as provided by the typewriter and celebrated by Olson (C. Olson, Collected Prose 245). Eigner argues: Having got, as Olson says, this idea of precision from the typewriter, we shd take up script again, the latter being freer and not so specialized .. Only it’s Cid [Corman]’s tape-machine, I wd guess, that’s the ultimate, in so far as anything can be. Collages are great. (Rippeon 28)

In Eigner’s consideration, a scribal and an audiopoetics are on a continuum with—and more successful than—the typewritten “precisions” of projective verse.

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Noting that the former would be “freer and not so specialized . . . the ultimate, in so far as anything can be,” Eigner suggests that what script and audio are better at specifically is the registration of physical particularity and bodily difference. However, the scribal and audiopoetics that Eigner describes had a high bar: the Jargon Society was publishing Patchen’s painted books (for which Eigner was very enthusiastic), but when it came to Eigner’s practice, the required xerographical apparatus was too expensive. In late December of 1963, for example, Eigner reports to Williams his interest in obtaining his own copy machine, noting in particular the Anken Chemical & Film Corporation’s Portable Photocopy Machine, marketed toward executives and built into an attaché case for easy reproduction of material while traveling. Despite his interest, Eigner admits that at several hundred dollars, the machine is out of his financial means (Rippeon 116). Years later, after Andrea Wyatt visited the Eigner home to compile a bibliography of Eigner’s work, using a tape recorder in the process, Eigner reports to Williams his initial interest in and ultimate frustrations with audio-apparatus, for recording both poems and “sound letters” (Rippeon 151). While these deliberations are largely “invisible” and absent from the more public writings, I suggest that we consider them inflection points that help to shape the direction of Eigner’s practice and engagements. Frustrated with projectivism as a typographically ableist approach to the processes of the self, dissatisfied with projectivist temporalities, interested in an ethical practice regarding “what to.do,” and yet confronted with obstacles in the recording and distribution of radically alternative practices of voice and page, Eigner’s response is to turn from the projectivist “immediacy” of the subject at the scene of typing—what Olson calls “speech in all its fullness” (Collected Prose 247)—and to develop instead a practice that situates the subject in and constitutes it through a broader and ongoing media network. M U R D E R - TA L K : “A H A Z A R D O F P R O P O R T I O N S .   .   . ” Demonstrating the degree to which these considerations are part of Eigner’s total practice, I suggest we turn first not to his poetry but to Eigner’s play, MurderTalk: The Reception (Suggestions for a Play), still largely absent from the critical discourse on Eigner. Published in 1964 in the sixth number of Larry Goodell’s mimeo-magazine Duende, Eigner’s play was complete and in circulation almost a decade prior. In March of 1957, for example, Eigner tells Williams he has “writ a play” and further reports that he has been sending it around to Cid Corman,



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Robert Duncan, and others, as well as to publication venues such as the Evergreen Review (Rippeon 38, 44). It is clear from the start that the play is not interested in “dramatic” action as we might conventionally understand it.3 In the course of Murder-Talk, not much really “happens.” The members of a multigenerational family are depicted sharing several rooms. Children play and adults conduct a ranging conversation that touches upon memories and dreams, food consumption and digestive problems (one character has persistent gas), and generational conflict. These conversations are unremarkable in themselves and are never really resolved. Simultaneous speech or action are represented materially, with dialogue and stage direction typed in parallel when they occur at the same time. As the play proceeds, each character seems to become more firmly entrenched in his or her position. The survivor of the Depression and of World War II, for example, scolds the governmentally dependent, food-wasting, and spendthrift youth that surround him, even as they remind him that he demands his social security check and complains when it is late (Eigner, Murder-Talk 18–19). It is only with an absurdist interruption, during which all the characters flock to the window to catch a glimpse of an escaped leopard from the local zoo, and “a leopard in the shape of a man” slinks across the stage after the curtain falls, that the play arrives at its conclusion (22). More interesting than the specifics of these conversations, however, are the ways in which the play represents them as intersecting with and turning in response to vectors of sound media. Throughout the play, a malfunctioning radio provides unpredictable interruption and material redirection of the characters’ conversations. Reports of mine explosions and bomb threats fragment and overlap the more mundane aspects of the conversation, while reports of an unspecified military conflict and its potential complications as a Cold War proxy turn the conversation toward political parties and ideological disagreement between several characters (6, 11, 12–13). While it is difficult to identify a central focus in a text that seems designed to demonstrate the pervasive yet diffuse influence of audio media, there are a few remarkable moments of self-commentary and, perhaps, Eigner presenting a version of himself in the dramatic events. In response to radio bulletins reporting a jetliner flying too low and colliding with the top floors of a tenement, one character (provocatively named “Lyle”) recalls a dream in which he “heard it roaring by and pict the underbody on and on my eyes shut . . . But they said it was the snowplow that time in the morning. Not so far off. Maybe it was” (Eigner, Murder-Talk 10). And in response to a question about the previous evening’s

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radio programming, Lyle also recalls attending a public performance of that same broadcast theater piece: We had that festival . . . they started 2 years ago in the spring when we got right up close where it was just across the grass there was there going between two trees that had loudspeakers; the play sort of surrounded us, big buildings on far side and in back and then with most of the audience like part of the general thing. (10)

Though there are no heroes in Eigner’s play, Lyle has the significant distinction of speaking the name of Eigner’s forthcoming Jargon publication On My Eyes as he recalls—spurred by the radio—a waking dream that conflates the sounds of a snowplow and jetliner. But there is more to Lyle’s remarks than a (not-socovert) signature on the play by Eigner. Lyle’s recollection of an open-air theatrical event, itself augmented by loudspeakers and complicated by a porous membrane between audience members and actors, complements the work Eigner is doing in Murder-Talk and the ways in which audience members and characters in the play share almost equal footing within its diegetic, radiophonic soundscape. The play sits unpublished and unperformed for almost a decade, but in his correspondence and circulation of the text, Eigner makes clear the degree to which he imagines his play and his poetics as in conversation with and divergent from projectivist discourse. Writing to Duncan shortly after the completion of Murder-Talk, and in a letter enclosing the play, Eigner positions Murder-Talk in relation to Duncan’s “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s ‘Maximus,’” which appeared in the Black Mountain Review no. 6 (Spring 1956). In doing so, Eigner suggests his distance not only from Olson but also from Duncan’s reading of Olson. In the essay, Duncan literalizes Ezra Pound’s logopoeia and suggests Olson’s contribution is also the culmination of Poundian poetics: Metrics . . . is actual—the sense of language in terms of weights and durations (by which we cohere in moving). This is a dance in whose measured steps time emerges, as space emerges from the dance of the body. The ear is intimate to muscular equilibrium. The line endures. It “feels” right. (Duncan, “Notes” 49)4

Duncan elaborates, following through on his initial claims in the piece regarding “the striding syllables” in American poetry and Olson’s practice in particular; a prosody that Duncan claims is “no more difficult than walking” (47). “Just as the ear and eye”—melopoeia, phanopoeia—“have been incorporated into the act of making in language,” Duncan argues, “the locomotor muscular-nervous system is being calld [sic] into the adventure” (50). “I’ve got BMR #6 here,” Eigner responds on March 25, 1957:



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and got a lot out of your maximus notes. I get some of your verse too, though I dont figure how much. A number of those sentences real fine hammering. But my memory never supplies me with much, never with anything. Maybe psychosomatic.? Moving around as on a stage helps you.? (Robert Duncan Papers)

In a response published in Duende as a preface to the play, Duncan indicates his excitement at Eigner’s statement that “memory never supplies [him] with much”: “This play,” Duncan argues, “shows that where memory supplies nothing, all kinds of life bustles” (“Dear Larry Eigner” 3). Eigner clarifies in a subsequent response on May 2, 1957: I hardly got pauses in there. What i meant in saying my memory doesnt serve, much. . . . And I had no stage but only the page. Details, that includes typography for instance. . . . And even the actions, not to spk of the talk which makes most of the piece. After all, what is it? Maybe something else cd ve bn sd if one tht of it (though i didnt quite put down everything that came to mind). Actors Action Like a jazz band? (Robert Duncan Papers)

Here, Eigner suggests that the “bustling” Duncan praises is in fact a function of the translation of the play into writing, an unintended collapse of temporality into textuality—“bustle” results from the linearity of the text. Eigner further indicates that the “page as a stage” is in fact a compromise and contingency, rather than a conceptual horizon. With stark clarity (and a little humor), Eigner demonstrates the contingency and compromises of the page, by diagraming his theatrical set using the typewriter. Where Olson might see “stave and bar a musician has” being used to represent space, Eigner simply calls this “a hazard of proportions.” At the conclusion of the play, Eigner again makes comment on the “imprecision” of the typewriter, noting: I’ve found I had to take my chances on what could be precise and what couldn’t. Not to mention the vagaries which happen in people’s thought and lives. Due to one number of circumstances or another I have to work with the written page, even as here I’ve tried to go beyond that and imagine a stage, real space itself. I’ve hazarded using a width of 66 letters. And I’ve found now that things don’t happen quite simultaneously, less occasion arose than I’d anticipated for putting things side by side. (Eigner, Murder-Talk 22)

“Like a jazz band,” “like a ballet, or opera”; improvisatory, impressionistic, and an experiment in “what could be precise and what couldn’t”—Murder-Talk is contemporaneous with Eigner’s critique of Olson and projectivism, and it offers

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Eigner further occasion to think about the intersections of physical space, media discourse, and spoken language. The results of Eigner’s explorations are apparent in the media-inflected poetics that Eigner develops in the years to follow. “ I T F E E L S G R E AT T O B E B A C K W I T H A L L M Y G O O D YOU N G F R I E N D S I N T H I S HA L L , A N D A L L OV E R T H E C OU N T RY ” Writing to Williams in January 1962, Eigner reports that “[he] did a poem abt Bernstein playin Debussy’s La Mer in Carnegie Hall at a tv’d Children’s concert” (Rippeon 107). Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein had been directing the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts since becoming director of the orchestra, but while the Young People’s Concerts had been a part of the Philharmonic’s programing prior to Bernstein’s arrival in 1958, his specific contribution was to televise these events live. Drawing from the repertory of the Philharmonic’s concert season, Bernstein wrote accompanying scripts that introduced and discussed aspects of music theory and music history in a manner appropriate for his audience in the concert hall as well as viewing at home. Introducing Debussy’s La Mer, for example, for a program entitled “What Is Impressionism?,” Bernstein first acknowledges new viewers, introduces Debussy, and then moves to make the newly added viewers part of the discussion of Debussy: It feels great to be back with all my good young friends in this hall, and all over the country; and I’d like to say a specially warm hello to our new friends up North in Canada. . . . I suppose it’s pretty hard for all you New Yorkers here in Carnegie Hall to imagine that there are people who may never have seen the ocean in their lives. People in Winnipeg, for instance, which is smack in the middle of Canada. Now if I wanted to tell someone in Winnipeg what the sea is like, I could do it pretty easily by facts and figures, or by sending him a picture postcard from Coney Island or somewhere. But that wouldn’t give him the real quality of the sea, would it: what it feels like to look at it, smell it, hear it, in all its variety of stillness and storminess and playfulness. And what our friend in Winnipeg would need is an impression of the sea, not just facts or figures. And that brings us to the subject of today’s concert— which is impressionism. (L. Bernstein)

Bernstein goes on to illustrate his various comments about musical impressionism, whole- and half-tone scales, bitonality, musical intertextuality, and so on, with anecdotal examples, comparisons to enlarged paintings and photographs made specially available for the event, and musical excerpts from the program and other



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relevant scores, all accompanied by his own narration and discussion.5 Throughout, Bernstein continues to acknowledge the simultaneously live and mediated nature of the performance—noting, for example, that his audience both in the hall and at home are unable to see the colors in the poster-sized photoreproduction of one of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings but nevertheless using the reproduction to show the hazy outlines and uncertain forms of an impressionistic painting when compared to a similarly sized photograph of the same facade. Importantly, and despite the auratic appeal of the “live performance,” neither the local audience in the hall nor the more disparate one viewing at home is given priority of place. Although his discussion of musical impressionism is predicated upon his live audience’s proximity to the sea and their imagined efforts to tell someone “what the sea is like,” those viewing at home are treated to various camera effects unavailable to those in the hall. For example, the Monet painting and the photograph of the cathedral at Rouen are shot so that “the hard clean outlines and edges and shapes of the cathedral,” as Bernstein describes them, literally dissolve (through superposition) into “not so much a cathedral, as light itself, light and color, as they look to [Monet] reflecting on a cathedral” (L. Bernstein). In this moment as in other instances, various camera effects draw a home viewer’s attention to specific aspects of the performance: Bernstein’s flushed, sweating, and exuberant face; the furrowed brows of various soloists; the collective actions of horn and string sections; the excitement of the tympani; the novelty of the harpists and their mimetic glissandos, and so on. In a brief pause before the conclusion of the event, the live and mediated aspects collapse into one another, as Bernstein—quite literally dripping with sweat—thumps his mic with his finger and offers an apology: “Sorry,” he says, “I’m having a little trouble with this microphone. Is it still working?” Discovering that yes, indeed, the mic is working, Bernstein then turns to offer the virtuosic finale—the final dance from Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé—itself accompanied by similarly exuberant camerawork, as the shot leaps from the faces of the performers to the rafters of Carnegie Hall and back in thirty-nine cuts over the span of less than four minutes. Eigner’s attention to this event and his reporting of it to Williams as context for a series of poems is instructive for at least three reasons: first, it qualifies Eigner’s sense of a poem’s content (what it means for a poem to be “about” something); second, it makes clear the degree to which Eigner’s poems and his process are permeable to media; and third, it offers an important self-characterization of Eigner’s poetics in relation to projectivist discourse. Begun two days after the airdate of Bernstein’s “What Is Impressionism?,” the first poem in this sequence—“The white shirts there / how”—makes clear that these poems are only “about” Bernstein’s

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conducting of La Mer in the manner that Debussy’s La Mer is, according to Bern­ stein, about the sea. “That is, [they] tell[] you no facts, [they are] not a realistic description, but instead [are] all color and movement and suggestion”:

the white shirts there

how

to revolve

the sea the ceiling, blends in the sky

the rim

beams

buckets of the ocean

deliberate gull above music

sleers back,

horns, pulls away

expression listeners

for the horizon thought

gallery

or the body sit still, why not arms of sand

some other time

you bring on a fisherman

(CP 2: 488)

jog



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White shirts (of symphony members?); the sea and the ceiling (of the concert hall?); a “deliberate gull / above music;” a camera (perhaps) “pulls / away” from “horns” for the “expression” of performers or Bernstein himself; “listeners” instructed by Bernstein listen “for the horizon”; and Bernstein’s compliment to the children in his audience at the end of the performance—“I am very happy at how quiet and attentive you all were, and how understandingly you listened to it. Congratulations” (L. Bernstein)—perhaps echoes in the concluding lines of Eigner’s poem: “thought / gallery / or the body // sit still.” But no facts, and not a realistic description; no mention of “Leonard Bernstein” nor Debussy nor Carnegie Hall appears anywhere in this poem “abt Bernstein playin Debussy . . . in Carnegie Hall.” As Eigner reports in his letter, “one line, abt th fisherman, I derived from [a] Noh play” that reminded him of Gloucester and reminded Cid Corman, when Eigner shared the poem with him, of Zeami’s Noh play Yashima; Eigner takes both impressions and compresses them in his report to Williams of the play as meant to evoke the “lanscape/seaswell . . . in Gloucester and Yashima” (Rippeon 107). Other lines appear to collage Eigner’s televisual viewing and listening experience with other references and associations; these allusions appear to bleed into the poems that Eigner wrote over the next several days and that he includes in his letter to Williams with “The white shirts”—“a copy i do figure and imagine i can spare, herein, and 2 others too” (Rippeon 107). Like “The white shirts,” those later poems (“The staggered walls” and “It’s a wonder the Eskimos don’t hibernate; after all, they’re not monkeys”; CP 2: 489–91) continue to echo Bernstein’s televisual methods of presentation and continue to borrow prosodic method from the musical techniques Bernstein discusses (e.g., impression, whole-tone scales, bitonality, etc.). As Eigner writes in “The staggered walls” of “pictures / a distance held up / involvements of space,” “browns,reds / a tower in the street,” and “by the joined stone, the rising / steeple, the diffuse patterns / of glass” (CP 2: 489), his poems recall Bernstein’s uses of poster-sized photoreproductions of the Rouen Cathedral. A single-line stanza calls attention to “a woman craning behind” (line 29) and evokes Bernstein’s audience of occasionally restless children. Yet these references are scattered throughout the poems and never fully resolve into conventional meaning-making statements such as would conventionally be “abt Bernstein playin Debussy’s La Mer in Carnegie Hall.” Like the “fuzzy” chords, bitonal impressionist harmonies, and “not final” wholetone scales Bernstein demonstrates on the piano, and like the snippets of longer works he has the orchestra perform for his audience, Eigner’s poems, too, work in color, movement, and suggestion. Doing so, they recall Bernstein’s comments

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about musical impressionism as well as Bernstein’s televisual methods of presenting musical impressionism; that is, through quotation, collage, improvisation, example, and intertextual reference, and all of these in turn depicted in a sequence of shots of various depths, foci, and frames. Of equal importance to Eigner’s emphasis on this event as televised is Eigner’s reporting of it as a children’s concert. Not only was Eigner in his mid-thirties, and well above the target age for Bernstein’s programming at the time of the Young People’s Concert, but in the year prior he had also both published his first book-length collection through Williams’s Jargon Society and appeared alongside Duncan, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Jonathan Williams, and others of the Black Mountain school in Don Allen’s now-epochal The New American Poetry. Yet the recognition and emergence Eigner enjoyed in the 1960s were prefaced by periods of struggle and dejection in the late 1950s. Eigner reports to Williams his accumulating but unpublished poems and his search for a literary press that might accept a large bundle of this work. In August of 1956, for example, Eigner declares that “the news is, I’ve abt run out of publishers to submit my 69 piece mss. to” (Rippeon 30). Whether feigned or real, Eigner reports surprise when Williams asks him for the manuscript, and though this will eventually become On My Eyes, various obstacles come to frustrate Eigner on the way to publication; on funding the publication, for example, Eigner writes to Williams, “I pretty well knew it t[o] be a stone wall, but I have to bash my head, some way. Only thing I can say now is, feel perfectly free to give up any time—as I do” (Rippeon 65). As Eigner triangulates between his family (who are reluctant to fund the publication) and Williams (who is simultaneously requesting funds in various amounts), Eigner positions himself variously as an impractical child, a person reluctantly accepting the care of others, or one of a cadre of misfits: “Whenever I try to get something done of significant proportions,” he offers, “I only succeed in demonstrating my unreasonableness, childishness, idealism, impracticality, intolerance of others’ ideas, and interests, intellectualism, idealism,—one or another of these. And so, of course, I have become an unreasonable nag.” Eigner continues in the same later, questioning Denise Levertov’s advocacy for his work on the very same project, “I dont know what to do in re her maternality - but figure its legitimate enough, anyway in my case, and have to let it go at that. . . . It does seem she has her own positivisms, as we do, which may constitute the momism(?) at that.” Sighing and declaring allegiance with Williams (who has in part caused some of these very issues at home and with others), Eigner admits “of course there have been crackpots in the world, and there are signs that J Wms and L.Eigner are among em” (Rippeon 71). The degree to which these stances are



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strategic becomes clear in later correspondence, when Eigner negotiates the actual terms of his Jargon publication. “If you can’t arrange an edition under the above terms of reimbursement,” Eigner declares, “—shake hands, ol man?” (Rippeon 70–71). Gone are the assertions of idealism or identifications with “crackpots in the world,” and while Eigner’s address to Williams as “ol man” may imply an address to an elder, in tone it reads less like the unwilling filial relationship to Levertov and more like a fond epithet between bargaining equals. Thus, while Eigner’s deference to Williams and his “apprenticeship” to Olson, Creeley, Corman, and others was in some sense literal, as Eigner sought access to a broader literary community through these figures, it is also strategic and an aspect of his developing poetics. Eigner ruptures the self-important altruism, the “seriousness” and “humilitas” “sufficient to make [the poet] of use” through comparison to cinematic melodrama; he likewise strategically positions himself as “child” at home and, more interestingly, in his poetics as they are receptive both to pedagogical method and audiovisual mediation. In these ways, Eigner anticipates his later articulation, in conversation with Jack Foley, of the “amateur” as “a lover of a subject. What’s the use unless you really feel like it?” (Eigner and Foley, “Omnipresent” 37).6 Eigner repurposes “amateurism” and “the child”—directly on the heels of the correspondence I detail above—as strategic approaches both to the world and to poetics, wryly declaring in 1965, “Parodying Socrates a little, you might say I know enough to feel naïve” (Areas 6). C O N C LU SIO N : “‘ W E A R E N OW WA L K I N G U P B AT E S R O A D .   .   . ’ ! ” A strategic “childishness,” a mediated “amateurism,” while Eigner too sought his silences free of what he called “yak from the radio,” it is hard not to read these stances as anything less than a direct affront to Olson’s trepidations regarding media. Eigner’s understanding of media as model for poetics is apparent in his turn to Magnificent Obsession for critique of Olson, his use of the radio as dramatic device in Murder-Talk, his attention to “goodies on TV,” and his borrowing both thematically as well as methodologically from the Philharmonic’s televised Young People’s Concert. While media offers analogies for poetic practice, one final example demonstrates the degree to which Eigner also understood or observed media as in some sense a platform for the self. Given the multimodal and multimedia attentions Eigner exhibits throughout, it is appropriate that this last example comes from a somewhat unclassifiable text that nevertheless bundles many of Eigner’s ongoing concerns.

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On September 5, 1964, Eigner writes to Larry Goodell (publisher of the mimeographed Duende). As he watches the pedestrian traffic on the street in front of his home and reflects on the circumstances and circuitous route of the play’s composition and publication, Eigner offers comment on an array of themes—the political resonance of his play, shifts in his ongoing poetic practice, his home life, his media ecology, and so forth—and he also has occasion to craft a short, productively ambiguous piece of text that appears to be a poem.7 “Stray idea of buckling down to write a piece, of appreciable length again,” Eigner begins, sounding again a note that characterizes some of his deliberations during these years, as he reacts to his own increasing tendency to write shorter, more “fragmentary” texts. “I was angry, among other things,” he continues, “when I did Reception. Amo, ergo odo” (“Dear L” 23). I love, therefore I hate. This “amateurism” is of a peculiar flavor, and it demonstrates an awareness, on Eigner’s part, not of “loving” and “hatred” in equal and alternating parts, as formulated in Catullus’s “Odi et amo,” but rather of a love that functions as a social connective tissue, a love that is broader than and contains its apparent opposite—a love that, in its diffuse and permeating behavior, parallels the media ecology in which Eigner understands himself to be situated. Indeed, he continues: Now, 8 yrs later The stories [in Murder-Talk] were old even in ’56. More yak from the radio eg now that my brothers are away, the 2 of em, and just parents and I here. My brain scattered. Sport of stretching ears to match nose . . . I hardly feel regrets, though. You’re not supposed to repeat yrself, at that.

Amo, ergo odo. Both Eigner’s play and his larger poetic practice are supported by, submerged within, and derived from the audio and televisual mediascape that surrounds him. And while as a “fast blackboard” it does bring him “goodies” and other material, it also serves up “yak” and distraction. Eigner’s recognition of this is capacious and receptive, rather than conservative and critical, and in keeping with his “amateurism,” he finds fascinating even the apparently most simple engagements with this ambiguous media ecology. “Stretching” and “scatter[ing]” of the aural attention, for example, has a fascinating set of referents in the small texts and observations that surround these prose remarks. Noting that “out on front porch here, 2 boys just walked by w a walkie talkie, the boy who had it to (in) hand in conversation with a girl somewhere.” Eigner quotes with an exclamation the boy’s self-locating statement: “‘We are now walking up Bates Road . . . ’!” This self-identification with and collapse of distances through telecommunications seems to occasion the poem(s) immediately above this note:

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w a l k y

b y

p e o p l e

s i t t i n g

the box is a radio more outdoors

As the letter concludes, a series of quotations seems to begin as a comment on political identity constituted through party affiliation (with representative icons), but we cannot miss that the second quotation has a nice rhythmic and rhyming relationship to Eigner’s signature: “‘Brush away the shoo-tailed fly ’ / many regards / Larry Ei.” The stair-stepping quotation parallel to his signature seems to recall Yeats—“The best . . . / the worst . . . / untensity”—but with no obvious referent: The political process? Those who identify with such static, party-affiliated metonymic identities as listed in the previous lines—“Donkeys, Elephants, Birchers, or Luces”? Is “untensity” a neologism for such misdirected emphasis? My final comment here is that in these collaged, interpolated, perhaps even overheard aspects (if Yeats and the other quotations are “yak from the radio”), this letter speaks, “impressionistically,” to Eigner’s political and epistemological concerns—party affiliation and political agency, the fragmentary aspects of experience and the impermanence of the self undergirded by an irresolvably material and mediated “voice”—and that such concerns should be foregrounded as we continue to build the discourse around Eigner’s life and work. As Eigner concludes, beneath a parenthetical aside “(motto for scraps),” at once commenting upon the media fragmentation of home life and political awareness and the enduring continuity of particular, embodied, and defamiliar speech: all your days are broken up your voice continues

NOTES 1. Quotations from Eigner’s letters here are standardized, with occasional silent corrections and omissions of his strike-throughs and superpositions of text. Readers wishing a fuller representation of those letter-texts should consult my edition of the Eigner-Williams letters, Letters to Jargon: The Correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams, as published by the University of Alabama Press. 2. The full text of this essay may be found in my own edition of Eigner’s correspondence with Jonathan Williams: Letters to Jargon: The Correspondence between Larry Eigner and

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Jonathan Williams. Quotations from their correspondence presented here are also taken from that work. 3. As Eigner asks, on May 2, 1957, regarding his own listening to radio plays at one point: “The cambridge poet’s theatre been brdcasting once a month . . . and I bn wondering just what is this thing called poetic drama. Metrical? ‘Lyric’?” “Ah well,” he sighs, “Definitions” (Robert Duncan Papers). It is intriguing to speculate upon what, precisely, Eigner would have heard on the radio from the Poets’ Theatre. The years prior to this 1957 mention of the broadcast are notable in the history of the Poets’ Theatre for the condensation of poetic talent they represent: Frank O’Hara, Bunny Lang, John Ashbery, and W. S. Merwin all staged productions during this era, and Mary Manning Howe (mother of Susan Howe) is noted in certain accounts for having “ambitiously adapted Finnegans Wake for their [the Poets’ Theatre] stage” in 1955 (Gooch 275). To imagine Finnegans Wake performed as theatre, or presented in radio broadcast, offers provocative correlate to Eigner’s inquiry “Metrical? ‘Lyric’?”—all the more so for the apparent instability in the second term as noted by the scare quotes. 4. Duncan’s piece appears in the Black Mountain Review 6; there, it is immediately followed by Olson’s own “A Foot Is to Kick With”—itself a muscular identification of prosody and walking. See Olson, Collected Prose 269. 5. Interestingly, while Bernstein’s pedagogical method of performing snippets of various scores, augmented with his own commentary does not occasion Eigner’s own practice “embroidering” his poems with explanatory marginalia and his preference for the poem as a dialogic structure—“being interrupted by a question or two form whatever audience” (Areas 151)—it does seem to confirm for Eigner this method, as Eigner’s own marginal comments appear increasingly on the drafts and published poems after this period. 6. This claim echoes across Eigner’s late career; see also the 1980 note “Not Forever Serious,” which concludes with Eigner’s call for “a return to amateurism” (Areas 25). 7. I have not yet found the verse in this letter, in part or in full, in my reading of Eigner’s Collected Poems.

C HA P T E R SI X

Larry Eigner’s Archives in Flight ST E PHA N I E A N DE R S ON

M O B I L E S , M O B I L I T Y, A N D M A K E W O R K One of Cid Corman’s Kyoto-postmarked blue airmail envelopes contains a surprisingly blunt appraisal of Larry Eigner’s work. The letter is dated April 25, 1965, and Corman’s harshness suggests a candor enabled perhaps by their long-standing relationship or perhaps by a frustration with providing poem feedback in this format. He writes: dear Larry, whatever way you make it is clearly the way you must. Each man’s necessities are different, though overlays—of course—exist. Your differences are perhaps more gross than most and I suspect few of your readers realize the physical situation that all your work implies (whether conscious of its difference or not). By and large your work will not hold—just for what is most generally “attractive” about it today—its curious disjointedness. It seriously lacks voice and clear momentum—though momenta occur. They are rather like Calder mobiles that have been dismantled and each segment hung separately in one room. Offbeat and not without interest, but finally both boring and easily forgotten. (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut])

Corman’s critique of the work’s “disjointedness” emphasizes the “collector” interpretation of Eigner’s work, in which the poem acts as a curio cabinet for discrete impressions, gathered into a paratactic structure.1 Corman’s comparison of Eigner’s work to a mobile has two major components, one having to do with arrangement (the separation of components from a system of coherence) and one about motion (the potentially slight and aimless movement of each discrete mobile piece). We imagine, perhaps, a rounded piece of painted sheet metal hanging askew from a This essay was completed with the support of the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows at the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Tsinghua University, Beijing. Additionally, I am grateful to Chalcey Wilding for her insightful feedback, George Hart for drawing my attention to C i r c u i t s, Marie Elia and Trent Shotwell for long-distance access to archival materials, and Kate McIntyre for research assistance.

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wire; someone walks by and it bobs slightly, tracing a meandering trajectory in the air. Corman’s deconstructed mobile image changes the spatial dimensions of Calder’s work, making an installation out of what was formerly a sculpture. But as “Calder: Hypermobility,” a recent exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, demonstrates, Calder’s mobiles are not only arrangements but also systems meant to move, though their motion requires “activators,” gallery personnel who are assigned to manipulate the works (McDermon). Furthermore, the sculptures do not always move smoothly, reminding us that bumpy motion can be an important component of play.2 Taking Corman’s comparison and inflating it beyond its author’s intended point of critique shows us how, in relation to Eigner’s work, discrete components—like poems—can be organized (and disorganized) inside and outside a system in motion and how such systems entail logistical difficulties, playful communication, and participation across geographic space. Eigner himself links Corman’s critique to the practical exigencies of publishing. On May 2, 1965, Eigner writes to Tom Clark, mentioning Corman’s critique.3 This letter discusses Eigner’s reservations about various little magazines, which he has limited opportunities to acquire. And then there’s the “bottlen[e]ck” of the “piggyb[a]nk”: I wrote you, 10 days bck . . . of my reluctnce to tangle, aftr these dozn yrs of th varius bottlencks, incl. that of th piggybnk, w. new mags (shd i hve bn pseudonomynous, anonymous, or what, shd i now? and how? I, sometimes wonder) .. and such blind dates, too, and how much of a givn activity is real work and hw mch makewrk, what mix approaches optimum and what criteria i cn never tell, if some of it at least is not real (or not too gd?) you have all wrk, no ply. So I’m all up in th air all round. (Tom Clark archive)

His speculation about whether he “should have been pseudonomynous, anonymous, or what” doubtless has something to do with the type of request, either explicit or implicit, made by Corman and others to frame his work with the fact of his palsy, a troubling critique that Corman seems to hint at obliquely in discussing the “physical situation” in which Eigner’s work is created. Yet the impersonality of some of these little magazine exchanges, “such blind dates,” encounters into which Eigner must put a great deal of organizational effort, is also frustrating to him. How much of publishing is “real work and hw mch makewrk,” or busywork? Eigner points out the need for some “makework” but wonders about the “optimum” balance and at what point one tips into “all wrk, no ply,” a wordpl[a]y that puts into opposition the strength and utility of the process of writing and the busywork of sending out. He continues:



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Part of my proclivity to try making hay out of what seems unpromising, cnstructing and then shoeing it, hopefully somewht, has in recent yrs at least bn th awful tangle of digging bck to innumerabl thngs that hve or may nevr hve come bck frm someplace . . . Lttr frm CC this wk . . ., saying “By and large yr wrk wont hold—just for what makes it popular now—its curious disjointedness . . . serious lack of voice or clear momentum.. Like Calder mobiles” Well, I kp on seeing and not seeing. Depended all along a gd deal on distn—of my nose frm page, and what was elliptical, forceful, can very easily sm slight (and tv, the radio, the climate . . . confuse the issue).4 (Tom Clark archive)

From the vantage of the contemporary fantasy in which all our data is saved automatically to the cloud (regardless of the actual circumstances of backup/ machine failure and data decay), we may have to remind ourselves of the ways in which Eigner had difficulty accessing his own work. In relation to his palsy, producing multiple copies of his own poems was, as he and others have noted, a laborious process. He often had the help of the correspondents and mailed them poems as a way of ensuring that the safety net of the archive was spread wide, so to speak. An actual archive helped: in August 1965, an agreement with the Special Collections at the University of Kansas established a repository for poem drafts and copies (Eigner, Calligraphy Typewriters ii). But mail and institutions, big and small, can follow unpredictable tempos. To borrow Corman’s simile, in the act of sending out, Eigner had to disassemble his oeuvre and fling parts of it to different locations, and those “innumerabl thngs” may or may not ever “come bck frm someplace.” Furthermore, regardless of whether they came back, they still created an “awful tangle” of difficult to organize materials in the poet’s workspace. Despite having been filmed two decades after his letters to Clark, an episode of United States of Poetry gives some sense of the scale of the “awful tangle,” the workspace mess—little magazines slant precariously on shelves, great heaps and stacks of paper cascade over drawers and boxes. Eigner describes it in a January 18, 1966, letter to Hugh “Drew” Wagon, an editor of Wild Dog: “And so much stuff is here. Too much for a one-armed paperhandler,in fact. Hangs heavy on shelves, in drawers, everywhere.” Later in the letter he calls it a “pileup” that is “getting more and more bewildering . . . moment by moment” (Wild Dog Collection).5 An incredible amount of Eigner’s epistolary correspondence is devoted to tracking the locations of poems, the business of publishing, providing copies of poems to friends, and so forth. Through the letters, we can see how the “makework” of sending out becomes a communal activity. If, as Eigner suggests in a 1964 poem, “the self ” is “a project” (CP 2: 606), he

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was also careful to acknowledge the indebtedness of such a project to collectivity. His correspondence with David and Maria Gitin, to whom he sent many copies of poems throughout the 1970s, also contains a copy of a “career description” written in 1971. In it, Eigner sums up his publishing accomplishments and how he can use further organizational assistance: From ’59 to ’69, by my bibliographer’s count, I’ve had stuff in about 220 issues of 100 magazines, as well as six anthologies, and the way it feels have gone unexpectedly far with other people’s help. And dependent as I am, in a wheelchair and all, it’s patent to me that life is individuals in group action. / But action and maybe life increases to itself, and I need secretarial help, in creative work, more than I used to.6 (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut])

This letter to the Gitins demonstrates how connected the “makework” of writing/ publication and the process of writing are for Eigner and how related they are to “group action”; elsewhere he refers to his epistolary poem distribution a kind of custodianship.7 Of course, part of what interests me is the way in which Eigner inserts Corman’s aesthetic critique into a broader discussion of publication’s practicalities, thereby suggesting that concerns about his poetry’s circulation—the poetic archive—manifest in his work’s aesthetics. This essay grapples with two forms of self-archiving, the practical and the aesthetic, proposing that the term self-archiving indicates both the self who archives and the self as an archive, a project of sensory perceptions, records, and projections. Archives obviously have different connotations than other serial genres of the everyday, like collections, diaries, and letters. The individual components of archives are often less curated, though they likely have an institutional framework. In addition to the drafts of poems and the correspondence that provides context for those drafts, they can contain such ephemera as bills of sale, expenditure ledgers, address books, and other remnants—Lorine Niedecker’s handwritten recipe book; Alice B. Toklas’s odd embroideries in Gertrude Stein’s papers.8 Thus, one might argue that they resist hierarchical organization (though they are obviously hierarchical spaces in practice, not least because the material therein is still accepted and curated by a repository). At one extreme, archives are messes, like the “awful tangle” of Eigner’s workspace: in his essay “The ‘Stuff ’ of Archives,” Martin F. Manalansan IV “seeks to expand the idea of archive by departing from the planned coherent borders of the ‘archival’ and deploying a sustained focus on the seemingly trashy, dirty, disgusting, and untidy disorganization of bodies, things, and emotions. In other words . . . mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements” (94). Though Eigner was frustrated with the disorganization of

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his workplace, the archive’s nonhierarchical aspect might have appealed to his poetics. He describes his creative process in a letter to Ina Forster:9 I thought at first, say in a flash of hindsight, that what I’d been doing for some time was finding things and evaluating, and quite a few months later, maybe a year or over a year later, figured it wasn’t that so much, evaluation or weeding, assessing, as it was just realizing things, because there’s really no hierarchy among them, no ranking, one thing is actually no more important than another, or not for long. (“Unpublished Letter”)

In emphasizing “realizing things,” in the sense of “mak[ing] real or actual” particular images and components (“Realize”), and downplaying “assessing,” Eigner pushes anxieties about poetic value and order out of his praxis. As nonhierarchical spaces, archives also demonstrate the overlap between the domestic and the public (Cvetkovich 109; Manalansan 98).10 In the critical and imaginative work of filling in the archive’s gaps, my use of the term is less concerned with institutional framing and more attentive to the archive as, to quote Paul Voss and Marta Werner, a “conceptual space whose boundaries are forever changing. Although etymologically linked to public, historical space, the archive also has links to the essentially private, hermetic spaces of the cloister, carrel, almarie” (i). Self-archival works are often concerned with isolating experience and perception—not to stand apart from voice or style but to produce it via a concept of self that records or transcribes an interface with the world. By thinking about Eigner’s oeuvre as an archive, an idea supported by the layout and comprehensiveness of The Collected Poems, we come to see how variously the term applies to Eigner’s works—and might include letters, individual poems, and book publications. Ultimately, Eigner’s archives underscore the gaps therein, revealing, reveling, and occasionally despairing in connectivity over distance and systems in motion. This essay first explicates the practical systems Eigner employed in archiving his work and then explores the date as a key axis, to use Eigner’s word for it, marking the movement between the past-as-past and pastas-present, creating temporal motion. Using epistolary excerpts and publication history information alongside close readings of particular poems, I then explore how Eigner employs the motifs of walls and planes to further nuance this motion, which is specified as a form of perceptual imagining. I propose the term sensory casting as a way to understand this imaginative play and consider its relationship to Eigner’s articulations about temporality; finally, we return to motion within the broader context of the oeuvre-as-archive.

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SYSTEMS OF ARCHIVING Eigner’s correspondence with Tom Clark began in 1964 when Clark, then poetry editor of the Paris Review, accepted some poems for publication. Clark wanted to use the date, which Eigner had apparently included with one poem to help identify it, as the poem’s title. Eigner’s May 26 response expresses both wariness toward and acceptance of said titling: Fine. Ok for “Apr 7 64 twig stick” to go in Paris Review, as well as the other one, “Monet’s Sunrise” I see what you mean to put the date as a title there (as any title should as I feel it lead in, or be intrinsic with the rest of a piece in some other way), and it wd be the 1st time with me, a change. But I’ve bn getting used to it as a regular thing in Whalen, for instance, last couple of yrs, the dating—one of the axes, wch there are so many of, being the forceful-colloquial-occasional-casual, I guess. And the last few yrs my stuff has been apt to strike me as piddling, at least till I got my nose inside of 2 microns away again. (For one thing, there are these constant streams of billboards pouring out of radio and tv, which I cant get away from much—but good sincere or whatever writing and speech has become a flood too, for the likes of me. You have the idea of keeping all of it in mind. It was great when I had less to look on, but no[w] I easily get to be a pillar of salt . . . But the window is tomorrow the sky still, you always have some condition, for ballast) O yeh, those bracketed figures which I try to kp records of instead of titles— couple of times they’ve got printed! (Tom Clark archive)

In this letter to Clark and the one from 1965, Eigner dually conceptualizes the “work” of writing as not only the act of writing but also of sending out poems for publication and tracking their whereabouts. Here, the date is the point where his concerns condense: he sees both its practical and its aesthetic potentials. Eigner writes that this is the “1st time” the date would serve as a title for one of his poems but that he has been “getting used to” incorporating the date in the poem through his reading of Philip Whalen, who tended to insert the date at the end of the poem, a “casual” (to use Eigner’s word) temporal signature or marker of a draft-in-progress. At this point in time, he clearly views his archival system as a method of personal organization; at the end of this excerpt, he refers to “those bracketed figures which I try to kp records of instead of titles,” expressing amusement that a “couple of times they’ve got printed!” The date, however, has a broader and more aesthetic significance than the “bracketed figures” for Eigner: it can draw attention to one of the poem’s many axes or perhaps is an aspect of an axis, one that he characterizes as “the



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forceful-colloquial-occasional-casual.” He seems to differentiate between the implications of this axis and his fears about the work—a foreshadowing of Corman’s “boring and easily forgotten” objection—that it is “piddling” unless quite closely examined. The necessary proximity to the poem seems difficult to achieve because of the “constant streams” of advertising occurring on radio and television, though he then qualifies that good “writing and speech” is immersive as well. “You have the idea of keeping all of it in mind,” he writes, perhaps referring back to good writing—it is difficult to keep the entirety of even a piece of good literature in mind—though “it” might also refer to the situation or moment of writing. “It was great when I had less to look on,” he continues, “but no[w] I easily get to be a pillar of salt . . . But the window is tomorrow the sky still, you always have some condition, for ballast.” I suspect that here he is describing the distractions of media as backward-looking and immobilizing, whereas the window is constant, and will continue to be, by its framing of the sky. The “condition” to which he refers is at least doubly suggestive: it might be what Corman calls his “physical situation”— which, instead of being limiting, he views as “ballast,” anchoring his attention in the everyday—or it might be the weather conditions outside the window.11 Over the course of Eigner’s career, the date thus becomes both a tool for organization and a manifestation of one aesthetic “axis” of the poem. However, its initial use was more organizational, even though we now think of it as intrinsic to his poetic practice: it was intended to supplement an organizational system for poem distribution, a system that had become too unwieldy to be efficient and that relied on the “bracketed figures” used to “kp records of instead of titles.” The “bracketed figures” system began in part because of Eigner’s reluctance to use the date to identify poems: It must’ve been a couple or about three years after I started trying poems again from listening to Cid Corman’s radio program and corresponding with him and Creeley et al. that I began labeling em so I could in short schrift record what I submitted where, but since I might best or could only pencil in a notebook lying in bed (nor cd I take a sheet out of book or binder to type on, insert it afterwards) I just figured to keep the labels as brief as I could for as long as possible. . . . Also about as soon as an editor took anything I reused its tag, though never more than once or twice, seldom perhaps without adding an apostrophe. . . . Kind of lucky I began dating things as a regular thing in October ’59 after Don Allen sought for dates to things he took for The New American Poetry . . . ; before that I considered luck might more than likely run out, I might be jinxed and get writer’s block if I dated, it’d be overconfidence, counting chickens before they hatched. (Areas 169–70)

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So instead of dating, Eigner “tagged” the poems, as though organizing specimens, with letter, number, and apostrophe combinations. In addition to being less burdensome than dates, “tags” also appealed to Eigner at the start of his career for their nonchronological and nonlinear possibilities. Furthermore, their ordering was more idiosyncratic, less universalizing, than dates. The system’s organization is discernible to the careful student, but recreating the codification of the various letter and apostrophe combinations can nonetheless be a bit baffling: tags are ordered by alphanumeric sequence, but as the above descriptions says, Eigner also reused tags, began new letter combinations, etc.12 As he says, in his shift to using dates in October 1959, we can trace the influence of Allen’s seminal The New American Poetry, in which Eigner and some of his friends and correspondents were included. His dating precision subsequently picks up in the spring of 1960, conspicuous in the Collected Poems, though it will not be regular until 1966.13 In order to explore the intersection of Eigner’s aesthetic production and his concerns about the practical pressures of organization, this essay pays particular interest to the years 1964 to 1966, in which the organizational shift between tags and dates occurs, and the five or so years following the shift. In sum, Eigner initially understood tags as more neutral than dates. Dates emphasize the act of writing, potentially idealizing the process of making, just as the date in a letter is often meant to convey information about the writer’s circumstances to a particular addressee (I am here, writing to you at this moment), whereas tags are labels for poems. On October 14, 1970, in a letter to Maria and David Gitin, Eigner inserted a marginal note: “Where to / put / things / H o w / to / share / ?” (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut]). Eigner semi-jests that this marginal note “qualifies as a poem.” His ambivalence at the idea is indicated with “Ho-hum,” but he also provides some (slightly mocking?) instructions for reframing its genre: “If you think so, you cd copy, and I cd number it, label it, sometime.”14 Dates frame the poem before it is written and become a part of the poem; labels or tags are for record-keeping, markers of often-tedious classification and organization.15 Through his description of the “tag” organizational system and his subsequent use of dates, Eigner openly indicates a danger in dating: the date is proleptic, oriented toward the future, and its use might either stifle the present-based activity of writing or might turn the poem too quickly toward reception. In the second instance, the danger of the date lies in assuming that one’s practice can remain constant and will be worthy of future study (“I might be jinxed and get writer’s block”); the date belongs too much to the realm of canonization, to writerly hubris and the romanticizing of manuscript. Using the date as a style of time-archiving also fetishizes everyday continuity and the present itself. Of Eigner’s oeuvre,

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Barrett Watten writes, “the time of the poem is one of constant attention. The poem does not defer a present but, rather, is a present” (Total Syntax 177). If, then, we think of the poem as a present, we can also recognize the other temporalities nestled in the present, a point we will explore further below. For now, suffice it to say that though there is admittedly a special emphasis on the present in the poems, what we might read as atemporality or transcription of the everyday is also carefully calibrated to range through both time and space. M O T I O N O N T H E PA G E , M O T I O N I N T I M E Flipping through The Collected Poems, one can see how quickly the date becomes a formal property of Eigner’s texts. It occupies the place and space it would in a letter, the upper right-hand corner, alongside but distinct from the poem’s ordinal number. In this way, it is a kind of epistolary marker, connecting two temporal moments—the writing and the reading of the poem. It is also especially visible when the poems depart from the constraints of single locations and perspectives by playing with spatiality, both as a theme and as a component of the visual poem on the page. Grenier draws attention to what he sees as the core unit of Eigner’s typescripts—the “words as composed of numbers (of letters) going about their business in/on the grid of the typewriter page” (CP 1: ix). If space is not—and should not be—a given; if it is meant to be transcended; if the constraints of space are overcome via the geometrical mathematics of letter arrangement on the page and the various trajectories with which to read words and lines, then the date can become another “axis” or even plane of the poem’s structure. Here is “Apr 7 64 twig stick,” to use Eigner’s title from the letter to Clark:

twig stick

A line of trees hard

branches above the roofs

the sea fog

press backward, down to water

every way slightly rocked paths

3 dimensions

infinite direction of the sun past the sight

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Emanate

in time dense, around

(CP 2: 560)

travel

the sap

risen the wind blows

I want briefly to draw our attention to how sight operates in this poem and becomes interlaced with temporality, in order to show how Eigner’s use of form highlights the capacity of the senses to create temporal and spatial (in terms of both geography and the material page) motion. In his 1964 letter to Clark, Eigner states that the function of a title is to “lead in, or be intrinsic with the rest of a piece in some other way.” In the context of this exchange, it is noteworthy that the initial image of the “twig stick” is the only phrase in the poem to directly align with the date-as-title (though “the sea fog” comes close); it and the date create a strong vertical axis, which is reinforced by the return to the twig’s “sap” near the end. The reader’s visualization moves from the twig itself out to “a line of trees,” which suggests rigid verticality, especially given the line break at “hard,” until one then sees the “branches above the roofs” in the next line, an image that shifts the sightlines horizontally. Because of the indentation, it appears that both “the sea fog” and the branches are “press[ing] backward, down to water”; additionally, I read “sight” as another subject of this action. The sea disorients directionality with its movement (“every way slightly rocked”) and allows for more abstract considerations of sight in space—we might even continue to imagine the sun’s trajectory when the sun is “past the sight.” The “infinite” “paths” made possible by “3 dimensions” “emanate,” are “dense,” and “travel / around,” though these lines themselves revolve around the phrase “in time,” suggesting that time is a medium in which to move, similar to how sight moves in and across space. “The sap” potentially does the same, and we imagine it flowing upward, which leads us to the wind and relocates us, moving us horizontally again though through something that cannot usually be seen—and both the sun and sap might move at speeds not usually registered by perception, indicating the need for extreme attentiveness. Reading the poem thus involves reading not only vertically and horizontally but also in a spiral pattern down the page—“travel[ing]” around the poem.16 Thus, the date, as a span of time, both frames the poem and becomes a medium in which we move by sight.

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Other temporal images—calendars, clocks—recur in Eigner’s oeuvre, both suggesting and problematizing the poem as a form of timekeeping. The following poem, reproduced in its entirety as it appears in The Collected Poems, begins with the auditory, tracking it through space as if visual. Its trajectory then pauses, grappling with the distinction between calendrical and clock time:

November 15–25 63 Silence lost. is it?

Where the audio

advances some other room This

is a calendar

the wind

past it and the wall, doesn’t move outside

or

hung

my view

the clock hands,

being of

and midnight

doesn’t make itself

I think

the sheets

were long ago and here hard paper, number drying

grandfather is quiet

things are lost

but

through the door some

partitions

one

first one

# a

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You put up the walls and you wove

the grass

it was there

which had to be taken

and had to be brought

what you made

in the door

time

to fine purpose and you needed sleep

the past taped

aspired

the actual hair the future more direct line (Lined Up; CP 2: 539)

Similar to “Apr. 7 ’64” and so many Eigner poems, this poem casts out tendrils, ways we can follow the semantic and even the syntactical units if we are willing to jump around, to hold particular pieces in suspension while waiting for their possible grammatical complements. This patterning is especially evident in the first stanza. The first two lines are a syntactically straightforward frame, their heavy punctuation accounting for half of the poem’s total punctuation. Following that, “The audio / advances” seems to explain the first sentence’s pronouncement that “Silence [is] lost,” the scene in flux just prior to our encounter with it, and we might be tempted to insert a preposition into the fourth line: “the audio / advances [from] some other room,” perhaps. But “some other room” might also be the belated echo of an answer to the opening couplet’s question, making it not so rhetorical as it first seemed. The second stanza’s deictic “this” hangs in the air until its referent comes in the next line, “is a calendar,” and the lines are self-referential: how might we imagine the text as a calendar? If we are thinking about it—and if Eigner is thinking about his composition of it—as part of a poetic series, this poem might be part



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of a project that is akin to a calendar, an internal measure of tempo. There is also clearly a calendar in the world of the poem, an external, potentially static temporal reference point that it is arranged in the poem in front of “the wind” and “the wall.” “Calendar,” “wind,” and “wall” can all be read as subjects for the verb “hung,” reinforcing its semantic meaning in its placement (how it hangs) on the page. The calendar and the wall, hung vertically, may or may not be cut by the wind, which we tend to imagine as horizontal movement. Then what “doesn’t move,” in the singular? Each component? Or simply the calendar? The “or” proposes a nebulous alternative or equivalent to the phrase “doesn’t move,” the withheld phrase multiplying the possibilities: this calendar/wall “doesn’t move or [moves] / outside my view,” or “doesn’t move or [is] / outside my view,” and of course the syntactic elision cleverly contributes to the sense of being beyond that the lines’ semantic sense conveys. So motion or the calendar or the wall might be “outside my view,” but following it into the next line and holding both possible meanings open we realize that the other branch leads us to a different object, a clock, nearly vertically aligned with “calendar” on the page, and that Eigner sets the calendar and the clock in the poem to compare them. Yet the clock is “of / hands,” which already we envision as being in some kind of motion, as opposed to the static wall-like calendar (assuming the calendar is not also the wind). “Midnight / doesn’t make itself ” suggests that the hands make temporality, with their connection to embodiment—at the very least time is strongly perceptual and not some exterior objective pace. If we read the poem itself as a calendar, that perceptual motion may be present in even the supposedly objective, static pace of the wall calendar: “I think / the sheets / were long ago // and here hard paper, number / drying.” The number, perhaps the inscribed date, is still in the process of drying, even if the substance on which the number appears is “hard” and old. Is this an outdated calendar, “the sheets . . . long ago” because they belong to some past year? The past is still present, the lines suggest, despite the fact that “grandfather is quiet”—and I understand “grandfather” to refer to the clock. Here clock time and calendar time do an unexpected do-si-do, in which clock time assumes the more stationary position and calendar time remains unsettled. We can see a toggle between the modes of measuring time and their efficacy. Yet despite clock time’s seeming stasis, “things are lost” and the present continues. What are these “things,” besides moments? If we return to the first line, one answer is “silence,” suggesting that in the plural “they” might be perceptions, bits of poetry-in-process. The relation between alignment on the page and perceptual process is most accentuated in the Burning Deck printing of Lined Up Bulk Senses (1979). In terms

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of the date of publication, Lined Up is chronologically the latest Eigner work this essay discusses; however, per the date of composition it is the earliest, written in 1963 (“Unpublished Letter”). In The Collected Poems, other poems intervene in the sequence, but as it is published in Lined Up the first long poems acts almost as a frontispiece for the short pieces that follow; Keith Waldrop cleverly designs the book so that the short poems progress spatially down each subsequent page, creating an effect of spatial movement across the series, not just in individual poems. Waldrop’s layout also minimizes the leading separating lines to reduce Eigner’s spacing between stanzas—presumably to fit the poem on one page. One such elided space occurs before the capitalized “You,” though in Waldrop’s design a left-hand justification with the poem’s first word, “Silence,” creates the kind of emphasis that a stanza break might have. This is the only other capitalized word in the poem, and the effect is a strong stanzaic caesura, another section beginning. The addressee seems to be, as second-person addressees so often are, multiple in both the poem and in the Lined Up sequence—the author, a reader, an antagonist, a grandfather, an omniscient presence or absence. “You put up the walls,” Eigner states, again circling back to the previous mention of the wall, and the wall(s) are not concrete impossibilities but are, in that previous instance, “hung”—now by a form of agency. Furthermore, this creator-figure’s poesis requires that the creation be “brought / in the door,” echoing the earlier door and the image of “partitions,” now through walls. The poem holds open the possibility that time itself is the made: the lilting “time / to fine purpose and / you needed sleep,” some of the most enigmatic lines in the poem, potentially suggesting a break between the act of making and either revision or reflecting upon it, the “time / to [re]fine purpose,” the exhaustion after creative exertion. We will return to walls in a moment. But for now, let us briefly observe that the end of the poem refers back to the calendar, “the past taped,” as if to the wall. Or the past has been taped as if audiotaped, as if a recorded and transcribed text, as if the poem itself is a transcription of the everyday that simultaneously undoes our assumptions about transcription. It perhaps “aspired” to be a faithful record of “the actual,” but such seriousness of purpose is undercut by the noun “Hair,” which I read as slightly humorous, reminding us of the negligible remnants of the everyday. Hair is made of more and less discernible and singular lines, resembling writing yet not legible, a record of the past, and when the poem juxtaposes it with “the future,” the latter has access to a “more // direct line.” In other words, the path back to the past is convoluted but our imagining of the future projects a trajectory that we can follow.

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This mention of audiotape may reevoke Eigner’s letters to Clark and their references to intrusive media, including the “constant streams of billboards pouring out of radio and tv.” It is tempting to see Eigner as bombarded sensorially, both by commercial culture and by a voracious modernity. The poems seem to be “rec­ ords,” as Eigner puts it, of highly attuned sensory antennae: “Writing can have more play than speech or talk. A poem can be a course of thinking afterwards for the reader (the writer or someone else) and some record of it” (“Interview” 13). But as Eigner makes clear in his correspondence and his explications of individual poems, such “constant streams” also carry topics and details for poems (he mentions writing about things he has seen on TV) and he sometimes sees them, like poetry, as things that pass through the audience.17 Our modes of connectivity are also encroachments. Or to put it differently, as another poem in Lined Up does, when we “listen[] to the sea / without a shell / a shell / rises and falls in the air / the mind” (CP 2: 541). Our mediating and perceiving mechanisms become components of our perception and of the world being perceived. WA L L S , P L A N E S , A N D S E N S O R Y C A S T I N G This focus on perception is why walls feature thematically in Eigner’s work—as both structuring devices and as obstructions that perception and media can partially overcome.18 Walls, wind, branches: Eigner’s readers know well the recurrence of these images and how horizontal shifts like the transition to branches can break up an imagined visual field dominated by vertical elements and constraints. Such movement allows the poems to perceive what might otherwise be just outside of a projected subject’s physical space, whether behind walls or on an astronomical scale.19 Eigner’s own account of his palsy and what is beyond perception links limited mobility and curiosity: I’m a primitive (when writing do what I can, when reading the likelihood I’m not getting much at all of what’s there seems large—if I’d gotten wheels and cd thus explore more before age 10, fewer things beyond or nearly beyond sight or hearing, my curiosity might have been less, for example I might not have tried so to speak to see through the walls of factories we walked or rode past, although come to think of it there was some, hm, yiddish spoken by my parents with theirs, and the Italian spoken by neighbors, the italian too fast for me to learn any words, except “1, 2, 3,” and loud and far away. I was in a neighbor’s house just 2 or 3 times). (“Unpublished Letter”)

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Yet in addition to obfuscating, walls (as we saw in “Silence lost”) provide structure and opportunities for imagining—Eigner revels in trying to “see through the walls.” And in a suggestive twist of publication history, if one traces Lined Up’s first poem, “Indeterminacy of love” (CP 2: 543), back to its initial magazine publication (“Poems,” in Wild Dog vol. 3, no. 21), it sits as the middle poem on a page with two other poems that feature walls. Eigner was perhaps sending it out as part of a group for which walls were thematically important. The three poems appear in this order in Wild Dog:

different times

birds come close as unseen

walls

good

house and walls or lines through branches

(CP 2: 652)

indeterminacy of love you

there

on looking back gradations of the sky variety

continuous heavens it blends with fields

Music

of a surface

brought in

(CP 2: 543)

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some lines I don’t understand

to raise the walls like a curtain the barking dog has the land to itself the sleepers are all shut in pictured california the back of doors not lived in

on

the kitchen

a plane is aboard the wind level

mountains space the distance

interesting folds (CP 2: 690)

In the first poem, “birds come close / as unseen good / walls,” the slippery “as” hinting that the birds might be “good walls,” creating a visual field for branches to cross, or that they might come as “close” as “unseen good walls” do (CP 2: 652). In either instance, the association of walls with birds (and the possibility that, as I have read it, “good” modifies them—though one could also read them as decidedly uncoupled, with “walls” leading more directly into “house”) seems clearly indicative of positive structuring. When read with “indeterminacy of love,” the “music / of a surface / brought in” furthers our sense of walls as positive surfaces or planes. The third poem complicates the motif of walls (and planes) but asserts the potential of poetry to shift the spatiality of the projected scene or even world: “Some lines I don’t understand / to raise the walls like a curtain,”20 then progressing aerially to California, space, and the earth’s “interesting folds” (CP 2: 690). In Eigner’s work from this period, we can begin to think of walls as planes, flat surfaces through which a subject tries to see. Geometric planes can also function as invisible walls that can be traversed by sight or airplanes. Vehicular planes propagate the poems, but Eigner also clearly revels in the wordpl[a]y, as in the third poem above (“a plane is aboard the wind / level”). In a poem from

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September 29, 1965, Eigner writes, “shadows of planes in / enough space” (CP 2: 673), strongly suggesting a vehicular plane, but then in October “Look / at the outside / inside // there are various cars // planes settling / around dusk the / birds in the trees,” and in December “both garage walls / the plane of earth / reaches of sky cloud” (CP 2: 673, 678, 687). The October poem still strongly suggests the vehicular, planes directly following cars, but also encourages us to think about dusk as a geometric plane; the December example, with its inclusion of walls and “reaches of sky cloud” moves between planes as structural plateaus for observation. Eigner took his first ride on an airplane in 1964 (Friedlander, “Larry Eigner” 121), and as Lytle Shaw’s work on the subject elucidates, the Eigners lived in geographic proximity to airfields, making the sensory experience of flights overhead an everyday one (72). The simplistic reading of Eigner’s interest in planes is, of course, that they provide models for imagining an unencumbered, escapist mobility: such a reading is reductive and potentially ableist. But, following Curtis Faville and Eigner’s own discussion of his palsy (as in his letter to Forster), it is useful to acknowledge the influence of Eigner’s embodiment on his poetics and vice versa. I want to suggest that walls and planes provide Eigner with motifs in poems and even a model for poetic circulation that produces a mode of perceptual imagining that I call sensory casting. Further, Eigner’s repeated return to planes mirrors how Eigner’s oeuvre also circulates as planes do, often aerially—transits crossing in flight, the work of many hands, part of a large and orderly system that nonetheless can easily become tangled, individual components delayed. Tracking the publication paths of a poem like “Indeterminacy of love” amplifies the thematic resonances of planes, of course, but it also reveals a practice that is less progressive—less indicative of a linear track—than Eigner’s self-archiving of his work (and its reproduction in The Collected Poems) sometimes suggests. Instead, the poems can be seen as relational, circulating on uneven tracks and creating surprising moments of convergence: to borrow Eigner’s motif, more like airplanes “aboard the wind.” To put it differently, walls and planes are not direct symbols or representations of the practical and procedural circulation of the archive, the makework and organization of which required many participants and many pieces of paper in motion. However, they are of the same world as the archive in motion, motifs where practical and aesthetic concerns conjoin, as they do in the figure of the date. Archives document a poem’s many contrails, and in the poems themselves, planes and their marks focalize and then spring-vault perception. For Lytle Shaw, “the external world of planes is a prompt—an alarm clock even—that as ambient sound often does for poets (think of Wordsworth) begins the focusing process” in which the poet is a “reflexive transcriber of local audio events” (83–84). In the



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present volume, Seth Forrest proposes the radio as providing a model for “shifts in attention that the poem registers” and perceptions that “simply follow each other in time and space.” I want to build on these accounts by conceptualizing the poems’ perceptual motion as sensory casting, in which planes are a vehicle to move sight (and other senses) beyond immediate perception, and emphasizing the role of willful imaginative play in making these perceptual leaps, play that Eigner also employs when thinking about temporality. Sensory casting helps us align the creative impulse and the organizational one, the desires to perceive and archive. “Casting,” in its associations with fishing and “casting about,” links leisure and play to motion through air or some other medium across distance. My use of the term also describes quick perceptual shifts—often up into the air or through space and moving as we sense motion, activating the imagination.21 As Eigner writes, “above twigs we / use imagination // seeing speeds of varying clouds” (CP 2: 619). These perceptual shifts are not products of discrete and often disconnected observations; instead, they are filaments to be traced through the poem, circuits of possible connections. Returning to Lined Up Bulk Senses, we might note that the repetition of the word indeterminate in two adjacent poems links love, that simultaneously heavy and light form of interconnectedness, and motion. The first, dated December 31, 1963, begins, “indeterminacy of love / you there // on looking back // gradations of the sky / variety,” the lines moving on a diagonal down the page while the addressee/reader’s perception shifts first “back” (Orpheus-like) and then quickly up; the poem concludes with “music / of a surface / brought in” (Lined Up; CP 2: 543), an auditory plane inserted into the poem, perhaps reminding us of Orpheus’s musical talents, the elements coalescing into versions of a scene that refuse to become fully representative but allow us to collect and move between them. In the booklet, an earlier poem, written November 16–22, follows, reading: “as orbits // indiscriminate, indeterminate, we // should have all the time // ourselves // at last // you go far” (Lined Up; CP 2: 541).22 Motion, especially repetitive motion like “orbit[ing],” even if indeterminate (we might think again of Calder mobiles in their activated motion, sometimes predictable and sometimes not) is here paired with time, of which “we should have all,” giving us the potential to “go far.” As we have seen, temporality in Eigner primarily engages the present but also ranges through time. “A whole motion” might be aligned with a “moment” and time might be measured as space is (“the distances are shortened / time”), but the pacing of different temporalities is perceptual and relies on an observer (“time needs reality / our mysterious clock / sight of motions parts”). Ultimately, “time is a question” (CP 2: 596, 599, 675, 682). In an April 22, 1966, letter to Clark, Eigner writes:

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But we have to live not only in the present (in enough of it, which is impossible if we’re too personal or anyway introvert or perhaps selfish, egotistical or hard-up), but also the past and (least of all, it had better be, probably—as how fast does this life go?) the future, a nice idea to embrace this is maybe eternity, and different times come together in memory, all sorts of times. And cd be any time is for thought, if we can manage it—while nostalgia or thinking in narrow circles isn’t much compared to action of physical work. Or the circles of though[t] might get too wide, and “the balloon of the mind” too big for the earth. (Tom Clark archive)

Motion occurs when “different times come together in memory, all sorts of times” and through our “circles of thought,” which should not be too “narrow” (leading to nostalgia) or “too wide” (detaching us from an actual account of life on earth). Tempering the hegemony of the present, Eigner proposes that “any time is for thought,” and here we might understand thought and writing as imbricated activities if we remember that “a poem can be a course of thinking,” or, as Barret Watten puts it, “The poet thinks with his poem” (Total Syntax 180). In the letter to Forster, Eigner writes, “Feeling your way along, you can, it seems, discover the right value, so to speak, momentary as it may be—nothing lasts forever, the ephemeral is ok. It’s never quite enough, though (anyway there’s always an amount of concern abt the future, your own and x million others’), and like anything else the present isn’t to be exaggerated” (“Unpublished Letter”).23 “Feeling your way along” is a typically Eigner process-based locution toward which I hope “casting” also hints. In what might potentially be a reminder not just to the writer but also to the careful reader, Eigner warns that “the present isn’t to be exaggerated.”24 However, the present is the place where connectivity is most certain. In February 1972, an issue of the aptly titled Earth Ship, a mimeo magazine edited by Kris Hemensley from England, was devoted to Eigner poems written between 1968 and 1971 (reproducing the poem numbers, dates, and even notes accompanying the poems). In the introduction, Eigner writes: Enough it seems has been produced, enough writings, enough cars, enough music, enough of a lot else. Production or creation is a human quality or whatever, anthropoid, mammalian, vertebrae proceeding through time. Days themselves are new. And old. But now appears a time to share. Only, to share what? All? An imposition that wd be. Too much. December 17 1971 (Earth Ship 2; Areas 48)

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“Now” is “a time to share,” Eigner states—with the caveat that sharing everything would be “an imposition,” “too much.” Additionally, we might track temporality but something about it always moves just outside of our perception, leaving us groping for its contrails. Here is an Earth Ship poem dated October 24–27, 1971: October 24-7 71

#576

what a moment 186 000 any start is simple

enough

a time how mute rough

dense

rising

(CP 3: 1052)

setting

The number 186,000 refers to the speed of light, the motion over distance that takes place in a single moment of visual perception. This is perhaps an unlikely poem to read with sensory casting in mind—there are no real images in which to gain a foothold. Yet we have the implied image of the sun “rising” and “setting” in the last two lines, and through it we see how “a time” is also “a moment” which is also “any start,” various ways of thinking the present, which is in turn entirely sensory, “mute,” “rough,” and “dense,” the sensory casting here being between different registers of sensory experience. Earth Ship’s reproduction of the date and poem number in the left margin make it a component of the poem, emphasizing the present as the poem argues that “any start” is the present. The poem

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becomes archival in its capacity as a document of the past and a projection into the future, a contrail showing where perception has been and casting our eyes along the plotted direction of the next poem. ARCHIVES IN FLIGHT Despite the fact that The Collected Poems reproduces and dates Eigner’s typescripts, the books he published in his lifetime were not often organized by date—nor even necessarily ordered and chosen by Eigner, as Jennifer Bartlett points out.25 In this essay, I have chosen to examine outliers to one of these general rules: Lined Up Bulk Senses, while taking liberties with the layout of the poems, reproduces the entire sequence of poems as received from Eigner,26 and Earth Ship obviously prints poem numbers and dates. Another exception is the chapbook What You Hear, printed in 1972 by Edible Magazine in London (and transatlantic, like Earth Ship). Allen Fisher, who designed the book, replicated the text from Eigner’s typescript, which includes the dates in the table of contents, instead of alongside individual poems.27 At the bottom of the page, the phrase “s e e n h e a r d” appears with no date; it indicates the note at the end of the booklet. In this layout, dates replace page numbers, showcasing the date’s potential for indexing and locating a poem in space as well as time. Because one quickly ascertains that the book both is and is not organized chronologically, the dates’ inclusion presents other potential sequences in which the reader might move through the text. Furthermore, the visual similarity to a table encourages reading the page vertically—down the left and right columns—instead of simply horizontally; “s e e n h e a r d,” which actually contains a brief archival round-up of the poet’s works published in England, reads not solely as a section title but as the last line of a found poem. The “s e e n h e a r d” page also functions as the biographical note, which is appropriate, given the more general ways Eigner depicts visual and auditory sensory casting in his poems. Achille Mbembe writes that the archive “is inscribed in the universe of the senses” (20). As Shaw and Forrest show, the auditory is often intrusive, and Eigner himself supports this idea when he writes to Clark on April 20, 1965, “I can less and less call my ears my own, as I guess I’ve mentioned—the house too full of radio (so this glassed-in porch turns out to be something of a godsend) since V-Nam blew harder” (Tom Clark archive). But both vision and hearing seem to move through space in the poems, and I want to suggest that by titling this chapbook What You Hear, Eigner deliberately points to the ways in which both can become forces of velocity in poems. In another

Larry Eigner’s Archives in Flight 165



letter to Clark, from February 10, 1965, he writes, “Memory, imagination, verbal, auditory, hm . . . Visual, biologically, sd to be extension of tactual. After taming of my wild left side i fnd iyself pretty sure spotting diameters and hence centers, as well as reading a ruler” (Tom Clark archive). If the visual is an “extension of the tactual,” sight can potentially be cast beyond the limits of the visual field— finding the “direction of the sun / past the sight,” for example, to quote the Paris Review poem again, moving beyond barriers and seeing beyond walls the way that sound can. When we imagine individual perceptions in a poem as pieces of the archive set in motion, and then pieces of the archive in the form of poems and letters as also set in motion, the archive grows in concentric circles: poems self-archive, and so do chapbooks/pamphlets, and so do books, and so do collections, and so do oeuvres. However, it is important to note that this inclusive imagining of the archive is not how institutional archives function. Mbembe underscores the fact that the archive is not a neutral space when he writes, “The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and selection. . . . [It is] not a piece of data, but a status” (20).28 Curiously, the feature of selectivity here brings the more formal act of archiving into greater proximity with that of editing. The “microbook” c i r c u i t s, published by Athanor Books in 1971, is another example of a publication for which Eigner arranged the contents himself. On May 13 he tells Calhoun that the latter’s “suggestion abt a microbook touched off ” several poems, and he lists seven by number, which provide the order for the book itself. Of the book’s title, he writes that it “might be better called i n f l i g h t but i think c i r c u i t s a better title, implying ecologic or at least planetary water, and food, cycles, as well as flight x y and z, and routes, the jet set” (Athanor Collection). Here he leaves open the contents of what might be in flight, “tagging” the data points “x y and z.” We might then read the book as both a deliberate ordering and as a provisional constellation, poems on individual pages in motion. The poems are often from the perspective of being in flight: “seen from a plane” (CP 3: 1003), “big or small slice up” (1004), “the earth catches” (993), a telescoping and casting of perspective on a global scale. From this vantage, one poem about temporality envisions time as space. Eigner writes:

enough new

each day

births

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there’s enough of the old, the dying

approach to the present (CP 3: 997)

While clearly emphasizing the present, this poem also sees it as a horizon, something always being approached, like the horizon seen from the airplane. In order to get near it we need to be in motion. In c i r c u i t s, the use of aerial perspective takes Eigner’s sensory casting a step further. We might think of the poems themselves becoming paper planes, semi-epistolary modes of communication propelled along various routes. Tracking Eigner’s publication histories illuminates relationships and allows poems to point to archives and archives to point to poems. The Collected Poems is a necessary tool in this tracking. It is a monumental achievement to be celebrated. While doing so, we might simultaneously acknowledge how its very nature as a collection necessarily frames the poems in certain ways: it draws attention to the date and to Eigner’s organizational system(s), it reinforces the poems as primarily present-based objects, and it presents the entire oeuvre as an archive. Ideally, it in turn prompts us to consider the other components of Eigner’s archive. Thumbing through these tomes, we assume that Eigner’s numbering system, like Dickinson’s organization of her poems into fascicles, preserves the writer’s own conceptions of seriality. One aim of this essay has been to demonstrate the ways in which all of these archival components—letters, poems as published in The Collected Poems, and magazine and pamphlet publications—cross and interweave, elucidating how the practical concerns of organization, publication, and circulation are enmeshed with Eigner’s sensory casting; together, these forces produce an aesthetics of connectivity in his work. Yet even in The Collected Poems itself, the poems nudge each other, jostle and converge and separate. Eigner’s original tagging system puts discrete poems— submitted for individual publication—into a system of organized circulation. If we think about the tags also as the trackers for items in epistolary motion, we might liken the system to that of tracking airplanes. Each flight has an assigned number, and we might see these in motion across a screen. Once a flight lands, however—or the poem is accepted for publication—the number can be reused for the next journey. This is an imperfect comparison for several reasons, not



Larry Eigner’s Archives in Flight 167

least that flight numbers describe a fixed path more than a particular vehicle: at the time of this writing, AA186 flies from Beijing to Chicago every day. But as I hope I have shown, the actual trajectories of pieces of Eigner’s archive are flung variously, creating paths of connectivity both real and imagined; “I’m all up in th air all round,” as he tells Clark. Thinking about Eigner’s work as an archive, with the attempt to organize it as such, or as a series of nestled archives, highlights the work as oriented toward reflecting a life of “individuals in group action.” Or, to put it differently, sometimes the Calder mobile is assembled, sometimes disassembled; sometimes smooth and sometimes jerky—but often in flight.

NOTES 1. In quoting this passage, I admittedly risk mischaracterizing Corman and Eigner’s relationship. As has been frequently noted, Eigner’s entrance into the poetry world is in large part because of hearing Corman’s radio show, This Is Poetry, in 1949 and beginning a long correspondence (Friedlander, “Larry Eigner” 117). Corman’s prickliness in the letters during this brief period seems to reflect his feeling disconnected, both geographically (he was in Kyoto) and “professionally,” from the poetry scene with which he was in such frequent epistolary dialogue (he was having difficulty getting his own work published, and this exchange occurs between his work on the second and third series of Origin). In a March 31, 1968, letter written after reading Another Time in Fragments, Corman gives a much more enthusiastic assessment of the work: “It’s a good collection. . . . It is the sort of thing that looks easy to imitate or even outdo in its own ‘style’—but, in fact, it is no more imitable than anything so particularly joined. (Not that you dont show influences now and again yourself, but it all becomes your own idiom and sensibility.) I’d like to write a short notice of it” (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut]). For Corman, the “disjointedness” emphasized in the 1965 letter no longer applies in 1968; instead, the work is “so particularly joined.” Comparison of the two letters suggests that what has changed is Corman’s approach to Eigner’s “style.” In the earlier moment, he worries that it is derivative, a form of period style; in the later moment it is earned and is what others might seek to emulate. Both of Corman’s letters to Eigner are quoted with permission of Bob Arnold, Corman’s literary executor. 2. Ugo Mulas’s photographs of Calder also emphasize the sculptor’s playful works and their intended capacity for motion. Calder is described as “one who ‘gave’ movement to sculpture, made it ethereal, mobile, interactive with the environment, sensitive to the air and to the vital presence of spectators” (Mulas sec. Dehò essay). 3. Clark and Eigner’s previous letters had crossed in the mail. 4. Given the placement of “climate” here alongside the “tv” and “radio,” I am inclined to read it as referring to the domestic climate, especially given that Eigner’s letters occasionally express a need to leave the house. In his 1974 notecard sent to Douglas Calhoun, Athanor

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magazine editor, Eigner writes, “Generally, I get uptight here anyway, not too seldom yet, one good enough reason after all for going along out beyond those walls” (Athanor Collection). I will return to walls as a significant recurring image later on. 5. Eigner is candid about how this mess affects him. The “pileup,” he says, “mak[es] me brief (in a way), violent, and out of phase.” And in a November 19, 1964, letter to Wagon, Eigner calls the situation a “nuisance” and chastises himself: “And the profusion of litt. mags thoroughly jumbled about the house is by now a nuisance, and their disarray a manifestation of my childish willfulness” (Wild Dog Collection). 6. This passage continues: I am a one-finger typist and have one hand to organize and process papers[.] Six to ten years ago, when for one thing I had fewer manuscripts I could still type in the dark, I was fast and concentrated enough to be that familiar with the keyboard, but now at age 44 I’m considerably diffuse and slowed. And there are one or two people I know who if they could afford it, had the living expenses, would be glad to come here and give knowledgeable aid. The difficulties managing the overflowing materials and the space sometimes lead directly to “mix-ups,” as when one poem is promised to more than one magazine. In an April 17, 1973, letter to Calhoun, Eigner apologizes for having to withdraw a poem: “Anyway, I’ve gone and done it again, somehow or othr—mix-ups more and more likely of course as the amount of material increases. . . . Well, sorry but you cant use #740, as it will be in a solo issue of Black Sparrow Press’ monthly mag. Sparrow in Aug or Sept..” (Athanor Collection). 7. In a letter to Wagon dated November 19, 1964, Eigner writes, “And my head is such a babble by now that mss I cant be bothered keeping track of, hardly, i sure dont miss em, kind of like other people to have custody while i go on as i may. Well, the dilemna is i have to kp some track” (Wild Dog Collection). 8. The first is at the Hoard Historical Museum in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, the second at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin (see Shapland). 9. As Benjamin Friedlander explains in his prefatory note to the letter, Forster wrote to Eigner in 1987 as a student, after reading Lined Up Bulk Senses, a pamphlet this essay also discusses. 10. Though some might argue that these instantiations of clutter-turned-resource are rather distant from the concept of the archive, which is often fetishized. 11. Here and elsewhere, I understand the everyday as characterized by routine and inattention—though aesthetic production of or about the everyday involves pivoting between inattention and attention. See L. Olson 5–7; Epstein 1–5; Chambers 9–16. 12. One special collections librarian, in her correspondence with the poet, admitted being “stymied” by this system (Larry Eigner Papers [Kansas]). I do not mean here to suggest that Eigner’s initial system was unorganized or faulty; Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville indicate that, after careful study, the system “was a crucial aid in our attempts to



Larry Eigner’s Archives in Flight 169

approximate a chronology and make an ‘organic’ sequence out of poems written before LE began regular dating of his typescripts” (CP 1: xvi). 13. That year, he “began a consistent practice of dating and consecutively numbering all of them,” as Faville and Grenier note in the Collected Poems (1: xv). 14. Eigner elsewhere notes the proximity of poems and letters, and the overlap throughout the two genres is evident throughout his correspondence. “It’s thus a poem can become like writing a letter or like taking a walk. The walk extending itself unexpectedly at times; such poems are just realizing things as they come up: weighing, assaying or assessing them as momentary as any appreciation evaluation (appreciation) might be or as much as the worth of any one thing varies” (Eigner, “Interview with Larry Eigner” 13). Poems and letters are so intertwined, Dickinsonesque, that at least once I have not realized that a letter contains a poem until Eigner mentions it in a subsequent letter. See, for instance, the poem “O n e t h i n g t h o u g h” (CP 3: 1218) in an August 2, 1974, letter to Calhoun (Athanor Collection). 15. In a December 30, 1972, letter to David and Maria Gitin, Eigner again brings up the tedium of record-keeping: “I’ve notes on the tss too, of course, in fact have been noting for some time now on tss where things are sent. But record-keeping i maybe disregard more than anything else. Keeping lists handy and/or consulting em sure is one thng that gets to be a d[r]ag and a seemingly futile activity” (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut]). 16. Jessica Lewis Luck frames this effect in terms of phenomenology and non-Euclidian geometry: “Traditional verse happens in a two-dimensional x/y axis with a horizontal and vertical orientation and movement; Eigner’s poems create the phenomenological effect of a diagonal, a z axis, as they drift across the page” (470). 17. “Otherwise things just pass thru you whether tv radio or page plugs into you” (Larry Eigner Papers [Connecticut]). 18. In the letters, we see how various forms of media also intrude on and obstruct the creative and thinking processes. 19. Friedlander aptly uses the image of walls when thinking about the form of the poem: “The wall of the left margin has been cut away, revealing the interior spaces of a poetry that, like modern architecture, is a ‘participation in space’” (“Larry Eigner” 120). 20. Eigner tells Wagon in a January 18, 1966, letter that the first line of this poem was “‘inspired’ (!) or whatever by Duncan in ##19–20 [of the magazine]” (Wild Dog Collection). Like TV programs and books, little magazines contain prompts for new work. But as part of the mess of the archive, their possible points of connection—to individual poems, to other publications, to letters—proliferate. 21. In 1978, Eigner writes, “And I feel my way in fiddling a little, or then sometimes more, on the roof of the burning or rusting world,” helpfully proposing writing as “fiddling” from a perspective to which he has cast himself up (Areas 125–26). 22. Line breaks are here reproduced as they are printed in The Collected Poems. 23. As we have seen previously, here he glides between aesthetic practice and everyday life, refusing to separate the two. He also articulates the importance of the present elsewhere, as in this passage from a 1981 essay that directly links the present and geography:

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Local is present, somewhat at least future too, as part of the whole world, the local part of it. . . . The past is the whole world too, while theres nothing too worrisome, urgent, serious about it, no question may there be of changing it (of continuing the more or less immediate past, yes), and more than one of your influencing the sun’s photosphere or Alpha Centauri. Well, the past and the present are a less and less adequate guide to the future, but nothing else ever will be at all. While as was always the case too much residence in the past makes you blind or mistaken about what’s going on around you now, and on the other hand enough of it can slow down the now some and make it appreciable. (Areas 51) 24. Here, I do not intend to downplay the role of transcription or what Michael Davidson calls the “clear, direct presentation of moment-to-moment perceptions” which are “record[ed] [in] real time” (Concerto 120, 121)—Eigner himself refers to “a position whirling past // drift of perception” (CP 2: 655). 25. “As with all his manuscripts, Eigner submitted a pile of poems to Creeley rather than a fully formed book.” 26. Eigner chose the grouping himself—Rosmarie Waldrop states that she and coeditor Keith Waldrop “would have liked more, but . . . didn’t press him” (Rosmarie Waldrop to Stephanie Anderson, email, 29 May 2017). 27. “The layout for the text in what you hear was Larry Eigner’s. It was quite a task to replicate, because he used typewriter spacing and my letter press used leading to put spacing in and some letters are wider than others. One of the design elements was simply the task of matching the printing of Larry Eigner’s text to his typewritten pages. I don’t have access to the original anymore (I simply don’t know where it is), but my informed guess is that the layout for the contents page you see in the printed book was my attempt to match Larry Eigner’s typed page. I may have lined the dates up vertically, but I don’t remember. It was sometimes very tricky to match he alignments, because the en and em spacing often differs between set type and typewriter” (Allen Fisher to Stephanie Anderson, email, 30 May 2015). 28. For one summary of the literature addressing the nonneutrality of archives, see Manoff 14–20.

C HA P T E R SEV E N

What Sounds Larry Eigner’s Environments J O N AT H A N S K I N N E R

Larry Eigner shows poetry how to be environmental. His close at-home attention to the events of a weekday neighborhood (traced by cats, birds, plants, wind, light, distant traffic), his scrupulous personal economy, and his many prose writings and statements on ecology sound a multifaceted ecopoetics. Yet the detail is elusive: “reference” in Eigner’s poetry is generic, narrative elided, and resemblance subverted through disjunction, a pursuit of what Eigner calls the “math,” not expression, of word placement. In reading this math as a sound graph we can begin to hear the constant his poetry locates, a vibratory body activated as interchange, rather than as boundary between any imagined “self ” or “environment,” a body with as many dimensions as forms of life have senses, here registered as sound. Eigner’s attitude might be summed up by a word frequently repeated in his writing, “enough”: “Enough it seems has been produced, enough writings, enough cars, enough music, enough of a lot else” (Areas 48). The preface to Eigner’s 1977 The World and Its Streets, Places emphasizes a search for pockets of abundance in a world of scarcity (the world of the 1970s energy crisis): “Amid increasingly palpable news rather than rumor of scarcities (to be hugely euphemistic about it), abundant moments in various places persist and keep on in high or ultra high frequency, and a poem can be assay(s) of things come upon, can be a stretch of thinking” (Areas 3). This “ultra high frequency” marks the information-rich end of the sound spectrum—in Eigner’s case, a sound inaudible to human ears. In 1969 Eigner wrote a letter to the editors of Scientific American, citing Barry Commoner on the “painful dilemma” facing a society caught between the production and the pollution of the fertilizer treadmill and proposing a weekly fast “as a frequent reminder to ourselves of the likelihood, whatever it is (and crop failures here have not been unknown), of inadequate harvests” (Eigner, “Letters” 785). Eigner then notes that if the day is to be an “earth- and life-oriented religious element,” it must broaden to devotion “with much heart to public living.” It is not so much civic-spirited devotion as doom that would be palpable to anyone with an ear to the radio and television of the 1970s. It was the time of the “population

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bomb,” the Sahel drought, the founding of the Worldwatch Institute with its globally, politically, and economically informed “Papers” warning of untold scarcities. A poem written a decade later proposes “time out” (stopping the clock? stepping outside?) and a walk “around down” the street, suspended between “everything” and “eternity,” with the thought “if // it should end ever.” January 20–1 80

#1195

everything like time out walk around down the street if it should end ever eternity another word

The poem begins with “everything like // time out,” that is to say, comparing all to the feel of time, including wanting out—subordinated to an “if . . . then” clause, whose “if ” hangs on eternity. Yet “eternity” is not “everything,” as the visual rhyme of letters that brackets the poem’s opening stanza underscores; it is also a word. Either way, “like they say,” the prospect doesn’t look good. I think we’re doomed like they say one day how it all counts there’s a rumbling fine

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in the air traffic

song

or the earth

a constant thing (CP 4: 1390)

The “rumbling” in Eigner’s poem, “song // traffic or the earth,” although “fine,” carries a sinister undertone, apposed ambiguously to the “constant thing”—the earth or the rumbling itself? Is the constant our planet or the “inconvenient math” of climate-changing “traffic”? Eigner both enacts and sings “how it all counts.” Yet this “song // traffic” is as light as an “air,” both near and distant, the way things are carried to us on the air. This air, like the earth or the oceans, is the constant thing Eigner’s poetry sounds. Eigner’s “math” is liminal to Black Mountain poetics, Language writing, and the mainstream ecological movement: from projective poetics (and Eigner’s congenital disability) comes an emphasis on the body as a source of writerly possibilities and constraints. The Language writers, who adopted Eigner early on, publishing his “Approaching Things” as the opening statement for the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G =E, were more interested in Eigner’s “ultra high frequencies” and his attention to the poem as “a stretch of thinking” (his friend and caregiver Robert Grenier famously proclaiming, “i hate speech”; Silliman, In xvii). The ecological horizon in Eigner’s poetry is sonic: August 3–September 3 86 s o u n d

#1565

h o r i z o n

a plane going on

(CP 4: 1573)

Unlike Williams, the Objectivists, or many of the Black Mountain poets who inspired him, Eigner did not after 1958 compose his poems with hard carriage

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returns: typed out not in words or phrases, but letter by letter, his poems advance by “under-statement,” working under the previous line, moving out from and rarely looking back at the margin. Eigner‘s avoidance of the left-hand margin reflects his distaste for what he called the “stentorian” claims of poetry: I’m cautious, and come onto things by under-statement. Wary of exaggeration. Sotto voce has resulted in the suppression of words. Don’t like to begin with a big B, as if I was at the Beginning of all speech, or anything; which may also have something to do with why usually I’ve had an aversion more or less to going back to the left margin after beginning a poem. (Areas 6)

Eigner elsewhere referred this obliquity to a need to keep the poem moving (Areas 16). This oblique resistance leads to another difference with the speechbased poetics of the Black Mountain tendency, that is his “suppression of words” (Watten, Total Syntax 178). As much as its slope across the page, Eigner’s poetry is marked by a “nounal” quality, the predominance, grammatically speaking, of indexical reference over predication and the suppression of verbs or other strong articulation (the “missing X”) from phrase to phrase.

March 17-April 6 83 it’s just a car going by plays up the whole big room or part way

then fades

to not even clock ticks but short dripping somewhere

#1385

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what sounds and sights given time ways down you look now you see now you don’t heads and tails (CP 4: 1485)

Barrett Watten’s analysis, in his essay “Missing ‘X,’” shows how discontinuity and reversibility are introduced through a basic device of parallelism, where grammatical differentiations “jar” the illusionistic space, determining “the perceptual order of the poem by syntax” (Total Syntax 176). For example, the “what” of “what sounds” in the above-cited poem disrupts the extent to which “sounds” might prolong a possible distributed predication of “plays . . . fades . . . sounds.” Perception oscillates until one reads “and sights” and realizes a grammatical apposition has begun: “short dripping // somewhere // what sounds // and sights.” Watten argues that reference in Eigner’s poetry is suppressed along with predication, or that the distinction between the two is blurred and reversed. I would add that Eigner’s gaps let sound into the poem. Hearing occurs in relation, in the interdependence of silenced (suppressed verb) and sounded (floated noun), in an intuitive balancing act that seeks to keep open the “accessibility of thought to language, of language to thought, and of thought and language to the world” (Friedlander, “Editor’s Introduction” v).

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May 14–July 31 87 sun-filled street

leaf

#1624

stilled space

from the height out side four cars f o r C l a u d e R o y e t—J o u r n o u d

at length

then three

and one

a truck

motor across the sky in a short time vertically a yard trafficking

(CP 4: 1596)

some nights

Eigner’s distaste for hierarchy extends to placing title or dedication to the side of the poem (as in the poem for Claude Royet-Journoud). The break with normative syntax has less to do with an imagist aesthetic, where psychological construction rather than narrative dominates (though Eigner did publish some haiku “versions”), than with a very personal sense of economy—not a break with syntax, but a sustained condensation of grammar, a repeated device of ellipsis (Watten, Total Syntax 176). While unfixed from the referential coordinates of topic, voice, or narrative, Eigner’s poetry still enjambs the “out // side,” insisting on “contact.” Eigner’s techniques reflect his engagement with an economy of part and whole, with meaning at the exchange between the shapes of poetry and what he calls “the

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outside sound”—an ecological relation: again, “enough it seems has been produced, enough writings, enough cars, enough music, enough of a lot else. . . . Contact outwards or something, besides bringing in and familiarizing” (Areas 48). George Hart picks up Eigner’s use of “weighing” in “Be Minimal Then . . .” (Areas 7–9) and in “Approaching Things” (Areas 125–26), Eigner’s inaugural statement for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—“Coming to weights and feeling them . . . As they come, what can things mean? Why expect a permanent meaning? What weights, imports?”—and compares it to Cavell’s meditation on weighing in Walden, to argue that “the thesis of such poetry is that the poem on the page is the point of contact between” the force of things and that of the attention (Hart, “Postmodernist Nature” 323). As in Cavell (or Weil), this weighing happens in a gravity field with “an upward as well as a downward direction” (Cavell 72). Eigner’s is less a Batesonian “ecology of mind” than a physical economy: as when he refuses any unnecessary repetition in his dating of the poems, writing “September 11–6 85” for September 11–16, 1985. (There are arguably biographical reasons for Eigner’s minimalism: his disability made writing an almost athletic task where energy resources had to be carefully measured, while the necessary thrift of his childhood in the Depression-era thirties made going light second nature; Friedlander, “Larry Eigner” 116.) From the standpoint of information theory, Eigner might seem to be “compressing” his messages. Eigner trims the poem’s envelope to draw attention to noise everywhere outside the poem—to the fact there are already plenty of signals in that “noise.” Thus, Eigner shares the Language poets’ emphasis on the social constructedness of meaning, but he extends such constructedness to our hearing and to what we sense of the more-than-human environment.

b i g

w i n d

i n

t h e

t r e e t o p s

what shapes

moving around (CP 4: 1573)

the outside sound

To what extent might we read an ambient poetics in “what shapes / moving around / the outside sound”? There are, of course, Eigner’s persistent “ambient” topoi: the peripheral or background, yet defining, sounds and events of a suburban neighborhood (“There’s a rumbling // fine // in the air song // traffic or the earth // a constant thing”; CP 4: 1390). There is the ambience of the reader’s experience:

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the phenomenological surroundings in which any reading of the poem is situated. There is finally the medial rhetoric of page-based poetry, a thickening of the medium in the way Eigner’s spacing (between the letters of “b i g w i n d i n t h e t r e e t o p s,” for instance) draws attention to the page on which the poem is typed and to the machinery of its fabrication, the work of what Eigner called “calligraphy typewriters.” Eigner’s poetry does share some of the characteristics of ambient composition: minimalism, collapsing or reversal of figure and ground, contact as content (where contact, the phatic in Roman Jakobson’s linguistic terms, becomes message), in a work “able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular” (Morton 36–37; Eno). The suburbs—largely empty of human activity from nine to five, five days a week, in which Eigner wrote most of his work prior to 1978—might be thought of as a transitory space akin to the airports, train stations, elevators, shopping malls, and supermarkets engineered by sound designers and sometimes targeted by sound artists. Ambient music composed for transitory spaces generally functions as atmosphere, ground that is always potentially figure—like a carpet whose intensity of design does not force itself on the occupants of the room (Humes). Eigner relaxes the poem’s hold on the attention, with a figure that is always potentially ground, so that whatever else is going on as the reader reads the poem can be allowed in. Eigner’s poetry is “ambient” in making the attention go around (amb + ire), soliciting exchange and circulation: “Contact outwards or something, besides bringing in and familiarizing” (Areas 48). Though this ambience is by no means limited to sound, the work of two composers contemporary with Eigner provides instructive parallels for understanding how his writing does and does not engage ambience, in terms of the concepts of “soundscape” and “silence” and of an overt listening practice. Soundscape is a term coined by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s. As he defines it in his book The Tuning of the World, the soundscape is “any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study. The term may refer to actual environments or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered as an environment” (274). Schafer’s soundscape is in part an Arcadian utopia, one he characterizes as “unfolding around us ceaselessly. We are simultaneously its audience, its performers and its composers” (205). As his definition implies, the notion of soundscape arises with the development of analog tape recording technologies—the ability to isolate, repeat, and study virtually any sound event or musical composition. (This development is not irrelevant to Eigner’s as a poet, who depended on radio and television—distracted from reading by a “wild” palsy only tamed by cryosurgery

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at the age of thirty-five. It was through Cid Corman’s This Is Poetry radio show on Boston’s WMEX that the young Eigner discovered, and eventually hooked up with, the Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley, who would publish Eigner’s first book; Friedlander, “Larry Eigner” 4.) Schafer emphasizes the twentieth-century development of “schizophonia,” or “the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction” (90). The irony is not lost on Schafer that the very technology that “splits” us from the sonic environment also enables and creates his object of study, the soundscape. In response to the “sense of aberration and drama” disseminated by this widespread electroacoustical reproduction, Schafer does not so much advocate a “return to nature” as—after McLuhan—a more conscious approach to the new technologies (as, for example, in the “extended acoustic space” of radio): “Radio programming needs to be analyzed in as much detail as an epic poem or musical composition, for in its themes and rhythms will be found the pulse of life” (91, 93). Eigner’s letters and poems are peppered with reference to programs heard on Boston’s WMEX, KPFA in the Bay Area, and the BBC, among others; a study of Eigner’s media environment would also, of course, extend to television programming. “Silence” is most readily associated with John Cage, whose 1952 composition “4'33" ” may have been familiar to Eigner. It was not so much by adding to the concert hall soundscape of twentieth-century music that Cage will be remembered, as it was by emptying that concert hall, opening its doors, and unstopping its ears that we might better hear the soundscape Schafer characterizes as “unfolding around us ceaselessly. We are simultaneously its audience, its performers and its composers” (205). (In Cage’s words, “Every person is a composer”; Kostelanetz 22.) Cage’s early manifesto on noise echoes the work of futurists and avant-gardists like F. T. Marinetti, Luigi Russolo, and George Antheil: Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. (Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” Silence 3)

Cage brought silences into the composition as a way of directing listeners to sounds in the environment (not “captured” and “controlled” but occurring spontaneously): “Those [sounds] that are not notated appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment. . . . There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time”

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(“Experimental Music,” Silence 8). The first thing to notice, as Cage insists again and again in the tale of his experience in an anechoic chamber, is that there is no silence—even if it be the drone of one’s own circulation or the whine of one’s nervous system (or the net of high frequency radar homing signals that now can be detected, with proper equipment, over the remotest taiga) “there is always something to see, something to hear.” That was in 1957. In 1978 Cage used Thoreau to repeat the point: “Music, [Thoreau] said, is continuous; only listening is intermittent” (preface to “Lecture on the Weather,” Empty Words 3). Cage had discovered Thoreau’s Journals in 1967 when Wendell Berry read him passages “outloud” after dinner. Cage noticed that Thoreau “listened to sound as electronic composers listen to it, not just to musical sounds but to noises and ambient sounds generally” (Kostelanetz 119). Cage was quick to seize on the difference that magnetic tape brought to composition: “It is a striking coincidence that just now the technical means to produce such free-ranging music are available. . . . The situation made available by these means is essentially a total sound-space, the limits of which are ear-determined only” (Silence 8–9). This would radically change Cage’s notational methods: as he noted in discussion with Joan Retallack, “the connection began for me with seeing from magnetic tape that . . . with tape, each half inch equals a second, and a second is a second, so that it would be possible to make musical notation, not symbols, but graphic” (Retallack 92). Cage was for some time associated with Black Mountain College, where Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Robert Duncan, among others, were using the typewriter and page layout to score their poems for voice. Cage shared what Olson would call this “practice of time in space” (Shultis 68–75). The extent of Eigner’s contact with the work of Cage and with Schafer’s “acoustic ecology” is unknown. There is a short poem, dated September 20, 1992, in The Collected Poems, the first six words of which, according to an appended note, “crossed [Eigner’s] mind while listening to the 2nd(?) of two 2-hour memorial programs in re John Cage over KPFA”: “B e t w e e n l i f e a n d d e a t h // no matter // piano // plane” (CP 4: 1649). Is Cage’s piano the plane (of his Bardo) between life and death, or is a plane the Cagean piano navigating the emptiness (“no matter”) between life and death? Perhaps it is that nothing in that moment matters (five weeks after Cage’s death) but piano and plane—a very Cagean insight. Eigner, Cage, and Schafer developed their art in an acoustic environment saturated by the new communication technologies (radio, television, magnetic tape) that were shaping and extending human hearing, an environment increasingly affected by industrialization (Schafer 77). Like Schafer, Eigner and Cage share an immersion in listening. They also made walking central to their creative practice.

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One of our best “walking poets” (who writes “everything like // time out // walk around down the street”; CP 4: 1390) largely used a wheelchair. (According to both Robert Kocik and Robert Grenier, friends and assistants to the poet, Eigner was able to take short walks holding onto a fence or railing. Kocik describes Eigner walking carefully in silence then returning to his typewriter to note immediately—in poem form—what was seen and heard (personal communication). Eigner’s “walking” poems bear a remarkable affinity to the “listening walks” Schafer counsels: A listening walk is simply a walk with a concentration on listening. This should be at a leisurely pace, and if it is undertaken by a group, a good rule is to spread out the participants so that each is just out of earshot of the footsteps of the person in front. By listening constantly for the footsteps of the person ahead, the ears are kept alert; but at the same time a privacy for reflection is afforded. (212)

Eigner’s spacing, between the letters, words, and lines, as well as stanzas of his poems, demonstrates a similar technique of distributed grouping, elements gapped just enough to isolate without separating them. The poems also “walk,” in the way a world comes in via sound—not in the acoustic space (extension) of sound, but in the time (sequence) of sound—one perception following and complicating the last, often eliciting a return, a reperception in the mind’s ear. Eigner’s poems might be read as listening maps: “In this way a poem will extend itself, naturally, quietly, and be like taking a walk, light, in the earth” (Areas 8).

January 15 95 wood porch outdoors footsteps a car go up

(CP 4: 1686)

and away

#1770

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At the same time, the poem can be taken in at a glance. Though Schafer offers important caveats, and is suspicious of visual metaphors—“if you can’t hear it, be suspicious”—he explores the spatial representation of sound in some detail: “Notation is an attempt to render aural facts by visual signs. The value of notation for both the preservation and analysis of sound is therefore considerable” (132, 123). After discussing the merits and drawbacks of sophisticated imaging systems such as sound spectrography, Schafer ends with an “example of aerial sonography, which brings value judgment into play. . . . Here, after walking about the given territory freely, numerous observers were asked to comment on the sounds they heard, and the results of their observations were gathered together for display” (132). Schafer seems to believe that such “subjective” maps are actually less misleading than more so-called objective ones: “Such diagrams are hints only, but perhaps this is all one should expect of sound visualization—a few hints which the ear can then follow up in its own way” (132). Similarly, Eigner’s poetry at times enacts a topography of sensation, clustering events on distinct sensual planes— touch, sound, sight—layered into a single spatiotemporal moment: March 7–8 84 damp breeze

#1441

through

the window

birds’ brief singing

cloudy weather (CP 4: 1512)

The visual layout of the poem is its syntax, grouping sensations or registrations (“statements”) in a manner neither simply temporal nor simply spatial. The poem seems to have four groups: 1) “damp breeze,” 2) “through / the window,” 3) “birds’ brief / singing,” 4) “cloudy // weather.” The last cluster is only tenuously grouped and appears on the verge of breaking up (in the manner of clouds). Energy is created by the strong diagonals connecting staggered line positions—one through the d, b, and s of “damp breeze” and “birds’ brief / singing,” and the two strokes,

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nearly at a right angle to this, connecting the t’s of “through / the window” and the c and w of “cloudy // weather.” This gives the four groups an alternating, chiasmic visual thrust—which is also semantic, clustering focused phenomena (“through / the window,” “birds’ brief / singing”) in the middle positions, diffuse weather framing the arrangement. Furthermore, the horizontal position of birds, between the breeze and the window, and the rightward and downward drifting apart of clouds and weather, seem to locate perceptions in relation to topography rather than psychology. As in the following poem, the sense of a map, of Eigner’s room at daybreak or sunset, may be more than fanciful. November 5 91 s t i l l

some darkness

sparrows the sky

dawn plane muttering distance fly in the window

single time branch (CP 4: 1643)

#1699.x

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As noted, the shape of Eigner’s poems is a curiously consistent slope to the right: each line, distancing itself even further from the left-hand margin, measures its distance from the poem’s start in time as well as space. In this sense, Eigner’s is a projective geometry; his poems hang in four dimensions at least (“one calculus”), and what we get on the page is a projection, as if his words were the shadow cast by a sundial. A focus on sound in Eigner obviously abstracts from a synaesthetic and proprioceptive continuum. The soundscape is one manifestation of the same movement—“what shapes / moving around / the outside sound”—that casts a cloud across the sun or shakes the branches. But with sound, as in the piece beginning “roofs,” near and far seem most interchangeable. May 30–June 6 81 roofs leveled skyline wires shadow moves frond pane mystery noise wave wind in the morning

(CP 4: 1428)

pipes

#1262

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In this poem it is the more temporal sequence of perceptions Eigner measures—whether they be visual, aural, or otherwise sensed (“weighed”)—than it is a soundscape spatially considered (or mapped, as in the previous examples). In fact, the poem reverses the “normal” subject-predicate order of statement to impose an Aristotelian perceptual order, from sensation to idea: roofs ® skyline; shadow ® frond; pane noise ® wave, wind. The single verb in the poem consolidates this sensuous causality as, post hoc ergo propter hoc, “shadow // moves // frond.” At the same time, the poem is counter-Aristotelian in its spatial order, beginning with distant roofs and telephone or electrical wires, approaching through the leaves beyond the windowpane and the window itself to presumably what is nearest, the sounds in the house pipes. The juxtaposition of two movements, from far to near and from sensation to idea, is either chiasmic or implies a reorientation to the senses, usually conceived in Aristotelian logic as the nearer or more immediate of the sensation/idea dyad. This interchangeability of “near and far” complements vision’s quick scale shifts, which, in another Eigner poem, zoom from wind to tree to branches to leaves:

May 16–7 85 cloud

the wind

separate branches birds

leaves

a couple of squirrels

up edging the wire again the helicopter turns around a roar in the sea footsteps

#1514

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time marches all

(CP 4: 1545)

over

“Time” carries ambivalent value: militaristic in its inexorable advance through events near and far, marching “all // over,” but also connecting disparate scales of experience. Such interchangeability, scale shifts, and continuous access for a unifying “time” seem relics of pre-Anthropocene phenomenology, free of the “scalar challenge” the human footprint has brought to perception (Keller 31–39). But if we follow Eigner’s shift from vision to hearing, seeing to listening, a less imperial perception emerges, more in tune with “scalar dissonance.” Eigner opens poetry to an “interchange,” by plotting time as it materializes (“marches”) through the senses, typographically, on the page—in a way that seems to model the scattered, multiple points of listening more than seeing’s vanishing point. Here the suppression of obvious (and sometimes less obvious) syntactical elements functions like Cage’s “demilitarization” of syntax (sending the “march” out of step), while the spacings resemble the silences in Cage’s compositions, gaps where environment impinges on the attention, as we pause to take a word or phrase in: “If you’re willing enough to stop anywhere, anytime, hindsight says, a poem can be like walking down a street and noticing things, extending itself without too much obscurity or too much effort” (Areas 25; Cage, Foreword). This sunny picture of the poem as “walking and noticing things” is probably the best possible description of an ambient-friendly poetics. Alternatively, a poem by Eigner could be read as the map for a “soundwalk,” as Schafer distinguishes it from the listening walk, “an exploration of the soundscape of a given area using a score as a guide” (213). Eigner’s poem focusing on the sounds of a quiet block might read like a soundmap Schafer “made during two different time periods on a ‘listening walk’ around a city block” (267).

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September 11–6 85

#1532

rustle emptiness a car goes through there’s a fence on the corner clouds moving away south streetlight in the sun 4 birds into the tree others away to the wind a steep wall above roofs tracks to the back globe of the moon the cat wary along by the flue sound disappears down the block (CP 4: 1554)

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Poetry follows sound, which “disappears // down the block,” but also potentially solicits sound, since listening, rarely coextensive with hearing, can be prompted as lines “rustle // emptiness.” A car, birds, a cat move “through . . . into . . . along,” audited as they too disappear. Defining poems as “nodes of language risen in thought out of the general continuum to prompt or orient us,” Eigner entertains the notion of “objects beyond the action of language? One idea may be that a poem should gain a reality capable of being renewed always, or an illusion of reality, by evoking, dragging in, or referring to something beyond the poem, so to have it less isolate” (Areas 27). Sound extends from within us to the outer reaches of our hearing (and into the hearing of others), a continuum that operates to some extent independently of vision (we probably hear what we cannot see more often than we see what we cannot hear). Sound may be that conduit by which we can best hope to escape “the poem” and drag something in from “beyond.” Eigner nevertheless counsels moderation: Everything should be taken for itself, but not too much, otherwise it is lost. Then how does the extrinsic turn intrinsic at times, the extraneous become digested? “A poem is a machine made of words”? Anyway, the dragging in of things from beyond the poem can’t be carried out very thoroughly. In a sense everything has to come of itself, unexpectedly, and has to be faced. (Areas 27)

Far from a rejection of “objective” or extratextual reality, Eigner’s is a practice of sustained attention to the extrinsic (as to Emily Dickinson’s bobolink, “extrinsic to attention”)—without, however, “straining after it” (Dickinson 519). Sound in Eigner is not a means to self-examination. Robert Creeley, for instance, often writes about (with, in, and around) sound, but a quick comparison will show that sounds, for Creeley, serve to shore up the ego in its shaky self-presence, whereas for Eigner they effect a scattering out to the multiple soundings of things. SOUND Hearing a car pass— that insistent distance from here to there, sitting here.

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Sunlight shines through the green leaves, patterns of light and dark, shimmering. But so quiet now the car’s gone, sounds of myself smoking, my hand writing. (Collected Poems 588)

In his “Blurb for Disabled Calligraphy,” Eigner lets us know what he thinks about Cartesian consciousness and the poetics of self-identification: “Self-assertion (or the isolated I, like anything else enough by itself) is none too interesting, is unlike (self-/) discovery a blind alley” (Areas 81). Above all, Eigner is a poet of exploration—one who demonstrates that to explore environments is simultaneously, and always, to explore and discover language. It can only ever be, as he says, “one calculus.” As a poet of dailiness, of what Angus Fletcher, in reference to John Clare, calls the “nondescript,” Eigner urges restraint, slowing down, taking one thing at a time (Fletcher 54). He would have agreed with William Cronon that we need to replace our wilderness infatuation with a more responsible frame—whether it be that of window, branches, wall, yard, garden. Responsibility means attending mostly to that which we can respond to (viz., Eigner’s citation of Duncan’s “Responsibility is to keep / the ability to respond”; Areas 114); the immediate environment is where environmentalism begins, not the “back of the beyond” (Cronon 86–89). At the same time, Eigner is the poet of scattering, of unstinting engagement with that wildest of elements, the air. Ruach, spirit, breath—air (the bright three-letter word Eigner prefers) is everywhere in his poetry, often in its active form “wind.” The number of times an Eigner poem tells us the wind is up or the wind is down, etc., is beyond counting. April 2 78 wind huge outside since when falling asleep alpha rhythms I suppose

#1068

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how many years without death (CP 3: 1335)

These are the winds that enter us (even in the oblivion of sleep) and, according to philosopher David Abram’s reading of Diné poetics, “leave their trace . . . in the vortices or swirling patterns to be seen on our fingertips and the tips of our toes, and in the spiraling pattern made by the hairs as they emerge from our heads: There are whorls here at the tips of our fingers. Winds stick out here” (Abram 233). These are the “Little Winds” that “linger within the spiraling folds of our two ears. . . . [And also] speak clearly into the ears of other animals, telling them of what is happening in the world” (234). Air, as “the very matter of awareness, the subtle body of the mind,” is actually that which joins us to (rather than separates us from) the other animals, plants, forests, mountains: “the air a bath you look / away to the hill” (CP 4: 1487). For Eigner it is “continuous air” (CP 1: 388); it also may be a reference to the ecological conceit that we all have tasted a bit of “Cleopatra’s bath water.” Words too travel a great distance on the air, and sounds come in from far away. The air (or the wind) is the body of sound, and Eigner (who kept on his wall a print of Chagall’s—that painter of the scattered, the windblown—and was proud of the fact his mother came from the same town as the Jewish artist, though he later found he was wrong) is always ready to give himself up to the wind, tunes in to it like his radio, adjusts himself to the news it brings (Areas 24). In this sense, Eigner is the most “environmental” of poets, our best listener, stenograph of the soundscape. To attend to the wind is to be picked up, scattered, whirled around, dispersed, and eventually recollected and deposited, having lost and gained in the experience—at once settled and never quite the same. But rather than talk, loosely, the way I do here, holding my words back, from the air that wants to take them away, give them other meanings, Eigner gives language, generously, typographically, to the collisions and separations, “near and far,” going on in our surroundings, all of the time. Eigner does not tell us about birds. Instead he shuts up; the bird comes into the poem, sits on the comma, and sings:

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April 15 60 live

, bird which Sings

above

and underneath or two birds,

may

all

go

subtly we are in the air feet on the ground the air goes thin then

budding relieve

the branches like fresh children leaves

die, fitful

mass of voices, curled, in continuous air

(CP 2: 388)

#3s

C HA P T E R E IG H T

Ways of Being Earthly Sympoetic Ecopoesis and Birds in Larry Eigner’s Poems L I N DA RU S S O

his life the

open window where the clock sounds fade what is it ?

branches out there

—(CP 3: 753)

The “open window // where the clock sounds fade,” as a synecdoche for all that the structural feature delivers—connecting phenomena to perception to biological systems “out there”—correlates with the development of an ecological consciousness in Eigner’s poetics. At this window, Eigner is not “merely” an onlooker; his life is also the “open window” of the poems; it is where he locates his life, as signaled in the equating “the” with two words on either side: “open window” = “his life.” Writing through it, Eigner establishes an interspecies environment that suggest an environmental ethic: life “out there” in the branches is the same life, ecologically speaking. Most often, birds are “birds,” and trees are “trees,” but as birds come to more frequently inhabit Eigner’s poems of the 1960s, referential language signals specificity—a sparrow arrives, the silhouette of an oak leaf emerges. Birds, the “silent” ones in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), as sites of open window interconnectedness take on new meanings—what Donna Haraway refers to as the material meaningfulness of ecological entanglement—and this is the basis of Eigner’s sympoetic ecopoetics: a poetics of interspecies locating and connecting



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(Haraway, Staying). To put this into historical context, shared spaces in these poems become ecological, vital with forces and full of abundance, concurrent with the expansion of cultural and legislative responses to the increasingly apparent environmental impact of the American lifestyle.1 And beginning in this period, Eigner’s poetics address humanity as a destructive force and attempt a remeasuring by creating a new, more sustainable temporality, one that better correlates to the survival of earth’s life systems and processes.2 The ecological aspect of Eigner’s poetics is not broadly discussed, but my sense of Eigner’s sympoetic ecopoesis builds on arguments about ableism and embodiment in his poems. Michael Davidson posits an active embodiedness through a geographical approach that emphasizes Eigner’s spatial relations in terms of distance: the poems are “cognitive maps of his internally distanced relation to space” (Concerto 124–25), evidence of “the active measurement of spaces and distances by an unusually sensuous, alert mind” (129). I want to collapse that distance by focusing on the proximity of birds and, in doing so, situating Eigner as Hillary Gravendyk does. Emphasizing the durational aspect of Eigner’s poems (in what she calls a “chronic poetics”), her critical reading reinvents a disability-based lens by broadening its aperture: disability, a way of being-in-a-body, is merely one generalizable feature of embodied experience; embodiment is characterized by particularity; and through particulars we can talk about “a shared condition of embodied perception [where what] is shared is the heterogeneity of bodily experience” (7). Further, in emphasizing how Eigner’s “texts record the multiplicity of perceptions that embodiment always entails” (5), Gravendyk gives us a new way to think about the significance of multiple presences in the complex, nonlinear semantic and perceptual field Eigner’s poems create, as well as his choice to inhabit this field (and its phenomenal counterpart) without reducing its complexity. This reads to me like an ecological proposition. With the heterogeneity of embodiedness in view, one can emphasize bodiedness as such and focus on what Eigner’s “stationary vantage” because of cerebral palsy affords (Davidson, Concerto 132). In Eigner’s poems as I read them, the bodies of the poem (poet, birds, readers) are mutually implicated in the ecologies of the poem, and this is the basis of his interspecies sympoetic ecopoetics. Not only are we always among other and other-than-human bodies, and not only are we constituted through them relationally and ideologically,3 but we are interconnected with them biologically (materially) as well. The Collected Poems (from the years 1937–1995) is an archive of embodied perceptions. “Up” is sky and “down” is earth; these axial directions appear often as lines of thought cross and recross. Much is made of the poems in terms of

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their use of the page space (as readers have followed cues from Charles Olson’s projectivism), and these readings tend to treat semantics as the product of an independent human mind. But an interspecies poetics requires reading lines between distinct poems—that is, between distinct instances of text that Eigner typed on separate pieces of paper—as well as reading the spaces literally and temporally between poet, poem, and its constitutive interspecies context. Many a discrete Eigner poem is typographically time-marked, their form inclusive of gradual perceptual accrual. Short poems suggest a moment of time, like a quick stitch (Eigner called it a “monostitch”; Areas 25) between longer stretches of observing-thinking. This is why, in reading Eigner’s poems as works of ecological realization, I follow lines from poem to poem (“horizontally,” as presented in their codex form) rather than prioritizing the individual page (reading “vertically”). Written not like clockwork nor as explicit sequences, but into those moments and places “where the clock sounds fade” (CP 3: 753), they are often, but inconsistently, dated, sometimes written across a number of days, sometimes years. They operate durationally as notations in time, such that the “it” in “what is it ?” (see epigraph) might be read as a continuous thought breaking through the linguistic surface of the poem. Because thoughts in his poems are rhizomatic, I seek out of occurrences “between” the writing of different lines in the ecological, geographical space of his writing practice. This brings me to the nearness of birds, their proximity, in the “open window” life. Eigner at one point posits a sympoesis: “Maybe the most a poem can be” is “a realization of things come to or that come together. At Moments. (Nothing lasts forever, sure thing, or for ages, and it’s a question how much can or should anything last or occupy attention . . .)” (Areas 25). Or, as Haraway puts it, “We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not no place, entangled and worldly” (Staying 4). Attuned to the proximity of other-than-human life, Eigner’s poems sometimes read to me as documenting and thinking through entanglement in myriad spatialities and temporalities, in a state of always-being-constituted relationally. Haraway deems the connective making that arises from entanglement as a signature trait of the Chthulucene, the age of the “nowness” of earth begins.4 It is in this sense of the chthonic that Eigner’s “bird poems” can be said to perform ways of being earthly, which is to grasp material meaningfulness of other-than-human constituents in proximity to his embodied sympoesis as the “nowness” of the poem. As Haraway puts it, chthonic ones “demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters”; they “also demonstrate and perform consequences” (2). One consequence these poems perform is the realization of a sphere of thought

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that is both interspecies (entangled) and ecophilosophical; this is the “becoming earthly” that Eigner’s poems perform. Proxemics, the study of human use of space in nonverbal communication— of the “hidden dimension” popularized in the early 1960s by Edward T. Hall— emphasizes the dynamics of physical relation. “Man’s boundary,” theorized Hall, is not one’s skin but is determined by information from various fields that define an individual’s sense of space; specifically “a series of expanding and contracting fields which provide information of many kinds” that compose one’s environs (115). These fields span the distances between perceptible objects in them, and humans extend bodily “into” this space. Hall’s theory of proxemics gives an Olsonian field poetics a different dimension—that of extension into other, other-than-human fields. Where in Eigner’s early poems, space seems to be occupied by objects (near or far) in the Euclidean sense, later poems inhabit fields of relation constructed by proximate (etymologically, “neighboring”) nonhuman beings. The consistency of Eigner’s locatedness allows poems as a group (through rhizomatic connections) to realize place as a social site composed of overlapping fields of information and, further, as a product (and not just a site) of interactions. In other words, place is not a container but a vital medium: the uncertain “it ?” of the epigraph might be located in the branches, but whatever is “out there” (trees and their inhabitants) are also appendages for thought. As such, his poems are not about space, or place, but about biophilia, the awareness and knowledge that arises from attending to spatial relations as ecological relations.5 Working temporally and accumulatively, proximity is foundational to the ecological consciousness that emerges in Eigner’s poems. In Eigner’s domestic interspecies space, his sympoesis merges different “fields” of sensory, biological information—that is, the dynamics of the “natural world” of his other-than-human neighbors. Listening is one form of bodily registering, of creating a connected situatedness, and Eigner’s poems bear witness to a long history of open window listening. This soundscape orientation is evident in this stanza of a poem dated “c. 1952–53”: The midnight birds remind me of day though they are

out in the night

beyond the curtain I can’t see (CP 1: 82)6

The stanzas that follow continue to develop a contrast between the birds “beyond” in the “naturalcultural contact zone” (Haraway, Staying 7) of open window and

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“boxed radio[s]”—or, rather, the “radio silence” that allows hearing (“reading”) of other-than-human language: Somehow bedrooms don’t carry Tradition

I

and the boxed radio

is off. But what I am reading inward performance Has relevance. Allows me to hear

while something speaks. As for the bed straightened by visible hands only it is huge when I feel

down in darkness

(CP 1: 82)

The “something [that] speaks” remains audible in the “reading . . . performance” in the immediate environs. Cid Corman’s 1949 radio show helped raise Eigner’s awareness of the New American poetics, and he often wrote in his Swampscott, Massachusetts, home, on the porch, or from his room overlooking it, environed by a standard suburban mix of trees, birds, squirrels, clouds, weather, neighbors, the nearby coast—features that help create the backdrop of the radio silence and voice sounds.7 As George Hart argues, Eigner was aware of his bodied relationship to an ableist, spatially oriented New American poetics (“‘Enough’”). I see this echoed visually in the space between “tradition” and “I” in the lines quoted above.8 “Bedrooms don’t carry / [a projectivist] tradition” that values Olson as the figure of “outward,” and even as Eigner’s limited mobility situates the “I” at a distance from that tradition, his “inward performance” correlates to an attentiveness to his “open window” life. It “has relevance” because it “allows [one] to hear / while something speaks.” I do not know what involuntary situatedness could possibly have meant to Eigner, but these lines suggest that the terms of his departure from available models of poetics enable access to a new hearing range. Indeed, encounters with other voices take on increasing material meaningfulness in later poems that work through the entanglement brought about by listening in the expansive spaces of “open window” life. This seems to be articulated in a poem written over a decade later:

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August 30 64

#hr

the language of birds

on the other side of the world holds me in

its prone mirror of song

tree bent landscape

retreat my voice

not

fading away

(CP 2: 591)

That the “other side of the world” might exist in the neighboring birds’ “tree bent landscape” provides a sense of the scale that the poems try to hold: that what is near at hand (one’s own life and body) is connected to “other” lives/bodies. Being “held” in a “mirror of song,” what is reflected back in the “bent” angles of trees? Many of Eigner’s poems are written in this conceptual site, where his “voice” both “retreat[s]” and does not “fade away.” The proxemic is also biospheric: the “language of birds” expresses the materiality of natural ecologies and these “hold me in.” Situated as in the entanglement of human and other-than-human life, Eigner offers a new figure of outward. Reading back through the lines where birds appear in poems written throughout the mid-to-late 1950s is like watching a flipbook of creatures coming to life. Inhabitants of nearby trees become active participants in visual and aural space, emerging more fully and specifically in Eigner’s registering of his daily activities, thoughts, and perceptions. Two poems distinctively mark a difference in Eigner’s awareness of the meaningfulness they bear. “for the long season” (dated c. 1951–53) and “for the long season 2” (dated c. 1952–68) attend to insects, birds, and trees as seasonal inhabitants, but in the earlier poem, they appear to be stuck, as with a pin, onto the space the poem is inhabiting. Crickets are “seething like machines” in the first poem, while, in contrast “pigeons walk in the air / as we swim / while leaves are blown” in the second. This detached attaching is typical of Eigner’s poems of the early 1950s.9 But in the second poem, birds take on a more vital role in the lines “I hear them from far away / the birds outline the world”; they sonically mark a conceptual horizon and provide a way to envision distance “beyond the curtain.” The latter poem also includes an appendage-like stanza (dropped down a few spaces, formally different from the preceding stanzas) in which a “we” is placed in the avian umwelt:

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O creatures

critters, we

are the world in the sky the cats make themselves narrow going through

(CP 1: 111)

Possibly because of the longer duration of composition, “for the long season 2” reveals a change in understanding the material meaningfulness of birds. If they “outline the world,” the phenomenal field takes on the ecological dimension because within this horizon the “we,” Eigner and other critters, are held, sustained by shared habitats. A poem dated October 1959 is perhaps Eigner’s first fully realized ecological poem in that it finds respite in, even while being cautious about, resilience in nature. If this sounds like a surprising description of an Eigner poem, it is—singular even—though the poem’s “parts” are quite typical. Empty branches, trees, wind, and leaves appear in many poems, and here, as in other poems, they exceed mere description and take on material meaningfulness to motivate an ecophilosophical question: “What / are birds for?” This opens an inquiry into the environs:

October 59

> [. . .]

are birds for? to the crotches [. . .] (CP 2: 341)

What rivers

cliffs

#1L

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Pointing to natural habitats provides an answer but this of course is no “answer” at all; the poem disrupts a closed logic. The question of proximity is both biological (what role do birds play in an ecosystem?) and poetic (what are birds doing in this poem?)—and contrasts sharply with anthropocentricism (why is a bird important to me?). Asking the question opens to the possibility of sympoesis. As birds become part of the thinking of the poem, they transform it. Eigner writes elsewhere that “a poem can be like walking down a street and noticing things, extending itself without obscurity or too much effort. . . . If you’re willing enough to stop anywhere, anytime, hindsight says” (Areas 25). Several short poems activate and explore the proxemics of a poem “extending itself ” into adjacent fields:

May 60 trail nest remember

and leave it beyond

#2t

upper tree

now

lie

(CP 2: 393)

When is a nest a trail, or vice versa? When it leads to the “upper tree,” “beyond” bodily reach, but remains in mind (“remember / and leave it”). This poem’s extension brings the “trail nest” (of bird or squirrel) within “man’s boundary” (to use Hall’s term); it becomes part of the horizon of the poem as a site of entangled subjectivities—the unnamed “I” of the poem, the critters in the tree. This is emphasized in the ambiguity of the spacing in “leave it now lie / beyond.” Extension and overlapping acknowledge that many species make a world “natural”:

July 24 64 birds

forest

the neighborhood

to sound

Øx’

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the difference

between leaves you look there

some sky again achieved distance

(CP 2: 579)

To attend to the “birds / forest / the neighborhood,” to extend to the sky, is to “achieve distance.” “To sound // the difference / between leaves” is to acknowledge specificity. Here we might think of a telescoping that brings birds closer, line by line, from their “home” (forest) to “the neighborhood” and then “between leaves.” The human body (“man’s boundary”) extends into other species’ environs and other-than-human species “extend into” the human environs. In contrast with projective verse, which is the traversing of boundaries in the extension of the human field, Eigner’s proxemics acknowledges that every organism has a field poetics. A poem that “extends itself ” sympoetically performs the subject in the overlap of multiply inhabited fields and thus as a part of a collectivity in a single (ecological) field. In other words, Eigner’s proxemics transforms his environs into a site of biotic community, where, in their most ecological moments, poems think in terms of an enlarged “land community” inclusive of the “soils, waters, plants, and animals” of Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” (224).10 In this space of entanglement, an “ecopoetic” home constructed of “natural” materials like plants and branches and visited by the elements (wind, rain) emerges. Where “air” is “song” the effect is not merely aeolian (where the poem takes precedence) but material and collectively embedded in the organic world. In this way, Eigner’s poems arrive at a complex sense of biophilia, here expressed through simple alliances (“your strength / apart from trees”) and cognitively dissonant reversals (“no plant like a house”): July 22 64 Go and sleep

outdoors

the wind is strong trees strong

there is no plant like a house to lattice the senses

#Øh’

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What air, song

bears your will, clouds Let time go, your strength

apart from trees the extent

of the present, here and there branches calm

[. . .] (

CP 2: 580)

The rare instance of capital letters reads like a command being issued, but by what or whom? The poem continues to comment on the construction of the house—“a forest all trees / the thick changes of mind / tract you’re in” (CP 2: 580)—inviting ecological consciousness as biophilic imagination. Thought and perception, “changes of mind,” bear a material “thickness” in the “tract” of woods where “branches calm.” As I mentioned earlier, chthonic ones bear material meaningfulness and its consequences, one of these being the ecopoetic realization of a new sphere of thought that is both interspecies (entangled) and ecophilosophical. This depends on familiarity with temporalities, the chronos and kairos, in the naturalcultural contact zone of the open window life. A contrast between these two concepts of time appears in a short poem that situates sunrise as phenomenal kairos and as a precedent for measurable chronos:

January 15 65 the sunrise

behind the clock ticking as it goes around

(CP 2: 616)

In the juxtaposition of the first two lines, kairos is “behind” chronos. The term clockwise derives from the movement of northern hemisphere shadows

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throughout the day (as marked on a sundial), which is why we say the earth rotates “counterclockwise.” This poem’s last line, with its free-floating “it,” highlights contrasting metrics of chronos and kairos, for while the hands of the clock make their quicker revolutions demarcating hours in a day, the clock that is earth “goes around” the sun slowly. Eigner extends into and explores biotic temporality, as in this poem dated “May 14 65”:

what time is it day I may

sleep

hour on hour

or all the time, what

a consideration, you

pretty good,

what a question

a circle the

forwards in

other way around it may

have gone, the thought of what to do

sits and birds come

a tree

there’s a word for each leaf, and each wall and a word for nothing

(CP 2: 640)

The huge swath of “day” is abstract time that “is” when the poem commences. The line “the / other way around it / may / have gone” challenges the sense of time’s “forward” motion as reflected in the clockface. As the poem continues, this chronic abstraction (“forwards in / a circle”) is thrown into contrast by moments of kairos in the tree that “sits” and marks time sonically with the comings and goings of birds. Time is experienced as passing through the inconsistent

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constancy of birds when the field of avian life extends into Eigner’s writing: “birds sing // calendars / older than clocks” (CP 3: 1043; “September 17 71”). Avian sympoesis provides a temporality that attaches Eigner’s poems to dailiness. Rarely do poems mention scheduled things, like postal deliveries, the evening news, or radio or television programs. Time markers often enter as earthly occurrences, as in “round and round the / sun comes / all the time” (CP 3: 799; “September 15 67”). The poem is a means of access to biotemporal coexistence. In some poems, each line is a rung by which we climb out the open window and into our animate environs, where, entangled, we experience kairos—for example, where twigs cracking tell time:

February 14f

#fo

[. . .] the tree is almost

steady like a clock or face twigs

cracking

[. . .] (CP 2: 550)

Another poem further explores temporality by thinking through the avian umwelt:

May 4 69

What’s a tree to a bird Branches

at least

Air

twigs

footholds

#311

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the sun comes green angles ahead

(CP 3: 907)

Biologically speaking, a tree is time embodied: “the sun comes green,” or, as spring comes, more sunlight and warmth brings more green and sunlight hits leaves so that the sun “comes [in the form of] green”—which is perhaps another way of saying what a tree is to a bird; a photosynthetic host of life-sustaining insects, berries, and seeds and materials to shelter and build nests. Proxemics becomes a means of exploring ecological coexistence, which in turn ensures an ecophilosophy that can challenge modernist assumptions of progress where they threaten to endanger earth’s life systems. Eigner’s proxemic sympoetics foreground the various and “dimensional” aspects of biotic temporality in this excerpt of a longer poem. It begins:

October 8 64 to open your ears

real music

on the wire sparrows or any other birds sit still

their world dimensional more than dogs or cats or perhaps men and listen a moment of stillness stick in the ear

#ia

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a beginning and origin Attachment

of flight

[. . .]

(CP 2: 600)

Life signifies through stillness, which is perhaps the “real music” of biotic temporality. To the open ears, in the silence of a moment (that “stick[s] in the ear”) of both “a beginning and [an] origin,” distinct temporal concepts are held together; the momentary, kairotic nature of anything that appears to “begin” at any moment, and the deep time of origins, the fact of ontology itself. Proxemic thinking follows thought’s trajectory out of the window and into tree limbs to “begin,” to return to an elemental nature, reflected in biological time on which this poem, as it continues, arrives:

[. . .] I recall passing through them, many branches and leaves begin

time

too

is present [. . .] (CP 2: 600)

“Passing through them”—them being denoted as trees in the previous line—suggests the material meaningfulness of trees as adjacent “territory,” as in “body like water compass of leaves the tree / territory you see through” (CP 2: 579; excerpt; “July 21 64”). There are many such moments of entangling, of climbing, flying, extending out through the trees or clouds in Eigner’s poems of this period. To

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note at this moment in the poem that “time / is present” is to acknowledge the link between biotic temporality and material meaningfulness of other-thanhuman species in our immediate environs, as though ecological consciousness and temporal complexity are coextensive capabilities. I am calling such proximal temporalities “biological time” because they are perceptible in and as those moments where human consciousness extends into minute life details of other-than-human constituents in the environs. Biophilic proximal temporalities hinge on affect and as linkages in interspecies temporality, they are “ecological,” in that relations are measured on the terms of interspecies inhabitance. “Careful of earth air and water mainly perhaps, and other lives, but some (how many?) other things too. Walden, ah!” as Eigner wrote in a prose piece published in 1978 (Areas 126). The “stretch of thinking” that the poem takes shape around include temporalities present in the poem’s environs. Rejecting systems of measure—metrics and other poetic standardization techniques that provide limited means toward awareness of material and temporal interconnectedness—the poem enacts its own nontotalizing, interspecies measuring. As a way of registering the material meaningfulness of the biological world, his proxemic sympoetics are ecological through and through. Eigner continues to develop a situated ecophilosophy through attention to the “subtleties of life around me” (CP 2: 569; excerpt; “June 8 64”). Poems question an anthropocentric being-too-much-in-one’s-head and prioritizing human needs:

May 30 64 [. . .] what is a man in my head

head

head the need of anything a bird

can fill the ear it sounds like water (CP 2: 568)

#Øb

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As a response to Olson’s vision-centric “eyes in all heads / to be looked out of ” (Maximus Poems 33) and his accompanying colonization of “sister ear” (a receptacle for his own voice only), Eigner’s proxemic sympoetics break with a closed, anthropocentric circle of meaning-making and thus widen the community to include the other-than-human. Here, “tangent things,” the sounds of bird and water, fill the ears:

September 14 65

#j’q

explanation

tangent things what goes through the head what sphere of being ideas of bird brilliant light

(

time, cleaved water

CP 2: 667)

This suggests to me Eigner’s ecophilosophical interest in what birds are for in terms of entanglement, in how a bird’s “sphere of being” “goes through the head”; the “ideas of bird[s]” (whosever they may be) exist within a common, interspecies sphere. From an ecocritical perspective that values naturalist knowledge, the lack of specificity accorded to birds would surely be regrettable.11 Eigner seems to address this lack in this poem:

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March 28 66

#66’

[. . .] what birds say

comes in

all the windows

no end of wires through trees but what connections a kind of bird sits on them, how much

is to be distinguished

openings some upward [. . .] (CP 2: 706)

With reference to the bird-wire-tree assemblage featured here, “how much / is to be distinguished” is a pertinent question, but whether the bird’s species is undisclosed (or unknown) has little bearing on the fact of interrelatedness manifested in the poem (though, an ecocritic would argue, it might enable a deeper connection). This question extends to grammar and subjectivity in the poem as well; Eigner forgoes the unifying consciousness of a centering “I” along with much of the armature of the nature poem (narrative, metaphor, image, epiphany) and thus makes space for the material meaning of birds and resists a hierarchy of attention that prioritizes human self-importance. “A thing can be overemphasized, made too much of, yet it seems that, ultimately, one is as important as any other, there’s no hierarchy, so evaluation of assessment leads to realization,” as he writes in “not forever serious” (1980; Areas 25). In the sympoetic site enabled by the proximity of birds, poems shift away from human hubris and the ecological destruction that follows. This is why birds are good to think with and why bird-think is so plentiful in Eigner’s environed entangled poems. As ecosystem inhabitants, birds put pressure on poems to realize environmental urgencies—to be “ecological.” Perhaps this pressure is expressed

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as a shared semantics in the naturalcultural zone. The semantic duality of “waterpipes” in the following brief poem is a good example:

July 8f 69

#331

the birds sing

waterpipes

sections, huge sides of the road

(CP 3: 917)

Whose waterpipes does this poem hinge on? The language suggests that the “waterpipes” of the birds—the throats that convey liquid to the stomach and air from the lungs to make sounds—are organized in “sections,” like a chorus, that are “huge.” This is materially meaningful where city planning is concerned: “waterpipes” also marks the connection between wildlife biology and civil engineering. So much depends on a huge section of pipe by the side of the road—a ditch, a sewer system, public health, a construction contract, an economy—and because pipes convey human effluent, untreated in the late 1960s, into the Nahant or Massachusetts Bays, the health of surrounding ecosystems depends on them as well.12 An “ecological” poem acknowledges the complications and inequities that arise when human needs dominate, as in a brief poem written in the wake of a devastating coastal oil spill. The positioning of the lines suggesting the tensions of the moment:

“February 23 69” oil at st.a Barbara

grass-roots sky-high

#291

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violence earth mined (CP 3: 897)

While previous environmental preservation efforts focused on remote wilderness and wildlife habitats, this spill, the first of its kind, revealed “the environment” to be much “closer” (in Morton’s sense of the hyperobject) than had been supposed, shifting the focus from out-of-sight mining disasters, which were reported in terms of human casualties, to highly visible offshore mining in valued natural environments, thus exposing threats to humans and wildlife alike. Eigner’s poem juxtaposes on-the-ground “grass-roots” efforts and the “sky-high” oil well jutting above the horizon (with its expected “sky high” returns on economic investment); the indented “violence” suggests the shifting of all perspectives in their wake, while “earth mined” sounds the tone of interspecies solidarity of an “earth mind” ethics. The Santa Barbara oil spill of January 1969 is credited with commencing the environmental movement.13 Images of dying seabirds and people joining the clean-up effort (with no gear to protect from toxins, as this preceded knowledge of these hazards) flooded the news. Throughout the decade, examples of wildlife as collateral damage mounted. Seabirds gunked up in crude oil joined a collectivity that included baby bald eagles perishing in DDT-thinned eggshells and fish dying in massive quantities in oxygen-depleted Lake Erie. Earth mined/earth mind, twinned cause and effect, call out the ecosympoesis in this poem linking extractive industries with environmental damage. That biospheric thinking is informing Eigner’s ecophilosophy becomes clearer in a poem from July 1971, beginning “The closed system / Of earth / Of the Ark,” which mixes biblical and ecological imagery to address the power of “the outsized Men.” It also comments on the relationship between human and natural causes of destruction: “a kind of chain / firecrackers or / burning woods / having defined a thing” (CP 3: 1032). The poem’s first lines echo the scientific view of earth as a closed, or self-regulating, system—a concept popularized in the 1970s with James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis.14 Eigner writes, as the left column of an early dual-columned poem, dated November 29, 1964:

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s l o w

i s

t h e

p o e m

(CP 2: 609)

Here he clarifies that a poem is its own temporality and that a particular experience of duration is the context of realization. Slow can occur at any pace, and what makes anything slow or not is a subjective relationship to the “feel” of duration. We cannot know how “slow” Eigner’s time felt to him;15 we do know that he worried about the “speed” of contemporary consumer culture as a factor in environmental degradation as “ecological problems . . . —fatiguing the earth, clogging it up with extras” (Areas 163) and that “there might be too much to realize as well as too little, the atmosphere might get or be too thick, things, life, go too fast, whirl past” (26). What he calls the “slow poem” is slow because it prioritizes the emerging ecological now over the modernist progressivist now of his cohort and lineage. Eigner’s poems rework the nature of time to situate inhabitance as organic and kairotic in an era of realizations about the exteriorized, environmental costs of capitalism’s corporate profit growth model, as the dangers to human and environmental health are becoming abundantly clear. Eigner took issue explicitly with the pace of human consumption, asking, in a piece published in 1975, “How can you move with deliberate speed in more than a few ways?” (Areas 44).16 His poetics enacts its own small-scale solution, through its extensive proxemics, and, with the ability to stop “anywhere, anytime”, the poem is where he finds answers (Areas 25).17 While capitalism instrumentalizes human labor and ecosystem services to tighten its singular monetizing grasp on time, Eigner’s poetry abandons profit potential and labors to rescale time to the metrics of the open window life of interspecies existence, through a sympoetic proxemic poetics of entanglement with the other-than-human constituents.18 Gravendyk’s approach interests me because it does not “read” Eigner’s poems and their modes of spatial perception back onto his body. She points out that in refusing to align the body with a single perceptual position, Eigner “asks us not to register his physical situation, but to pay attention to our own” (5). This allows for a “critical” stance whereby the body of the reader can no longer recede from the poesis of her critical text—an idea that is particularly poignant in the Anthropocene.19 We can no longer recede from our (potential) environmental connectivity,

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our (potential) ecological consciousness, our related responsibility. Eigner’s poems call on us to attend to the situation, limitation, multiplicity, expansiveness of our own embodied perceptions.20 Eigner lived in what Neil Marcus calls “Disabled Country” long before it had that name; Marcus, by naming this country, refuses to live through imposed categories (“Neil Marcus”). What Gravendyk describes as the “discursive and perceptive field” of the poem, which is multiple, activated through poet and reader, is this country. We can read Eigner’s poetry as expanding the boundaries of that country, and we can, through his poems, comprehend its significance. His poems offer an opportunity to reflect on how we see ourselves constituted, individually and as social and ecological bodies, and to consider how we value mobility, what we deem productive, and how something seemingly static like attentiveness fits in. And we can also ask: What kind of (creative, intellectual) individuals are we: Or, going further, what kind of (biological, feeling, thinking) organisms are we becoming? “What is it ?” to return to the epigraph to this essay. An ecological consciousness emerges subtly in Eigner’s work because the proximity of birds presents repeated occasions to think about being a constituent (human or other-than-human) of a shared living ecology. This becomes the basis for a relational, earthly ethics; not “earthling” as in planetary inhabitants but “earthly” as in “earth-directed.” Eigner’s ecopoetic attentiveness shows why we need to cultivate bodied ways of being earthly as citizens of our respective biomes united by the shared condition of dependency on earth’s life systems. Eigner seems to equate other voices with his own “singing”; this may fall under the category of “( t o r e c o g n i z e / w o r l d w i d e / a n i m a l / s t a t e / o f n a t u r e ),” as reads the left-hand column of a dual-columned poem (CP 2: 582; “July 31, 1964”). This poem draws together many threads that consider time and material meaningfulness (such as “birds / singing / time of day”; CP 2: 582) and ends with a statement of a sympoetic ecopoetics:

[. . .] listening, sing somewhat,

learn

what to do with ourselves

(CP 2: 582)



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The ecological poem is concerned with and arises from spaces as shared/made by humans and other-than-human earth inhabitants, but it also addresses itself to or “realizes” the unknown. Crucial to consider at a time when we have only begun to register, in poems or otherwise, the significance of sympoesis with other-than-human presences.

NOTES 1. Throughout the 1960s, Americans received a steady stream of news about environmental “threats” and “hazards” to public (i.e., human) health, which evolved into an emphasis on protecting wildlife and preserving natural resources, and the National Wilderness Preservation System (1964) and the Environmental Defense Fund (1967; motivated to ban DDT) were formed. US president Lyndon B. Johnson urged Congress to act, in 1965, to curb human-caused elevation of atmospheric CO2. US Congress passed the Water Quality Act and the Solid Waste Disposal Act (1965), and the Clean Air Act (1963) authorized grants to state air pollution control agencies, setting state standards. Senate hearings on leaded gas commenced (1966). Grassroots efforts killed plans to dam the Grand Canyon, on several occasions fatalities resulted from air pollution in US cities, the first arctic ice core for the study of temperature and atmospheric changes was drilled (1968), pollution in the Great Lakes reached critical levels and the Cuyahoga River caught fire (1969), and the first coastal oil spill devastated California beaches (1969). 2. Eigner’s ecopoetics is subtle, which may help explain why he is excluded in many an anthology of ecopoetics (or his poems are perhaps too spare to merit inclusion, or too little known). It might be useful to recall distinctions between subgenres of ecopoetry as these are described in the editors’ preface to The Ecopoetry Anthology (which includes Eigner’s poems), which they see as “falling loosely in 3 main groups”: nature poetry, based on an encounter with nature and reflecting and often meditating on, sentimental/romantic or not, a being with thoughts and things; environmental poetry that is activist and explicitly engages environmentalism; and ecological poetry that engages questions of form and subjectivity, including “a form historically taken for granted—that of the singular, coherent self ” (Fisher-Wirth and Street xxix). My use of ecological in this essay corresponds with this usage even as I think Eigner’s ecopoesis precedes questions of form and subjectivity per se. 3. Gravendyk elaborates Eigner’s chronicity through the spatiotemporal features of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which brings the aspect of “imagining a self not ‘occupied’ by the singular act of perception but a self able—even required—to encounter the world, perceive the physical body, use the body in order to perceive, and to interact with other bodies—all at once” (10). 4. Joining together khthôn and kainos—“beings of the earth” and “now”—Chthulucene is the term Haraway prefers to Anthropocene for our current era. 5. E. O. Wilson coined biophilia to mean “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike

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processes” and adds “that to explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development” that is a propensity “our existence depends on” (1). 6. To extract from Eigner’s poems just the lines I feel moved to comment on and to reweave into my own essay-nest would be to do a disservice to the whole of the work of poems and how they integrate with the work of Eigner’s life. More often than not, a reading of a whole poem results in a few twigs poking out, as in any regularly tended nest. They arrived, though, and so here they are. When possible and not nonsensical, this essay will quote whole poems and signify when this is not the case. 7. An author biography Eigner wrote describes this: a 2 -windowed bedroom (summer heat, winter cold, and snow, wind, springtime, Fall) overlooking backyard and porch with clothesreel in a closed-in while big enough neighborhood (sidestreet and 2 deadend sidestreets, a path through woods, shortcut to the beach before the easterly one nearer the shore ended, after its joint with Eigner’s street at the foot of the hill much steeper than the one going down from the town’s main road. (Windows 195) 8. Read through an Olsonian lineage, there will always be worry that Eigner will not rise (literally, to bipedally traverse geographic space) to its model of spatial mastery. Gravendyk calls out critics who overlook the limits of Olson’s projective verse model to emphasize the limits of the body, and of Eigner’s “limited” embodiment in particular, as an explanation for the particularity of Eigner’s poetics. She instead challenges both ableist and disability-based readings that would see the text either as a compensation for or a transcription of his embodied condition by shifting attention to elaborating a new poetics “dynamic enough to account for Eigner’s embodied particularity, and to help articulate the correlation between bodily and compositional particularity more generally” (2). In Hart’s reading, Eigner’s “alternative” projectivism escapes the confines of “a projectivist compulsory ablebodiedness” and from his environed position he challenges the privileging of nature poetry “done by foot” (“‘Enough’” 168). The above-quoted seems to me to be a poem setting off in that direction. 9. Gulls appear frequently, their cries often “mapping” the distance to the nearby beaches. At one point “birds” are even compared to “chafing dishes” (CP 1: 150). 10. An early, uncharacteristic poem, “G r o u n d” (dated “1956 # s 6”), suggests as much, with its consideration of human environmental impacts in the form of trash flows. At the time of composition, trash removal and landfills in the United States remained unregulated and the family dumped detritus “out back of [Eigner’s] house”—including the poet’s castoffs, “assorted pages” (CP 1: 214). 11. Eigner’s preference for “birds” is a choice and part of his ecopoetics. In a poem dated “April 8–15 65,” when he lists specific species and includes habitat details to create a sense of verisimilitude characteristic of the nature poem, the poem seems to be doing just that, rhetorically—“plunging / flying in water / for the fish that swim / auk” and “grebe / nest held afloat alive / stems / feathers in the stomach” (CP 2: 633)—and the effect is



Ways of Being Earthly 215

to undermine the poem’s philosophical leaning “the water is the sky / the sky water / in cloud” (CP 2: 633). 12. I am hazarding a guess here, though the evidence points in this direction. Here are the facts: until 1968, untreated sewage from the City of Boston was released into Boston Harbor with the outgoing tide. Efforts to clean the harbor began in the wake of new state and federal laws (the Clean Water Act of 1972), which mandated primary and secondary treatment for all municipal sewer systems. It is likely that sewage treatment in municipalities up the coast from Boston were similarly subject to correction, but it is not clear when Swampscott stopped dumping its untreated sewage. As of 1982, the Lynn Water and Sewer Commission provided wastewater treatment services for Swampscott and Nahant. According to the EPA website, in 2015, the city of Swampscott settled over violations of the Massachusetts Clean Waters Act. Violations included the “discharge of untreated wastewater containing pollutants, including sewage, from the Town’s MS4 outfalls into Nahant Bay and Massachusetts Bay.” Historically, human sewage treatment has displaced the needs of other species; areas of land colonized for sewage treatment infrastructure in Boston included Calf Pasture (used for grazing in the nineteenth century) and Deer Island (Histories; US EPA). 13. Sweeping change occurring in the year following the January 28, 1969, explosion that cracked the sea floor in five places to release the pent-up crude oil beneath Union Oil’s Platform A oil rig: California placed a moratorium on all new offshore drilling in state waters and adopted an Environmental Quality Act, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, and the first Earth Day took place. The federal Clean Air (1970) and Clean Water (1972) Acts followed. 14. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) was preceded by journal articles earlier in the decade, and in 1969, in the journal Nature, an argument about whether the term biosphere describes “the total complex of soil, water, air and living organisms that forms a complete ecosystem” or “the space of our planet that is taken up by living beings” took place (Gillard 500). 15. The pace of the “slow” poem is, for Michael Davidson, “not for lack of interest or attention. Rather, that ‘slowness’ permits a degree of discrimination and attention; the space of the poem is, in Eigner’s case, less a score for the voice than a map of intensities whose subject is ‘a large motion’ of global, geological forces” (Concerto 128). To this I would add ecological, biological, sympoetic forces. 16. In this essay, “integration interchange,” Eigner suggests ways to recalibrate our standard of living and lifestyle, such as instituting a fast day, as a kind of national holiday, to inspire gratitude for food, commemorate hunger, and perhaps allow for a yield in crop production and so lessen the need for chemical fertilizer, knowing that, from a Scientific American article of 1969, nitrogen fertilizers play a role in environmental degradation. 17. For Eigner, “slowing and winding down isn’t a problem, or hardly so, for me at least” (Areas 26). Eigner’s disability required a certain slow attentiveness; prior to a surgery in

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1962 (at the age of thirty-five), his right arm and leg moved uncontrollably; “in order to relax at all I had to keep my attention partly away from myself, had to seek a home, coziness in the world” (26). That is, he had to extend himself outside of “himself ” as a physical phenomenon—a gesture that translates into a poetics. 18. The concept of “ecosystem services” was introduced in the 1960s by environmentalists focused on the problem of inputs, of pollution, and how this compromises earth systems. 19. I almost cannot emphasize enough how generative I found Gravendyk’s approach, threaded through her own bodily experience with chronic illness and emphasizing the “presence of the body among other bodies” (3), and her contention that “the particularities of the chronically ill body, then, help to point out that the recessive body is a fictional structure” (11). I want to emphasize it, though, because we as a culture struggle to recognize barriers to inclusion—for example, of disabled individuals from certain spaces because of a lack of disability accommodation—and the exclusions are tantamount to lost opportunities for knowledge. 20. Gravendyk does not say as much, but she does confront what she calls “the protean space of the temporarily realized poem itself ” (6), which holds open the question of “what kind of perceptive positions might be formed and reformed (for the reader and the poet).” This speaks to me as a concern for the futurity of a poetics (Eigner’s) whose phenomenal effects have yet to be read or to occur.

PA R T I I I

Selected Letters 1953–1992

A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTIONS

Eigner’s capitalization, punctuation, and spelling have all been retained in the following transcriptions. Obvious misstrikes on the typewriter keyboard have been silently corrected. Where a key failed to make an impression but the intended letter is determinable, that gap has been silently filled in with the appropriate letter. Eigner’s variable paragraph indents and margins have been standardized. Illegible strikeouts using typewriter keys have been omitted; strikeouts in pencil have been retained and indicated with an overstrike line. Illegible notes in pencil have been omitted, and some typed notes have been as well. Brief marginal notes have been inserted in-line in brackets; longer marginal notes appear at the end of the body of the letter. Eigner’s use of spaces between letters to indicate titles has been retained, but other irregular spacing has been standardized. Eigner created his own punctuation mark for asides and afterthoughts by overstriking open and closed parentheses; these marks are represented by double daggers (‡) in the transcription.

LE TO ROBERT CREELEY ∙ 08/29/53

Creeley was one of Eigner’s early correspondents and supporters; his Divers Press published Eigner’s first chapbook, From the Sustaining Air, in 1953. In this letter, Eigner describes his impressions of the book and his time at a summer camp for people with disabilities in the Catskill Mountains. (Robert Creeley Papers, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries) Saturday August 29th 1953 Dear Bob, My thing urrived 2nd Tuesday of my sojourn (Mother put plastic couvre on same & was delighted but it’s not—how cd it?—going around th neighborhood; enclosed moulah fer 30 (thirty) copies, if available, 1/2 of wich we’ll try to remit ourselves on, and dad wants to know, he says to do so, if, it wd be economical to order em out of a large bundle in NYC); I returned Sunday night (I’m still up in the air considerably); yrs and Paul’s got here Tuesday—and contact 8 Wednesday—(Divers bklist in each copy, some great efficient? under-the-counter? handling.). Hot hot weather today. By far my longest absence in 13 yrs (1/2 my life at present) and the one in which i’ve bn most free to circulate, in a sheer physical sense of acreage covered daily on foot—I push the chair by my feet, etc—and in a rather mental sense, there being no goals or important schedules, as formerly there had been schooling or therapy. (I even got my fingers burnt, like they say—“again”—a little. etc.) On getting home—and a narrow place, after all, the 5 rooms I live in—everything seemed dead and empty, out of contact, etc, and in a weird unattached light, like another place in NY, Connecticutt o Mass. (say the Western part, say Springfield, the road near Worcester, or the overnight cabins in Hyde Park which i on 2nd look realized was at a rural street-corner); and my own bed I kept thinking of as more familiar than the one at camp was growing, but very strange it turned out. And the book, the book,—a book is smaller than a storage tank, a cow, etc. But yet, when it comes to that, it seemed at most moments rather big, and bigger than expected, 16 pages being so little as part of a great tome (the Bible?)—and, at that, it’s not pocket-size. Brief-case! Only, the words themselves, smaller lettering than the typewriter, anyway, seemed to just pass over and not be much. It actually took



LE to Robert Creeley 221

a couple of days to get bkish again (tho i carried WCW around up there—and to take in the object of the radio! Fine text, arrangement, clear (I don’t know how to cite—one gd thing is that the title occasionally is rather out of the way of the right), title-page, And the cover. I dunno as to the non-objective much, and seen as live candleabra or bleeding wood it has the gruesome about it, like Poe, or the bare (or rigorous or something) abstract, but looking closely, all the lines, top middle and bottom, and when looked at from ten paces the sustaining i tht was another line. Theres the 2 capital letters, and from there the other letterng. . . Curves. from (V) Of course i dont know exactly what to think. Yr cover more squashed—riotous. Better than those musical dashes on le fou. As for the texts, far be me today to compare the texts. So far, the carnival hits me; then, sort of, method of actuality .. Title poem i focus more on now. Very good. More fragmentary, or briefer, or epigrammatic (which really brushes them.) than Fou And (even) less—golden! So, i bn lookin a yr 1st bk, of only last year (Gad!). Mobiles, still life; the formula (dry) was the heart. Fixer of Chang but the Moon is Strange: And then the “stare” in actuality ? Etc. Something how each bk is different; sizes of Mercedes & Futura? And who signed my name? Rene (And who yrs?) Painter for a Forgery. Now, I cant autograph it. Ou etait “Brugm.” (He too garrulous? O for a bibliograhy. I havent got to proensa much. The lines as yet don’t seem to “hold” each other, much. Now, ahem, ditto for Bible Is Greek, perhaps, or, er, i don’t quite focus it yet. Maybe fete cd’ve gone after it at that, exc that not quite enough room for it, I calculate. It might’ve fitted in under “Road-Side” But wd like to revise the thing at that (as, “the cheeks blew” is weak, and shd at least come in way on the right), if possible. Or I may send it to Souster in a while. Then, you cant tell abt things too much. As, de limits, now, seems to get ornery, so to speak, after 1st 7 lines, and, especially, whiney in the last 4 stanzas. And noise grimaced, the breathlessness has its panting aspects (but it may be something) And i cant recall what “beside it” was supposed to be. It? It? And “none moving away” was something big. I guess I’ll have to approach it without its antecedent event & c. This is experience! What a life up in the motagnes there, and how extrovert I gradually turned, not in the busy-body sense or anything, though. In a way it was loafing, dull, and in a way a 2-wk long Party—the gathering at night, etc, and childish—but it was

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really rubbing elbows and not being too deliberately pointed, immediately, with anyone. And they were stimulating, you didnt care for anyone’s ignorance, but their peculiarities, but you said things and let things go at that. Rather. I acquired a repute for genius or something but was allowed to inveigle against that. Though you realized how it wd be living off in the winter, separately with any one of them. It was a lark. The perplexing thing about it is, that it seems not of much (or “real”) use to stay in the summer, lets say, like that, 2 weeks rather than one week. Well, so what? I dunno. The end comes suddenly in any case. I saw my first basketball game—a real tramping sport—was the minor part of a softball batter (crazy), and one morning went in the lake, sitting on the bottom with my back at the bow bench. Then they got up this bowling one night a week, in which, anyway, the pinboys or girls ran those balls back shockingly, reverberating, ow! They got me to try, but the holes stuck to my joints and the smaller balls without holes were to big to grasp. One spastic put ball on the floor, crouched behind it (or almost over it), pushed, always feebly, and stooped there intently motioning it on like a hen who’d laid an egg, while it wd clack slowly as over railroad ties, prolonged inch by inch, going into the gutter, but once, or maybe twice or so, he got a strike. All cripples, and other citizens, shd at least go to Harvard, and so forth. All those accents, at least of few of them. Midwestern girl—counsellor fr Kansas city. And Brooklynese girl—soft natural speech, the radio really exaggerating it but only in a way, you wondered how she cd say everything like that. And all sorts of characters, etc, very rendolent of themselves and others. I wrote a little skit which was called for, to fit in with a Winter Eve schedule. Bringing the mts indoors, etc. A one-piece plot, but with a few little ideas around it. They come on, Brooklynite, Philadelphian, New Yorker, and idea was to have them say (but I was elliptic abt it), “Is this Mt Hunter?” “No, Mt Hunter.” “No, Mt. Hunter.” Then they stumbled over something they made into skis, which were crutches, and in reality supposed to be logs of the roof, so when the staff arrived next spring they found a 6 inch snow on the floor. The actors were to extemporize, I expected them to improve what I’d written, i didnt care what they did, of course, I had just developed the full-page thing by writing out the speeches; and this other guy recruited the cast and copied out cues. But of course the cast turned out to be spastics etc, not the counsellors I’d envisioned, except the Brooklyn girl who was a customer instead of counsellor, it turned out, and told me with some heat she was from Queens (it’s still Brklynese; her sicknesse ,



LE to Robert Creeley 223

i later learned, making her excitable). And they were better characters than actors, and just tried the speeches. Of course. Well, that thing i did without awkwardnes, i had the talk right in front of me, etc., but i made up lines. Very short piece. But it’s nice if you can do it, if only you can keep doing it. One 21-yr old, a cock strutting round like a stove-pipe etc, jerking limbs, bent on having a counsellor—particular 1, i mean—marry him. Wdnt get out o bed 1 morning, etc. He says: For a complete life dont u think there has to be 2. Etc. Well, i say, nobody has a complete life; etc. If thats not true, why do they write so many songs, abt it? My gosh. Etc. I says, Only one thing, Its got nothing to with the stars. But he was a little beyond that,. Later on therell b time for looking at them. First you gotta take care o yrself .. Nice to come up against these things now. All i bn doing the past 10 days is spewing lines i dont see go together much. Maybe they do. I don’t know. Larry I think u hit more nails in contact 8 than E Pound there.

L E T O PA U L B L A C K B U R N ∙ 0 5 / 0 6 / 5 4

Eigner was an attentive reader of Cid Corman’s Origin, and he published his early work in that journal alongside Blackburn, Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. This letter relays his thoughts about reading the journal and the work associated with it. (Paul Blackburn Papers, Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego) 23 Bates Road, Swampscott, Mass.

Thursday deja May 6th 54

Dear Paul, I look, but cant believe its practically a full month s ith yr letter. (Rash real slower, perhaps, at that, right now kicking up again, and spread a little, on fingers—scary and absorbing) Anyway tht I’d wait till i finished the copy—towards the end overestimated final no of pp—at one stretch—result 69— then tht I’d wait till i saw Cid and Ferrini up at Gloucester last Sunday, the 2nd, where he told me you had left day before. So. Delivered the goods, by the way, having just finished typing the Monday and fixing errata Saturday, That type job took 5–6 wks o someth. Gd and-or hilarious time had by all i gues. Looking back, at the same time, goofily, terribly literary. Or. Seem i repeated what i sd in letters mostly. not that i expected business meeting exactly. Or did I? I grow unfamiliar. The world becomes very queer, for me My guiding bipeds Very odd that origgin shd constantly conclude, yr after yohr, as the best mag. Tho it seems. F doing very well indeed, with the n n e r m o s t i l a a n d t i m e o and house of time, which i havent much yet, only got it sunday there. But Timeo quiet and unshouting enough (rather opposite to Olson in this respect), and something to put as a little different from Wms’ amazing flow, which like anything when it really gets up there, as in paterson, gets sort of absolute. Such a problem of getting stuck, or merely (and vice versa, problem of flow, the endless, finite-vs-infinite again), on any piece of language. And when you put 2 and 2 together you always leave out the other numbers, so there is something else again. But you dont seem to be as much in the same boat (this a very infinitessimal section in a way) .. Not I. I dont know where I am.—others More or Less do?? I think i look at you from an odd straight angle at that, i feel even The Poisoned



LE to Paul Blackburn 225

Cat as a formal thing, maybe just this formal clarity, tho i can hardly say that of the “wyf ” piece, and there seems to be this bleach (ble) quality. Well, very queer association, or i dont know. At first, with me, these things are labels, or even criticisms, then, the stuff Something to Consider?? Processes of adjustment. Shd analyse, at least somewhat, as, in the cat, sound-connections (as purple tongue, licking (my) fingers, paws, . . . pain). Tho sound-connection, to be specific here, doesnt do it (tho may reinforce whateve is up), being unpatterned, as i see: then, regularity of indntation.? (Next to last line “me” a greatly placed variant, or shd i say variable.) Or rather, and i now gather so from “cake and knife to divide it”, a sum of various, or sundry, repetitions. Which, elements of patterns, do not add up to pattern, but some sense of it, or theres an Element of pattern in the whole, while at the same time the lines etc are flexible etc and discourse etc ? I wonder if this is true. So these elements of patterns get you into very nice distinct turns etc. I see Wms using quite a schemata, triplet, lately, though you wdnt think such could ever get as much as the tremendous rescources of say, paterson, and that poem gets more than Stevens ever has, perhaps. That triplet a real strict affair, at that, cf ’d to what you do. Now i wonder if p 96 of paterson (Bk ii, sec 3) was W’s 1st use of it. It’s great there, esp in “With evening love wakens”, which is real Dantesque. (You think Rexroth’s actual rendition from Paradiso, there, in dragon and unicorn, is great until you see this) Rexroth a really diffrunt story, i guess ) “Waters of the future”: recurrence (stoppage? Passaic Falls?); also that business about levels, succeeding in reach, but not getting stuck. And potential being act, dissipated after a point (multiple seed—Wms) Hm. Funny thing abt that, in those lines ther seems t be another rock edge on the side. I.E., where else can the flow be exc to the future. Anyway you never can say, theoretically or whatever, when/ where the potential is actual enough or, also, enough to be actual. (On level of personal choice, what about walking round the block? but very widely applicable.) But we arent left considering how to run, absolutely or even primarily, even tho it gets perplexing in particular. As i can tell its better to sit in here reading and dabbling etc than to watch Jackie Gleason, tho i cdnt say today particularly, let alone Senator McCarthy. Well, a quantum theory of value and work? But you speak of levels in a theory of poetry. Not in particular, ok? But a man shdnt keep writing, or try to, ipso, but only if he feels something, enough. Really, that is. ? ?

Insult!! ? Well, thats another problem. Meaning.

I can, at that, remember, very easily, being wishy-washy inside etc, etc. (tho never insulted), and pride (another perplexity and it keeps on, quite variously,

LE to Paul Blackburn

226

and will, a distinctly momentary sort of impression, or happiness, or whatever). Tho maybe ten yrs ago, at that, the wash. Tho i cdnt say if I’m IMpervious. As to that, maybe everybody is rather deliciously balanced, delicate fabric: last line of Wdsworth’s intimations, pd close to tears. Or, no. Me, i can get rattled, of course, and never really know what turn i’ll take, am of course the original caterpilar, and have some compulsions besies. (Most Natural THing in the World, sd the Dr to the unmarried girl in the radio skit) For 1 thing if i am too concious of the necessity or whatever of silence i’ll burst out—wich acc to my onderstanding is a common character. Otherwise I’ll kp a muscle going. Then when i get an itch after 9 or so yrs they say it must be nerves. Well, mysterious. Eczema, allergy. Still mysterious. The behavior. Ow. (O yes, amazing what degrees you go down through avec sentimentality. Traces of it still, perhaps? Response I dont mind.) Corman and the woes of Bob Creeley. Telling the latest items So today comes NMQ with an ad in it for black mt review Gee whiz. Well, i hope you find some fun there in Mallorca

Good luck

to Everybody

as the saw sd

Larry O i got a copy of #11 and like yrs, think maybe yr best .. Which is crazy perhaps, but anyway, nice and spacious. Provencal coming up pretty well, someday taught in U.S.? Anyway Cid said Lekakis dances, i think.

LE TO JANET EIGNER ∙ 07/02/63–07/07/63

In this letter, Eigner responds to a query from his sister-in-law, who was writing a paper on his poetry for a university course (as he tells Levertov in the following letter). Eigner’s extensive reply is one of the earliest explanations of his poetic practice. (Larry Eigner Papers, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)

July 2 63

Dear Janet.. Thats fine, or anyway to some extent, whatever that is, and as i mayve said (you asked about work back there—which indeed was a formidable idea some yrs ago), not only do i go from pillar to post nowadays but other way rnd too, so that nothing (much—i do get fed up w Wagon Train, et al., or shd it be just Winston Salem, every night, Rheigold beer et al) i mean now that I’m finally scared at the thought of going into a (big) library,—collectig material, say (I really used to want to keep up with James Jones and I “want” to read A—) I certainly let the kids thr. the fr.. door with less indecision oh yeh, i have it, nothing is an imposition, much. And, of course, (well, hm i just remembr, Levertov [*]), how could i suggest Olson who knows California Indian, and Linear B (from Crete), and god knows what else, and makes use of them. or even Creeley (or Creeley,,,i dont know i told you i couldnt understand) I’m apt to feel goofy (like mad, etc.)—but thats with anything. Only drawback, really, i can see, is y.. married name? Ah well..then theres Eddie Eigner of course. No special trouble i guess that a poet and senior (?) (Jack Lorts by name), did a theme on me likewise—“..choose a contemporary poet” i far from hinting i can think of something better (yow) this is exact, tho i suspect quite (?) “unnecessary” jack e lorts, at some college in california, did a theme on me in December 61. I’m sending it it i guess, though there was the caterpilar -anyway you be decisive, now,; also, joe saw it just before going West, and “solvd” a point lorts couldnt quite find a reason for (and lorts had writtn Corman and quotes the comment he rec’d) Better to repeat, often, than hunt or even scan—dont know wh I’ll look at y..r lettre here rirht beside again oops ah well. How much criticism has helped me theorize (on me), past couple yrs, i dont know, but some adverse has .. like, 1st

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off (?), this dutch poet joe met and who really had found my lacunas et al impalatable evidently (argued, wanted and was going to tr..and print in dutch mag, 2 yrs ago - hey, not so long) full of holes, barbed, did he say? and i cdnt see the objection, but then in this free-for-all poet & critic out of Purdue somebody sd my poem (in 1st issue) tended (1.) to slide off the page and 2 she got lost in my forest of gaps, etc—and that i saw, or (1) anyway. Or anyway i’m easily distracted and piling up on me by then (while before 21 say even before looking at a page i was enthusiastic. avid of course) Anyway, now the words themselves, at that, have seemed good, at other times so-so, or—by now of crse, i cant figure em out, more or less. Advantage and disadvantage to everything, at different times..#Good stuff close-up. But—to get to my hindsight—I suppose, imagine there might be, some imaginary axis (as they say, at least [penciled note over “at least”]), one end of the log having the great I am thou and the other the still small voice, the latter end being the one I hover abot, i mean literally, understatement and so forth I’ve gone along giving e v e r t h i n g the benefits of doubts at that (hence, partly. the indecision, and by this time coming out my ears, and mystification: e.g., what might be behind that pome or other piece—no matter how much i gt to it, in fact, so anything seems more or less surfacy, which may be differet from th hermetic i mention in that essay in Kulchur #10 or just what to do with a thing now? or what to do? Well, bareness has been bothersome and otherwise. Lack of imagination, trees you just stare at -and of course i start from scratch a good deal, get sidetracked etc., always kind of shallow, fall for covers . . . (I really was precarious before this operation, sometimes . . . anyway felt jinxed and best i cd do was forget - when we’d have an argument here - other than overtly backing down - now driving home cerainly or sticking by myself now I’m too grouchy, am not a meliorist, hardly give a thought to the Congo,,, or dog bark, a familiar thing In a rush too..) Anyway, also, this understatement like keeping things at short range—like for instance i got to typing reliably and with some speed—mostly putting thumb dwn on space-bar at each stroke not lifting hand then—whereas I’d never learn to pick apples with a pole - the short-range (or maybe just small radius .. o yes) So i guess it is I come to ellipsis or suppressing or elision (slurring) of words; and an enjambment, splicing, may be partly the same thing (abut butt butt), like telescoped words and slurred words. Easy on the tongue, into thought or something. There should be a reconcilement with lots of things—if good enough anyway. [typed in margin: July 3] (So a further thought, myself again, avoidance of tongue-twisters, lucky for me, like generally, no good for me to try to get too collected, I do just as



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well not reaing long novels, I guess, though too bad etc. While in passive relaxation you dont do much, though its valuable more than sleep,,, ) I was really trying of course, especially from as soon as i got through wanting to be cop or fireman or junk collector, all through school, (being good to myself during high-school summers baseball, today, tomorrow, ..yes, waiting for outcomes, as well as attaching myself), and the 7 correspondence crses (U. de Chi) in one of which i asked, what is, might be, free verse, ‡in my usual honest-to-god puzzlement‡ -course, Versification - and reply was, “just cut-up prose,” (which i had feared ..), or, “I dont know” (was it?) I really dint do a thing, actually, till a short while after Corman started on me, as i say in N.Am.P..p 436 there..Richie was in kitchen and came on C C ending his 1st (or maybe 2nd) brdcast, called me, or brt me in. it was in his junior (’49), just before Corman appeared, that Richie bought a Collected . . . e e cummings, so crazy, whacky, as a rule, though “Billy the Kid” (and others in the Untermeyer school/college anthology Modern Am .. Poets—which Richie bought as a frehmn?) now the cummings is in S Fr) comes on right off. I’d been very hidebound, and plodding, diligent .. As i started out to say, from about 7 to 11 i set out to overtake Longfellow, and i really took seriously the advice of an elderly poetess named Mrs Bjorkman ‡‡ very esoteric, you know, post-graduate name, the spelling anyway ‡‡ that blank verse is only for a Master .. you shd have many yrs of rhyme and whatnot behind you to try.* [at bottom of page: *And I wanted to make the S E Post .. Greetg Crds..Halmrk cd do me now—not appealg tht, wholly—a primitive.] Paragraph, a mysterious entity (pretty certainly other than my giving it the benefit of the doubt, in addition to bf) As a chapter still is, say. Commas,, periods. semicolons Well, cummings was p d curious. A little too much so, in fact, only C C ’s opining that he was a bit too cutish at times put my mind at enough ease, so that from Cu and maybe in a couple months more W C W (and Creeley? ..) I saw abt dropping what is superfluous punctuation, i observed elegantly to myself (et al) that a comma was like the little boy who cried wolf, if you dont use it as a regular thing (a rule , a priori must ..), then if and when you do use it, theres more to it, it’s more inevitable, i guess, like less superfluous, and I had the notion on beginning to write like this clique or whatever, of working my way through this “forest of possibilities” Hard to say ‡in understatement anyway‡ what maximum (or otherwise) of effort, how often, but, it does look like, as Carlos Williams said, “a poem is a machine made of words”, and punctuation seems part of a pome (on the page -otherwise its scriptoral matter that tries to indicate speech elements other than words - Hopkins tried to utilize his penmanship, I guess ‡tho as you may imagine, I havent got to Hopkins much ..‡, anyway it was partly this openness as to punctuation that led

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to good words and so forth. Which of crse might get you to “picture poems” etc, though i guess thats 1 ting yr class wdnt have time for any symposium on. And I prefer Yeats! Another question is whether a modest little lacuna (gap), instead of a ,.,** [at bottom of page: ** despite besides the economy] constitutes “just” turning convention inside out; but who cares? But there being this rapid turnover, faster and faster, the boy scout campfire gets to be the Theatre of the absurd? B’way is even farther from Aeschylus ‡at times anyway?‡ Stronger you are the longer you keep mining, though. See this long poem, “On Seeing On My Eyes” by this Jackson Mac Low (he snt this and asked for stuff for a mag. aus Wiedbaden, Fluxus)—Blue Yak Bookshop was run by La Monte Young. who’s in Kulchur #10. Musique Concre etc. Excessive thinking abt therapy, and/or computers taking over /.. ? Brecht and Zen JL [July 4] is familiar with, no, “Zen and Kegan Buddhism . . . I Ching .. Mallarme” This quote from nomad #10–11 (NY issue),, p 71, where besides this expostulation J L hath Instructions to assemble your own verse (“Take a row of 8 digits ‡in a book of numbers, say Tel. bk‡. . . Take the 1st 4 digits as the number ‡of dictionary‡ . . . “ ‡‡The time some people have‡‡ and as well he has some poems with solid lines twixt syllables to indicate exact lengths of pauses - which maybe to agree with you would get in touch with Drama Workshop (?). though anyway hes a music composer too, acquaintance of John Cage .. Yeow. ‡A sense of pause I have an idea theory might do me no good ‡‡ The times-worlds of Stravinsky, say. (I cant keep time.) On and on Spontaneous digressions, the above, but, lacuna became punctuation devices different from commas, say, which connect, lead on, are elisive rather like apostrophe, besides being a stop, a lacuna seem part way between , and . semi-colon somewhere no doubt, by other people. A Joel Oppenheimer keeps using the virgule, the stroke (/), instead of apostrophe—elsewhere the stroke is used other ways. Style custom old story change Coordination between typing and mind’s voice. Accuracy by spontaneity all right, I have an idea that other people might really be overdoing it, because they get to 5th base - everything become very professional. Kerouac is keeping up with James Jones, with Spontaneous Prose . . . Well, i hardly worry any more if I stay away from the machine 6 wks Anyway, JK in the slot. Me too, in that i havent thrown anything out. . . [5th] Lacuna sometimes felt as tension, yes, or less elisive than . Or then comes lacuna (Tempo, speeds, distance between words and phrases. Indentations whatever else they may be are partial turns, not going all the way back, and though even i have



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sometimes gone back farther left than my 1st line, I’ve thought it might be true enough that my rightward bent, besides being slapdash and ad lib, is due to a feeling that there was always a past, same as this other cause for the sotto voce especially at the opening (lower case and indent too, again), a wariness—of course some things begin with a cap. letter, unforced)—of the implication that this is the Beginning (of Words, say) Speech going on before (and after) the poem, which is a slice of speech. So, this rightward bent of mine, out of a doubt that x is a Beginning, I mean a beginning (Which is maybe like Chinese if not Japanese scrolls—dont know, anyway forget o yes besides th mention by Gary Snyder of a work-in-progress “Mountain and Rivers without End” on p. 421 of N Am Potry he speaks of it in a letter to Corman C publishes along with excerpts, portions therefrom, i think i recall, in # of current O r i g i n featuring Snyder—one of the 1st 5 issues.) A reason why I like to make exact transcripts of my original ms or ts (unless i do see an improvement) came to me last night: The “photographic” memory which i did have once, maybe still do—i neber haf any trouble spelling, wd always just visualize the word (have any of the psychologists ventured that gestalt is mainly done through the eyes (well, there are sound patterns et al too) )—unusual for me, at that, a snap subject. Especially why, when i delete 1st word (suppress, art.. conj. . . .) from a line I feel pretty strongly against pushing 2nd word leftward, (3rd wrd etc) accordingly, even if the line has bn indented already, which is often as not ‡at least‡ A fixation of lay-out so to speak, maybe as a letting stand of the place where the suppressed word was as well. Then too, its happened often enough that something will appear in print and I won’t care for it, then ’ll see it in typescript again and it will come back—while sometimes it come back without reference to ts, and of course at other times nothing seems like much anyway, after all, nobody’s books, etc. But, as to that, being not such an eager beaver now, quietness, including that of blank space on a page, isnt so puzzling now, hardly so—or, that is, i appreciate it. Short “little” pomes too. And now friend Corman has bn more or less Japanese for a few years. ‡Felenghetti has at least 1 haiku in Poor Old Tired Horse, a sheet aus Edinburgh #3 ibid me, too. “ Sawmill Haiku An ancient frog in an ancient outhouse Flop! ” —which i “got” just now, suddenly before copying. ‡ Becoming unafraid of number per se. While long poems i have less and less guts to go through—indeed i read Harpers more, et al. . . . Short things I am more equipped for, of course. But times certainly are various. The poem brink (circa

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#40 in Eyes,) I did all in pencil,, dow on the walk in front of next dor—with this tray i have across the chair .. I seem to recall my spacing being called “unique” by some, including Olson. It therefore seems an odd word. Prose I’ve tried. (sometimes its pretty enigmatic why it shd get published also, so much more or less borderline poetry, now and again—where is the line? so it goes) More evidently than with the verse, i had this thing where i was only able to start by some way of coming up under, thus to start with the name of a character seem terribly stilted Pretense or whatever, of beginng. (Other than naming itself, since i tried by myself or some other real person Attempt at fiction, ha! Maybe it can be said you get self-conscious by it) “See what comes .. try a note anyway” If the “note”—which i did my best to get in shape right there of course—I was unable to keep up ..i was never able to make use of, or shuffle with others, like bks sd. Hence long, muttering sentences with few stops, Also I guess as the only way really for me to organize (and select material. An i doan know when Kerouac started but Mitchell Goodman* [*Levertov is married to MG A 1st novel in 61, The End of It (Horizon Press). I liked it; but maybe too crisp, etc. I dont know..] (in ’59 or so) tol me thats the only way really you can write a novel, go right through. Oh yes, right: old story: dont sit dwn to write til you got things fairly well in mind. [In left margin: Philosophy lets see then Maybe Go slow as you can without getting stuck. Never was so coherent as when i happened to get imitating Kennedy, et seqq.] Creeley as well as Corman wrote me much (Bob way over head in letters et al, and Olson and Pound in essays and long poems, like greek, a beautiful tongue, thogh who knows th meaning. Cid and Bob gave me samples of stff I wrote, and I have echoed. [In left margin: 2 or 3 lines echo Dante Lorca..] [The following postscripts were typed on stationery from the Dartmouth Alumni Fund; Eigner’s father was a treasurer for the group at one time.]

July 5

Dear Janet ps On looking over your questions I guess i havent even gone too far afield at that although one thing led to another and it certainly looked a mess at various pnts. Sometimes now i forget what I was going to say a minut before—or always was so, to some extent; there are various lines. Some breaks are a matter of hours, of course. Some new thoughts about myself and I guess other things came up in writing. Which is my usual manner. “Day unto day / uttereth . . . ” Though



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what the hell? Only the best thing is to let them keep comin through the door if you can A couple of things still remaing: This morning an air-mail note was sent off to Richard asking him if he might get copies made of a “review” and a poem “for Larry Eigner” (by Loewihsoh—the one in the Anthology) that you could have, before he relays this mimeo mag in which it is (it went broke and folded after #1, after coming to me out of the blue) to friend Arthur McFarland (Friendship, Me.) If hes already sent it, i can write McFarland; though maybe that can wait, maybe not too relevent to yr course (analysis? critique? or whatever)—for kicks. I clean forgot I had sent him the rejection slip I got from New Directions, but , as I told him you wanted commentaries, he might send that anyway (I’ll try to check on this if ma-pa get him on the phone sunday, the 7th, his birthday) You need documents? Public prints? In this rejection slip, besides what might be booby . . . ‡stuff i was telling Joe at supper before you left‡, James Laughlin says I seem pretty Japanese, “though in your own .. ‡?‡ . . . way” I think Levertov has said this too (though not explicitly in her introduction to On My Eyes—done at the instigation of J Wms), perhaps a couple others. This a few yrs back. So all right, these spurts I have come to of 3 lines, or 2 or whatever besides the real chips # [#In WCW the moments lead on, having arows run so to spk, “bent towards some flashing scene,” rangy, continual.] its encouraging to put down under the idea of a japanese thing (for a combination that turned last sept. or so, see enclosed photostat - not the primate thing, which is rather dubious. What might well be fragmnt otherwise. (In the new O r i g i n #8 is an essay on B a s h o in which the tanka, haiku, or whatever it is, is termed “single breath run” Diane Hoff borrowed my #8 6 wks ago, of her own volition, its still away.. If you’d like to consult it, and its available, you might also look up #3, in which is an almost theatrical production of a Noh play, my god! (Yashima) first Noh I’ve read; and #6, which has a poem of mine referring in 2 of the lines to this play) There are no signs that M L Rosenthal (poetry ed. of Nation) talks of me in his recent book (!) but a kid who grew up next door to Uncle Louis Eigner and who’s been an English instructor at U of Manchester, England, wrote me once he met Rosenthal, who, on Arnold Goldman, this neighbor, asking abt me, sd I dont write poems, just poetry: Goldman sd he replied maybe this was ok. (Levertov substituted for Ro during his leave from Natio.) And 2 months ago Goldman wrote that Malcolm Bradbury, in the Manchester Guardian, mourning the demise of a little mag. said 1 poem by me justified its existence.) Well, maybe I’ve written too much, but i guess you can organize? Maybe you

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shdnt let this theme by Lorts get too much in your eye? But you be decisive That response WCW gave when Creeley sent him the booklet he put me up to, quoted in blurb on my eyes - i cdnt feel i was “oblivious to the world”, so C C sd wcw kps having diff. ens thusiass.irue the. he wrote many introductions . . . apptrciations,,, ok Larry

Janet Went overboard with the pencil. I should have quit. Never mind trying to read pencil note(s) in the margins of this letter. But concerning Japanese and also the comment of M L Rosenthal elicited at U of Manchester by Uncle Looie’s neighbor, that I write poetry but not poems, I’ve always been glad to add (and insert) when such codas, prolongations, seemed to work, work ok. “If music be the food of love, play on” Continuations and so forth. (beginning of Twelfth Night, at that play dealing in explorations or otherwise, mistaken selves ) How to stop or when -which might it be? If not both. This brings to mind Lectures given at Black Mtn College by Olson (I have especially unmanageable photostats on left/right curly paper), which may have something to do with this. . . who knows? It’s based on Whitehead ‡ “an Aquin‡as‡, this man, .. ” synthesizer, like Aquinas), something in re Rimbaud, and Keats’ “negative capability” - “that is, when a man is in doubts” - opposite to fanatic, though in some degree this must be preaching Doubt, on acct of the way of the world, if you take up something there you go (a sailboat is an enigma) Zen Wren All circles are wide and small. The passivity of that athletete, Keats. For last few days Iv meant to ask, If you come up with any notes in your course on how to put 2ff pages together (W Wms Paterson especially), I’d like to look at them hoping I get a chance to. Well i do know of certain books about him One book of essays by a nun (cant recall her name), studies of c h a n g e dynamism (maybe transitions), in Cantos, Paterson But I’ve had explication of a lot of things now Olson. My god. But details still curious. A whole issue of Perspectives U S A (a big international thing connected with Ford Foundation) was devoted maybe 9 yrs ago to studies, critiqus, of P a t e r s o n Theres a sort of astounding—and youngish? poet Robt Kelly. Like, maybe half of one of these new O r g n s . . . #5 (?) is one poem of his.



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Theres also a Jack Hirschman I’ve seen (some of him here), doing it thick sort of like Hart Crane. Creeley, in a rvw, mentions the thickness, and goes for it. I too. Yeh, quantities of qualities Now Sunday Without consulting folks I thought mailing this yesterday wd be the thing. But got message to Richie last night. Went rummaging this morning for a note where CC draws diif.s btwn me and Stevens ‡not of course to imply I’m as much on the ball), cant find it, but others w.passages somewhat responsible for my hindsight, I guess - and varying opinins too . . . all right. Larry ‡From July 24 to August 16, 1963 the University of B‡rit‡ C‡olumbia‡ ‡at Vancouver‡ will offer . . . a credit course in poetry writing an Extension Department non-credit course in contemporary poetry a series of Four Friday Readings .. Creeley R.. Duncan . Ginsberg, . . . Olso, . . . Levertov”‡—tish #18 p. 14 Another thing I just missed saying at the start: Consecutive lines which are flush bother me, and then in print, after, might be less easily raised off the page [Next to the paragraph beginning “Lacuna sometimes” Eigner has indicated the date in the margin (5th ). A wider left margin begins next to this paragraph, which continues through the next page, and the following note is typed in the margin.] Cummings here quite explicitly; the typography right off—havent looked at him in 12 yrs. Heard him give Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard a few years back. Great voice, as powerful and much more versatile than Dylan Thomas, who, incidentally, is kind of suspect among my “friends” (v. Paul Blackburn—why the gripes particularly?—in Kulchur #10) Recently i caught one point, I think, “The old windbag, dying of stitches,” Another leonine guy by now, I guess, as has bn said, is Irving Layton of Canada. Which suddenly—my mood of chaos changing—is rather more wonderful than anything else, considering Alan Ginsburg in “Sunflower Sutra” the First American Lyon (?), the differences being just curious, or fun, if I dont get scared by their multitudes. Of course, how come Whitman is real different from Mario Lanza - or different enough, say? Kerouac a hare maybe? no lion anyway. Like my hare i imagine. (Richie said he read On The Road I just tried September in the Railroad Earth 1st few paes—hard to follow, and made me self-conscious, the prose effort, as many things do—or did )

LE TO DENISE LEVERTOV ∙ 10/15/63–10/18/63

Another early supporter of Eigner’s work, Levertov helped assemble his first major collection, On My Eyes (Jargon, 1960), and wrote an introductory note for it. In this letter, Eigner describes the effects of an operation he had to calm muscle spasms on his left side and the efforts it takes to use his typewriter. (Denise Levertov Papers, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries) 23 Bates Road

Swampscott, Mass.

Oct 15, 1963

Tuesday

Dear Denise I heard the tape of your m i t reading 9 days ago, Sunday the 7th, and got some good bangs out of it (what is just-like you know anything of Henry Flynt? Sent me his “press release” asking for comment, I said, How?, he sent an excerpt from a bk, ms, i lost it, found and lost again, havent read it or letter with it [in left margin: just found! so have read it, Wednsday—ugh!]—like a cat dragging things around in an ice-floe—while as well i bn executing these ideas that have kept coming, like standing up a cardboard with neither clearance nor torque in a drawer so things no longer gravitate to the back but instead stand vertical, acute and even horizontal) Hearing you again was great (7–8 pm) since myself for a change I managed or whatever to shake off Franciscans at the Boars Head ‡which are quite a few people,—in the family—and things‡ “Silence surrounds the facts” for instance and for example “Rainwalkers” came alive o , whereas before, being round and fully packed it was a winfall, a thing of clarity to the point of hardness, to be passed through for the sake of coping with other poems - which is a sad twist I give, a large part of the time, to Duncan’s “ability to respond . . . ” I sent some things to E 15th Street in May, so it bounced back, and subsequently I sought your address in Lawry (it was unknown there what in Maine wd be sufficient . . . ) and later of Geo Bowering, when he wrote me from Vancouver of the activities there. Now James Laughlin, I have your addresses from. (Impulsively, last December I submitted a collection to him, because, really, of Corso, though I just cant get to him, though at the last minute the opus seemed to sag badly— in the latter part, which I had sent to City Lights before, in August (first, major, portion was at Wesleyan U.P. the former half of ’62). [In left margin: Wednsday] Laughlin wrot you were in Temple right now and that that was a sufficient



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address, “Temple” I suppose anyway it wd be relayed to Greenich Street, this note would. I just had the idea a couple wks ago of, if possible, if the arrangements could be made, offering people who ask after / want On My Eyes a photostat of On My Eyes,—one by one, as the orders come in—rather than turn them away, do nothing—at a little profit, token profit, to my father, say ‡and inducement‡ , who retired in June, being 70, etc. Two copies left here, besides my own (fly-leaf bearing the signature of an aphasic former musician October 62 in ward next to mine, the book missing overnight and a couple of days thereafter!) Maybe you still have the typescript (carbon) of On My Eyes and if and when you lay hand on it could send it back here. I sent mine to Sanesi in Milan—in lieu of the book as Cid suggested - together with the othe mss, all in one pack. No hurry about it, though, and photostating from copy itself may not be any harder as I have for instance anyway one cousin who works a Transitron, who has a copy (his son—courtesy of mama) and to whom I’ve spoken. (A number of other relatives and the dentist, who’s bn so kind to me . . . ) (Whenever J Wms’ name is mentioned Mama hollers.) I better write Wms I guess, but after arrangements are made, hell . . . and Callahan, though mother will block photostating the photographs - if anybody wants them (my will is pretty inchoate of course, its hardly ever bn nursed, only led to water), most likely, unless my cousin jumps the gun (on me, perhaps, as well as her). No magazine or book has ever been sent for light-heartedly or gaily, or left around (while i cd certainly go down the drugstore and buy 20 at once)—which may be partly why I feel blear-eyed and now overloaded, in quite a dither. Well, ok, onward. But thoughts of sending stuf here or there in series or not - and one week Bowering says he wants to start a thing in Calgary, then theres a Ronald Kaplan in N.J.—but i still have fits as well as like always, though as a result I’ve written pretty sourly to Hanna, besides the Webbs. A million blind dates, or 3, or 2, or 1. The face of Sasskia, you know. . . Not, actually Chaos is come again . . . But 1 thing, anyway, i might see to, some, On . . . Eyes still seems good, at least 1/2 the time i take a look at it. And i keep pelting away whatever for instance the enclosed, particularly the prose ‡March, April, May‡ which looks more or less vicious, and is, more or less, grenades in my guts --the pins having bn pulled by the clothe-the-animals march, which appears not to have bn a hoax after all ‡a p r o n s on cows for cry eye—the inteviewee 2 wks ago did not realize it wd make the cows kind of attractive to the milkmen, I hope Rochelle Owens, Rothenberg, and Living Theatre know what everybody is doing since etc i dont) And that has bangs too, and so I am distracted, although after hearing you that Sunday I felt wrongheaded indeed . Josh White Grenades I dont know what Sauvage heh heh Various sides of coins like G B S , say, but hamburgers raw (Brecht) Turn

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the other cheek ‡for as long as it please . . . ‡ and drive the money-changers out of the Temple [In left margin: Thrsday] Chance operations (not only Mac Low is unsettling) Comin out my ears so much and that out of sight is out of mind. Huf puff. Abt 560 uncollected verse pieces ‡Arthur has copies and has made out a list‡ and I’m more and more reluctant to be Lot’s Wife or even Orpheus, (and the Ei. . . ’s of Massachusetts being an ugly bunch after all—incompetent, without any tradition or whatever to look at this, therefore insecure, ergo fat souls—and the nursery-room being on my side of bed, rather than the fervently wished-for home far from mentioning first base ‡the root of , let me assume‡ I am growing more and more disgusted at being boasted off as well as told. And whichever are carts and whichever are horses, I grow idle, and keep company with the tv and everything—this tv must be sat with every night, and the price is right eg is always coming through the wall, unles I want to watch the educational tv, which is alays ok and sensible (such is open mind), and gets tempting, violin from Brandeis, Symphony from Pittsburgh (Wm Steinberg a real shadow-boxer I imagine), SF, Sanders, Kresge and Tuesday for the first time Ay.Hall Boston, Chemistry from Tufts, and algebra from B U , to take recent examples (exc for Sanders and Kresge), and BBC History Shakespeare plays. A lot i miss out on. Too much anyway. As it is, of course, this gravitates to easy reading, “low” levels of thought, etc., though it does not feel idle as yet, anyway—that is, on the approach to boredom. Though, as to the pejorative mode, bug-eyed, sloppy and dashing around too much. Only the immortals have a right to be bored—it may be. The March 63 Harpers lead article [in left margin: by Sci. Editr of Nation] has it that the moon cant be reached in isolationist way, but we must find a way to collaborate with Russia, for it’d be niggardly not to use at least some of our unused potential, we might find life elsewhere. And “The universe is man’s business. Esp.. the so.. system, . . . prob.. as far as man in the flesh can ever hope to go. Kipling’s lines, . . . are outdated. The world is no longer wide. If he has the money a man can traverse it in a matter of weeks or days, with no effort on his part and with airline stew.. of various pigmentations, but all ravishing, ministering to his wants all the way. But in the solar system, airless and impersonally hostile, with death beating on the walls of the capsule every second, there is still room for adventure. For the vast majority of us the adventure will have to be vicarious, but we are willing to settle for that and to pay for it.” This has seemed much like poetry to me, most of the time, however it is. Fleurs des Mal in the silence of Spring, and all. I sent Harper’s an awful 2100-word letter art on it.. O well. In same issue was an attack on a Congressman trying to



LE to Denise Levertov 239

encroach on conservation. So it goes. But maybe this was partly why it’ was rather a shock to hear more of the spread of drugs to an aid to writing, for an example anyway. It was only on getting a letter from Arthur telling how he, his son and a nghbor took some pot that I really thought of distinguishing, like intoxicant (poison—liquor, de-hibitor whatnot), various drugs, habit-, non-habit forming, stimulance, (peyote, was it, in Brave New World) depressant (Huxley predict TV sets in hospitals) and sedation, aneasthetic, afredisiac. Kind of snobbish for one thing, perhaps (like the Greek scorning of manual labor, or John Henry’s pride, or DHL’s?), but an increasing number of things, also. Say that the Indians never had a chain-smoker among them, those who smoke knew nothing or hardly anything of peyote, and Grks had the mind sufficiently on local wines, kvass or whatever. Theres a photograf of the neurosurgeon whose artyfacts entered my thalamus in March 8 63 L i f e—mostly his mask—taking away the grief of some cancer, likewise by operations in the talamus. I am still, in the 56th week or so, numb, and being watched, etc., doing the roadwork (or shd be). It seems abt what expected anyway, the left arm being quite good, though the left fingers more or less clenched, and heaviness and vibration in leg .. I dont mind the clench, such as it is, because of the numbness—and that I dont feel my heartbeat even when it must be a pounding, I like. “..a drowsy numbness” never was painful, anytime. Dragginess just in my leg. (Poor Patchen Poor Nehru, Nhu . . . . . . . . . ‡ Left arm is better’n right now Shift typewriter carriage with left Right kind of psychosomatic, as things have bn. (It hit me last month man does grow back skin, etc., though no limbs, and when a tooth nerve is killed off it likewise does not come back I bet they dont know much at all abt thalamus tissue, for all the talk there was of “permanent lesion,” such as there was, and I now divine that if it comes back too much I’ll be too, back where I was, and I hope this is it—sort of like tone control.) [In left margin: un beau mot, il m’a semble, parce que de (vs) cloture, a moins] I’ve bn gadgeting all summer never was much able to hold myself back from a thing—like arithmetic in my head (the other alternatives, pencil, typing, equally liable to confusion interesting therefore, and after some years of going from relativity to buoyancy, say, to bridges, etc., to algebra to arithmetic) A good part of the time came to measuring things w a ruler, quite fussily—characteristic of mine—to a 16th of an inch.; i notice i can now decide pretty confidently where is a diameter of a curtain pull or magn glass and its midpoint. But anyway its fun, and against mother’s sometimes vociferous not to say adamant strenuous vehement dislike for my spreading out I’ve also got a bookstand i can read at (not really though, hardly, pretty slowly, a thing so i can ope a notebook in left drawer without torque, without the notebook capsizing a partition in righthand drawer without torque

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or clearance, so nothing runs away in back of drawer ‡and she does want me to be organized and orderly, in fact she still urges me to accept a file-cabinet etc ‡ and I hope Uncle will bring some pressboard to ride with the typewriter carriage standing on back rail between margins and coming up abt 6” high as backing : to prevent paper dragging along table-top and catching, tearing . . . it will also make me able to load carbons into the machine myself (which will add confusion &, eventually)—Brown envelope with scotch-tape worked but tape broke down. Of course my right arm has the opportunity to be more haywire, hence it is so, often..or I feel it so, anyway. Similarly, I’m able to stand up under arrogance, whereas I used to get jinxed if I tried to.. Only I’m rather a Caliban now. But this is life. Or “The wheel has come full circle: I am here” Grrrr ! I feel like showing individuals now. I mean I kind of feel to ask anyone to print me is kind of senseless, all things, my things, considered. (I dont feel I know enough how to react, other things aside) I sent Laughlin “quietness of music” and, as a kind of complement, th other sheet, “Leach ..” but not as a submission., no return envelope or anything. I wrote him a note i forget at the moment but i said mostly I’m not ambitious, and told abot hearing you and asking your address, also my ambivalence about echoing Wms in “. . . music” ‡ One thing that makes me feel at sea, in particular with New Directions, is that Laughlin sent me a copy of Jacob’s Ladder At that, though, in submitting the ms, by way of excuse for the poor condition of many of the mss—carbons stapled to large—11 1/4 x 8 1/2” sheets, my scrawl, etc.—I mentioned how I’d had a vague notion the surgery wd enable me to organize like lightning, if successful, but anyway my thoughts had got sluggish, and I was doing this roadwork then, and all.) I’ve always felt pretty erratic of course and have warned people against taking me for promising, though in between times this I realize as rather foolish. But I’ve had quite a memory for unturned stones, and things untold, and have learned to gab. Little passing up but postponement. Anyway sometimes Eg I just havent got to the 2nd year of TISH yet. Those Arthurian pieces of poems and I dont know what else deflect me. sob sob ) And Bob a tangled language (code), still groping I guess To each his own - and or but yet a hundred others, through your eyes if they feel like it. Bowering also writes that Davey has apparently stopped writin, having a wife with an appetite for color tv and such, or so he surmises is a great cause. Well, easy on the eyes, or I dont know Enough black-and-white Chemistry, algebra .. I have too many cats for curiosity to kill. Too few I cant tell. There was a compleat play on tv monday night (ANTA production), a new one, about Sacco and Vanzetti ..



LE to Denise Levertov 241

A wide open space all right. (Nothing like being there, though, people say . . . You get yr tv set, etc, etc, but, never the best possible world) Dilemma: Living seems as good as doing (writing for instance) after a while Or the dilemma is you must get more or less specialized in order to make big heap snow (Beethoven , Conrad .. ), but what is it doing, that particular size, not to mention snowballing, on top of your two feet of ground? As much as you can chew At different times though Sometimes it seems like ransacking, exploiting so much of everything to write And material is the mos immediate and or constant thing, however transformed or muted or sublimamate or whatever—“Jacob’s Ladder,” heh? - to be left alone a good part of the time, perhaps, at this point in history. at least. It gives pause. It’s real, hard. Would Dr Williams have spawned more interest in ecology if he had not doctored at all and spent more time on writing, cd Ginsburg now be an ecology columnist for the newspapers, a poet being by this time a good deal of a legislator ? Well, I’m getting there, cannot on the other hand imagine myself not bogging down in job at the water dep.t, keeping the stuff clean, going kazy, drop in the bucket, only one life to “lead” ? Waiting for Godot with too many ideas fixed —(Sammy Davis and Jerry Lewis, Saturday night.) Fascinating thing that theres this portable dry-process ph-stat (on the market a couple of years now), abt the size of a portable phonograph and very much simpler to operate (but $300 I’m told and I’m already going crazy Solicitation from Bowering, a definite one, just now come in—day fore yesterday one Kirby Congden a day or so ago Arbitrariness. A couple weeks ago father discovered mentione dry-process ph-machine down at the plumber’s (plumber who used to live upstairs), another object of attraction to me, and another reason - ma doesnt have to tell me—reason i can feel, for not getting the portable. It must be two, maybe 3, interviews I heard with composers in the long ago (7–8 yrs ago?), where the expense of hiring copyists (after a conductor took a piece, anyway, or especially) turned up as a big headache). Now, anyway, Barber might go right down the plumber’s and run off the various parts to a piece. Another aid to writing of course. Wow! The cost is more than printing (4¢ a page, sheet, in wet process at my uncle’s—those stores must really clean up charging 25¢), but like buying out the drugstore, easy being immediate. I guess microfilm hasnt caught on like photostat, but its odd that ph had taken 20 yrs . . . Ma had a hysterectomy in December but was able to go to br’s wedding January 26, in Indiana. Didnt wait till spring as she was to counsel at camp, part of studying

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to teach disturbed children, at U of Michigan. But she got expectant of course and cdnt go, So she took a mod. poetry course and wrote the required theme on me (So a couple wks’ rummaging and rambling on my end) Theme a good one (?) Other circus will begin in a wk or so—late October. My br working enzymes now (you may have met him after your April 60 reading at Harvard, which was also the day it came out they raveled/unraveled the gene/chromosome molecule, Good Friday. I sent the 2 pp. secondng Dr Rock w idea Joe might send it to Dr Rock, might like to and be able to. Wife suggested i send it to Post as article rather than a letter, with a photograph. I did, and wrote a letter to editor saying I recognized it was harsh and so forth, sort of iconoclastic, but I’m not war-like way down, i recognized it wd be harder for him to print than it was for me to write ahem .. still It came back with a reject slip and where it says the Post isnt in a position to accept any unsolicited ideas (or the word may’ve bn original) underlined in editorial red. Wow! (?) So anyway I sent the reject slip to ann arbor I think this was just before or around the time they were jubilating over Yevtushenko—his bold grand old party almost ‡so his text was summarized‡ ideas Allan Dulles exclaiming e t c . But it was, anyhow, when there was no pope Impulsive of me, all right. . . . .

I hope youre all doing ok

Larry Went up to Gloucester early last month and it was mentioned Charles wd be home that day, and that hed bn in the hospital. Then we drove around to his place—no car perhaps Mrs O had just left to meet him Earthquake yesterday morning, biggest ive bn in. I thought it might not be one of them sonic booms—this loose rumble. Lucky it wasnt morning before, when i was in dentist chair. My mother has discovered a crack in our foundation just this afternoon. Aha! It made me jump. But of course I was just having my gums cleaned the day before In December dentist used the highspeed drill on me—hadnt cared to try before It takes no effort to sit still—anyway when I’m not talking or anything Shave myself, which I’ve come to prefer . . . Hold phone in my lap and can dial pretty well since i can prop it in my lap with my left Which is abt as much as it takes to make me less literate, or to that extent

LE to Denise Levertov 243



While at the dentists the other day he found my gums puffed up up. Because of these anti-convulsion pills i still take .. Last August in back bay Baker Memorial i was in this big room looking over the Charles and happened to turn to your quote fr The Bostonians i think at sunset, late afternoon, another thing. . . . For roommate I had one of these squares who are afraid of falling. A few yrs before had an accident, broken bone . . . out of hospital . . . accidental spill, broken bone, heard 8th-mile away . . . assurance . . . fallen down again psychiatrist, (another one finally back from vacation after 2 3 4 or 6 or .. days’ hospital bills (might as well be in Miami)—psychiatrist is distinguished looking, summering in Gloucester, the the drive, Rabbi Muscovitch whos retained by Hospital and now congregation he once had all scattered by an invasion of Negroes - not those in the hospital of course - all scatted to Suburbia beard, short that is muttering with memo-pad jaw a personal feiend, a continuous wife (opposite my mother) In early or late fifties Sixfooter “Handsome” Son of an immigrant Copy-boy on Boston Globe then court reporter most of his life (B U somewhere though—accounting) I say: take up physics Begin Ha-ha Only Larry has the brains for that “Larry youre a good boy .. I love you” . . . (going on a little ways when he’d got out from under a bit ‡ Shakespeare is nothing compared to the Bible, say. Tough. Theres the rathole, the bog . . . Oh, Shakespeare, he say, I’d never read him, he’s ‡or he was‡ an anti-semite. The antiSemitism of Ernest Martin Hopkins (a former president of Dartmouth, whose major claim to fame this does seem to be, even as my father is always wildly sporting E M R’s lapels, consequent to his graduation from Dartmouth, gradus a parnasum, -assum) And some other’s’ antisemitism. And that of some New England inns. And the lawlessness of most Negroes. From experience . . . Criminal minds And fellow newspapermen come up fully expecting to see him back on the job, etc.

A Man Dying on His Feet

a man who wants to die in his bed Quite a few spots of Duncan’s I remarked, got a kick from, like what he says in Mariane i can chew, and first two pp i cd follow for a while, or

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3 pp, going from his stars to mine and so cd apear back to his. Though memory is frail, if understanding is fragile, Grady thought the Duncan a rehash. I of course always appreciate, even think well of, edification so . . . “Cryptogram . . . ” Your “Muse” extends more in this world, or anyway H D’s is for me more a mummy, her house a museum while I’ am more ready to think this a surface observation than anything else. C’ est moi I am going to get a glas of water . I’m thirsty A good deal of it is surface going down my throat . . .

LE TO ROBERT DUNCAN ∙ 12/29/69–01/01/70

In this letter, Eigner reflects on current events and his reading of Duncan’s The Years as Catches. The letter also contains Eigner’s comments on Hebrew traditions and his family’s Judaism. The first version of the poem beginning “Formations in the / blue” (CP 3: 935) appears in this letter. Eigner adds the “s” to “considerations” in pencil; he has also indicated the poem’s final arrangement with arrows and lines in pencil. (Robert Duncan Papers, Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York) 23 Bates Road Swampscott, Mass.01907.Mnday aftr xmas

12 29 69

Dear Robert .. Thanks for your Rilke card. For one thing it finally got me to George Quasha’s Rilke versions at al, and his comments, in caterpillars 3/4 and 5. I subsist more and more on occasions, in the various deprtments that hv stuck with me all along,—not very good, self-reliance locked in the winds—including the avoidance of compulsion to do what i dont want to do physically—and i hadnt felt the capacity, the room, to take in, look into, Rilke before last week. (Yes, Hart Crane the open sea, stinging, . . . Rilke a wellspring, jet, head, pretty clear/cleansized nozzle or whatever.) For myself, its an odd enough life still, odd enough how things go out the back of my mind. Abt 12 days ago went through your “ . . Part II” which i had missed last year in catepillar 2 (the mag. having turned up suddenly last wk among the spare copies of things in a nice orderly out-ofthe-way corner, till whch time I’d thght it hadn’t reached here) - cant quite recall if I wrote you that the 2nd pce of mine Clayton E. . put in cat. . 6 (“. . . What is a child?/ . . . a man? . . .”) had one source in the hd book pages i saw in cat..1, evn as the other source of the thr was a diary of the “June War” I happened onto in Commentary - and was stirred at least as much as to pencil first 3 lines of Keats’ “Ode to Psyche” on the last page. City of the Fasa and all. Near and far. To see whats in front of you and to dream. Keats did it in “. . . Nightingale” Well, i dunno. Actions in the armchair keep turning random - I’ve just switched off the telecast of the AAAS meeting from MIT, where they are holding forth in re hunger and nutrition, first Margaret then others, fine moments of speech, e.g. those by a black hswife frm N Bolivar County, Miss.., where it appears the folks have got together and pulled themselves through some. (M.. Mead said we hv the technical capacity

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to - this doubtful, as others then said - and must feed the hungry of this wk to get a move on other problems, pollution et al, long range/short range it sounded like, as well as you cant be 1/2-concerned and 1/2-indifferent abt life and health, and feed all but must begin at home anyway to be competent to, morally et al, and im- I was thinking we must be egalitarian throughout the world before we cd, i thght, nowadays, feel justice . . . ) Brown which develops at moments into golden study was way back in my childhood before radio and tv orientation of the folks and myself (though myself even now to a lesser degree), but the myth spirit hit me when Saturday bfr Christmas and then, more, xmas eve there were children reading aloud poetry they’d written in a Christmas ‡and Chaukah‡ contest (the Chanu- negligible 2 pieces i hrd and xmas/xnuk entries 9/1, and lacks a strong resilient symbol, all right) Santa, some of baby Jesus coming to make happiness, animal maybe cow (or what i forget over the moon - then one considering an Xmas in the Sea of Tranquility, . . . no stocking full of candy and gum, etc. I thght “the poetry of earth . . . ” (Keats again), Before was one abt Santa getting stuck in the chimney. But what isnt a colored card??? Anyway, things began to pall in due time - “,,, a Chanukah Tree is very nice” not the only ugliness - and i switched off the seemingly endless stream of compositions . . . . . . room . . . Awaiting time, yes, and the various faces of moon and spun stars. Right after “H D . . . ” in cat.. 2 I got to “Man . . . in Order and Strife” in 8/9. To remember now and maybe re-read some. . . . The mixture (of good and bad, like the spoilage of success), tension, force, value of the unknown, potential. A yen received to get to Browning (never make it at this rate) Dante Sufi Blake on the American Revolution. Order more or less, or gestalt, or regard for gestalt. Lincoln - i heard Garrison wanted to let the South go its “own” way, secede, or didnt care if it did, but Frederick Douglas had objections to that (Douglas going around with G.., taking the stump with him, at some risk it appears of being apprehended and returned to “Master” in Baltimore, even before he revealed his “true” identity - rather thn quit talking like a college man to make “himself ” more plausible, so the story goes - and escaping to England sometime after). While coherence* involves force* in a sense [in left margin: *And I on p. 202, 8/9: ocean // distances // bodily // dimensions // smell it // holds together // . . . degrees . . . ”], sure - like theres what Philip Corner writes of Ch.. Ives and



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quotes from him in cat.. 2; strife rather thn, or as well as, order. Surprised you seemed more tolerant of A Hitler than L B J, Rusk, or Napoleon. Thought at first Hitler might have bn a lot more conscious of just what he was doing. Or enough. Yes, i imagine Napoleon had no extermination policy for civilians. Or nothing like human lampshades. Hitler with eyes wide open. Or maniacal, maybe, more or less. [In left margin: Yr pre-’45 picture of Hitler (concentration but not dth camps known)?? Yr 1966–8 view of L B J . . . ?] (MacBeth rather more human, or normal; or anyway shown at various stages, his rake’s progress.) Grter visibility it seems since tv, though i guess as yet for goods more than ills, but anyway you think Rusk had/has less awareness of the gory—yuh, Rusk and LBJ’s ideal world as strong maybe as Napoleon. But so what - Hitler “human,” Napoleon and LBJ “inhuman,” Oh, Hitler more palpable and in a sense responsible, less bureaucratic or organization man. Then again though, Hitler painted roses (if i hear right), and Goya painted giants - other things too, had a grter range. I’m in disorder again, somewhat. . . . A brass tack, th above. Andrea Wyatt, who was has met you once alrdy i think [in left margin: A tak at poetry cener maybe, I guess.], was here wk-end before xmas, 19th-21st, in re the bibliography she’s doing of me, put up to it initially by Sam Charters and Rbt Hawley, who also solicited throug her a bk ms from me . . . . Andrea went to Kansas U Library Thanksgiving and looked over mss of mine there and took xeroxes of all (wow!), in order to set them in order. Understaffed she found them - confirming a report i had a yr or so ago, otherwise she was very much impressed by them. So one thing she’s now going to see if Larry Goodell has a ts of my skit he put in duende #6, to put in the collection at Kansas; then if no luck there she’ll inquire sometime or when she sees you . . . if yrs is available. If you’re willing to give the ts up, i can if you like give you as some replacement the xerox (on paper of the non-flexible kind) which i have, while it’s lain unlooked at the last few yrs, and even if i cd recall the condition of yrs cdnt very well decide how it compares. Nothing urgent anyway. No ddline can i perceive. Happy New Year and regards to Jess and yrself. Larry Rbt Hawley sent me, besides Mary F’s aurora bligh and 2 other bks, yr years as catches, as yet largely unread. Glad to see you when. I see you were on Cape Cod august 41 or 42—[Tuesday] while June 41 (8th grade) I finished up my 2 1/2 years stay on the nearby coast, in Canton, at the Mass.. Hospital School. Whatever that is to think about - hm. (And come to think of it, the father of Lysander

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Kemp - if you’ve ever read him, in The New Mexico Quarterly e.g. - was 1 of the 2 resident physicians there, making the rounds and seeing I was fit, for one, though I knew nothing of L nor most others on the same premeseis of course.) Read some more of your Years . . . vol.. last night, yr speaking of among various improvisations “a syncretic religion.” Considerable talk in these parts of “the Jewish tradition,” one of the phrases that keep people constantly on their beam or in their (circular) tracks, e.g. it’s a prime concept of my cousin the boyscout zionist Economist (Ph.D. Harvard) who’s been with rand and now with mitre; and when last over at his place in September i remarked a tradition has to be assembled from day to day, nowadays, and think i may have quoted that Chinese Emperor on his bathtub. Well, in a tribe, small group, religion unabstracted or undistinguished from the rest of culture, or life, whereas this cousin of mine follows baseball and football some, has his own sailboat or it cd be small yacht in which he makes excursions out from M..head Harbor, has a color set. Ah the Departments! I figure is there was something Jewish about the Wright Brothers or Abner Doubleday life wd be that much more colorful, a little more. (Just a propriorty attitude actually - the guy kept saying “ our .. our our ”, and I’d be surprised if he knows much abt Xtnity or anything abt Islam or Buddhism ) Despite Book (maybe), maybe anyone syncretic enough is a poet or (and) religionist - the terms synonymous - or just somebody really alive. (Eyes open. Maybe wide open. Awakened . . . ) You mention seeking the poem etc., process, building up line by line, even, while i got a sense of “forest of possibility” But of course, my size, which i got down to, fragments, toeholds, etc. and I’ve been incapable of large units like full-blown sentences except in rushed time. Think this has to do with why i find myself still getting, recurrently, quite a kick, impressive and all, out of your essays etc. The way you go around . . .Still happens, fairly often may, while i write it feels like icebergs, though more and more quickly what i seem left with, most times I look back, is floes. Anyway, in cat.. 8/9 there are at least 3 errata, in sum: 2 on page 201, where the 1st, on line 8, is real negligible if the poem looks good enough, if i recall its musing rumination aspect: toy horse/cart I have in ts 8th line frm botton of p shd read: times mass a word got left out On next page (202), the poem “so many cars . . . ” shd have in its 4th line not “eaves” but “eyes” Was about to say above, a few months ago i saw in Webster’s Collegate that holy, whole and health all go back to the sam AS word meaning whole, maybe - i forget - to make hole, (holw ? ) heal, anyway to make whole. An exclusive insight, it now

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seems, of some number Angle- or Englishmen back there. So much for Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, it appears - or ancient wisdom not too cosmic, or universal. Precise. If now the same connection, or fairly exact collateral, shd turn up in some other language - there are 200 languages or something, though, counting or not counting dead tongues - it wd seem like quite a coincidence, chance. Hmmm On the other hand, I heard a while back theres more than one word in Hebrew, for holy. “Superstition”? maybe. Or just words contributed by different tribes. No. Got to look in The New Testament Friday night—after a reference. Something I’ll never get to read through. In acts, crowds, quite a cast of individuals, besides proselytizing. Corinthians, Hebrews - fine-spun argument, polemic, as well as attempted advice (Paul caught rather off-base when asked abt marriage, or of course in process). O T simple, dogmatically codied . . . it hit me; no such argumentation there, as I’ll bet. The world or mid-east world before Alexander. After him quite a few regions flowing gether. (Towards the whole earth in time and space While its always bn humptydumpty enough, in fact mostly maximus iv v vi came this morn—got by Andrea W in NYC. Wow! Ouch! Wow! And here yesterday a note from McClure accompanying “To James B. Rector” and a ts “beginning with two lines by eigner // ‘the knowledge of death/. . . stars” Just looked at Ah! [In left margin: PINDAR, eh?]

PS New Years Day 1970

Oh yes, you do say on p.1 of the intro to Years As Catches, you dont know what makes a whole except “a working feeling” Yes, and there may be no very definable order, or “syntax of things.” Gestalt. With any arrangement you have a shape, anyway pattern. (Noticed this back when I encountered the game of jackstones at that school in Canton, Mass. Whatever way the stones fell when tossed - to be picked up, the ten or so of them, between bounces of a ball, by twos, threes, fours—it was in a design. Topology, eh? That was a fascinating Formations in the considerations blue life jackstones windfalls hordes ) Reading the line Lift, untimely joy in “The Years As Catches” late last night , crossed my mind

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250

V’yishkadahl

. . . Lift up His

v’yishkadahl

Countenance Upon Thee

something

And Give Thee

something



Peace

something . . . shalom

but,

you’re not supposed to see God and Live Guess i picked up a dozen words in five or six years [added in pencil: of hebrew school afternoons and week] . . . ‡as a kid might put in as responsive reading, say—but that benediction was always the last word,. . . shalom was. A queer time it did seem, back there in the Temple. Contradictions. With decurum and unction. Then in High School the ridiculously jumbled jurisdictions of the Greek and Roman—heathen—gods )

LE TO JACKSON MAC LOW ∙ 03/31/70

Eigner’s friend and fellow poet was an editor for the war resistance journal WIN (which originally stood for “workshop in nonviolence”). Eigner comments on the social and ecological issues that concerned him at this time, and he relays his impressions of Gary Snyder’s environmentalism. (Jackson Mac Low Papers, Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego)

23 Bates Road Swampscott, Mass 01907 Tuesday mrch 31 1970 Dear Jackson, Glad to have this word from you, what you wrote the 22nd, the very helpful lists (everything ok) et al. ‡ #288 appeared in a Victoria B C newsletter, open letter 9, dated apr. 1 66 but mailed me 3 wks ago! so the in Boulder isnt using it but 1 of 2 3-line pieces I sent him instead . . . Be nice if win uses #183 this april, easter, in re the man who had the dream—I imagine they will John Martin hasnt used it yet, aha! ‡ While I myself am not onto, keen on, letter-writing any more - pulled far away by the mass of the whole shebang. I think the 23rd Light Poem came from Tyson a few days after I wrote you last (his accompanying note is dated Feb. 2) and since its arrival I’ve of crs had in mind, occasionally, to drop you a line on it. Now you’ve got me back on a ball, however briefly. Right away, or just about, I got off a response to Ian, to his design, painting. Disposed of it, ohhh! (When I get on a bearing, it slides away under me - this used to happen even when there were few.) Let’s see: the colors brick fluorescent rockets or 4 buildings in vertical procession or lights ditto—the area’s implications of endless streams, as I see now. Switchings. UFOs Wdnsday The will to remember, enjoyment of sight “. . . drawn to junction/ like a firefly in a field.” That hits now. And #274 “roadways are where they are, . . . ” I’m hardly onto my thing any more. I’m wild in this vacuum here, an old folks’ home - my folks were born old, it seems, like so many

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others, and speak only to job-holders etc or potential job-holders and married people etc, except they like to tell me and others whats what and tell me what to do (and I’m increasingly susceptible to “stage-fright,” as I had occasion to tell Michael McClure in January, nor will they hear of my taking any kind of pill) So I grow more and more sluggish, thoughtless, also willy-nilly. McC.. urged me to send for earth read out, and to send Keith Lampe something, but it’ll be a fluke if I ever get around to that. Information overkill here, far more than I can pass on (!) or otherwise act on. Nick Kimberley of big venus in London sent me some more stuff, including peace news for Jan. 20 70, which has G Snyder’s “the four changes . . . ” in it. 1st draft. Great stuff, i hope it gets wide publication although it loses a little by having so many things, going on and on some, and in a few places off, like where it puts in a plug for astrology—always the question of attending to neither too much nor too little. And I should take Gary’s advocacy of soil banks up, first getting his address from somewhere. It appears untilled land should go back into production again because 80% of the excess nitrogen in the environment, 1948–68, [added in pencil: last 25 years] came from chem.. fertilizers, needed (. . . ?. . . ) in intensive agriculture. Maybe a good idea to have a weekly fast, as a reminder of the likelihood and values, whatever they are, of shortages, and of people with below-par living-standards, and a fund drive to have money saved from food budgets on fast days go towards getting ample supplies as long as they’re in existence, and even to recompense grocers and restaurant men for lack of business. A switch from production and consumption to sharing, without which you couldn’t avoid inducing widespread fear and chaos when lowering production. ‡Well, I can send these words to noose, and Gary S wd get it. ‡* Larry Freifeld - I gather you know him - sent me 3 or 4 things from his land press in January and 2 or 3 wks ago I got around to responding to them and sent 12 - 15 thngs for a bklet ms he asked me for. Tentative. So-so, maybe. I was reading the review of Gandhi’s Truth in Nov. 1 win a few days ago, Sunday. Read “Beyond Separatism” a few months back. Could reread everything abt a million times. Nothing sticks, I’m afraid. And there’s so much here, too! All kinds of goods in the mixed bag on my back. Wow! Quite a life! Regards Larry Eigner

*Forgot a couple of weeks ago who was that Senator who said at the time we’d have to lower our living standard to avert polluting the earth one way or another. My old ma said it was Sen.. Muskie, but maybe not.



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Saw the other day where jr.sen., from Oregon, the man who beat Wayne Morse, is plugging one idea I saw before in Gary S..’s essay: taking away the tax exemption for children after the third . . . et al [In left margin, below “Wdnsday,” Eigner has typed the following perpendicular to the main text] Oh yes, I see you get noose. See infra p. 2 #288 is at Black Sparrow too. Incidentally. ok Ok ok oke [Below the note above, Eigner has also typed the following note perpendicular to the main text, with additional illegible notes in pencil] 1400% out of 1770% increase in the past 25 years

LE TO RON SILLIMAN ∙ 10/21/72

In this letter, Eigner describes a two-week visit with his brother’s family in St. Louis, Missouri, during which he gave a poetry reading at Washington University. Eigner also describes his impressions of the journal This, edited by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten, and his father’s encounter with anti-Semitism at a local synagogue. The poem included in part here can be found in The Collected Poetry (3: 1124). (Ron Silliman Papers, Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego)

Saturday Oct 21 72

Dear Ron, Again, once more, my long silence - 5 months this time - seems regrettable, but the more you do the more there is to do, and best not to knock myself out. Wednesday I got back from 2 fairly unrushed and browesful weeks chez frere in St Louis. While for instance I had readings there, too, unexpectedly, and the ups and downs of a place with kids - or anybody younger than yourself more or less reactivates the future as a puzzle. Anyway, talk is cursive or analogue and writing, especially typing, is digital. Life is quite a melee, frustrating if unacceptable as such - 8 nghts ago one of the ten highschool kids who with 2 teachers came to the house brought me a jazz record, Phil Woods’ Rights Of Jazz, throwing me off enough (I’m not such a quick thinker, though I speeded up some what with the variety), as for 1 thng there’s bn no phonograph here for 3 yrs, the last 12 yrs noone at no. 23 interested enough to recall from time to time how to play one (plenty of conerts etc. on Boston radio and tv, anyway), but on coming home that nght my sister-in-law exclaimed Woods is her favorit jazz man. Someone at sght of my 1960 Jargon book mentioned Jon.. Williams had been in those parts a while before, maybe at one of the universities, but I didnt veer to ask after him, cdnt think of a beginning question, so little up on thngs am I. I can’t remember reading your June 17 wrds on Jon.. W’s “new” book involving Havelock Ellis before today. Oh well - its no great matter that I’ve hardly ever steered myself through writings or anything else, exercising choice and dicrimination on my own, hardly having had any chance to, what with gifts on one hand and never an allowance on the other.



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it’s not disease, napalm or anything, e.g. failure isnt. My capacity and powers of concentration never have seemed to be much, and I find say Coolidge and Bramhall in this #3 formidable. (G Franklin’s widely-spaced lines helped me do one Sept 24 after a false start the night before, abt the anti-personel mail, a few days in the past, that Friday nght pa found a swastika captioned by “socilist jew” stuck on his car’s rear, after returning home from Beth El parking lot, as quite an exciting anticlimax and finale in black september - wings extended, as often, from the steed of direct experience, ominous or whatever, via inversions or what else comes. Well, generally more to writing than reading, I figure, but it’s curious where Coolidge may get his starts and how far he stretches. Concretist Joyce Holland is puzzling, of course - or what and how much should be made of anything, at that. [In left margin: Sunday] Your “. . . X in terms of Y & Z—evasion or mystification” has me thinking Coolidge may be using some “concretist methodology” too. ?. But I’m hardly curious abt this as I’ve been and from time to time an abt various things in physics, like just how does action equal reaction whether thrtr’x constant velocity or acceleration. (Before the class come into the rm at the U of Missouri 1 of the 2 instuctors who brought me there told me nola express, the undergrnd nwspaper* [in left margin: *out of New Orleans] Charles Potts and John Thompson left here when they visited a few years back, runs a column on quantum physics, which he sd he cd understand, the installment he read, and in an issue of Science For People% [in left margin: %my brother, a microbiologist at Washington U, gets this mag. of a year-old outfit, Scientists and Engineers For a Hlthier ‡?‡ Community ‡?‡] devoted to science teaching a few days before I saw cited a book by somebody named March called Physics For Poets, in the description of a course relating physics etc. to society.) Well, a lot of my own stuff has enough times in retrospect looked meaningless and flimsy enough when what it’s derived from fades into the past. My own stuff goes out of mind abt as much as other people’s these last few years. (Maybe it comes back the more readily in and on the whole convivial or lively scene, as it seemed to in St. Louis.) . . . After getting to bed last night I looked at this 2 again, some of my pages (often I havent got it hat “heat . . . to fly,” in the thng abt the hotel fire, is an inversion frm “heat taking off . . . ”), and Clark C..’s and yours. Element of meaning I see now pretty distinctly in C..’s “Beehive Ordinates” and the piece before it, “A B ,” - its, intermittent, is frequent enough, say - so I can appreciate the sound more. (Well, no more diligence in drinking seas, like Tom Meyer, S Faust, Enslin, numerous Tottels’, trying to store the goods in mind . . . ) Your 5 come through no too, like first and last one or two in highway or crossroad situation, the second of the 5 coneivably carrying “C’s Common” at the top - and the third, which I remember you being down on, quite

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a switch at that, needing break-up and dispersal in some way to keep up intensity, distinctnes. [In right margin: the space / the spread / of bright stars] Oh well. I read out of this 2 first 5 poems at Francnia May 11, and maybe the 7th for instance. U of Missouri reading was Oct 11, at that - out of my Selected Poems, pieces the audience had mimeo copies of frm xeroxed pages, ah. Howard Schwartz, the instructor my sister-in-law had to my complete surprise arranged the reading with, who came over the 6th, said i spoke way better than he expected. It was due to dialog all the way, Joe and Janet, my brother and s..-in-law in St Louis to whom S.. Poems is dedicated - it first showed in Swampscott Aug. 19 a Saturday, a hardck and pperbck, so next day i was able to send it to the on the plane flying their son and daughter home after a 2-wk vist.! Took Gunslinger I and II to St. L.. with me, started the latter without rereading I, just as wll - now it’s back here. I’m always way behind; but best not to do too much. earth ship a mag. from Southampton, UK, whose editor has now gone back to Australia - #8, 23 of mine, was in Feb. Enclosed is a faulty colophon sheet John Martin said I shd throw out . . . Regards Larry

LE TO GEORGE BUT TERICK ∙ 06/04/74–06/09/74

Butterick, who was writing a guide to Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, had inquired if Eigner retained any letters from Olson. Although he claims not to remember receiving any letters, Eigner recalls some of his encounters with the elder poet and writes at length about his study of the Hertz Chumash and the etymologies he finds there. (Athanor Collection, Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York) 23 Bates Road Swampscott, Mass. 01907 Dear George,

Tuesday June 4 74

‡‡Typing here on the front porch on this my 2nd machine from uncle’s in Plainfield, the 1 indistinguishable frm the u.c. i ‡‡

You are one of those I haven’t got around to writing for a very long time (McLaughlin another, Duncan who months ago sent 18th Century Imitations another . . . ), though I’ve meant to, tht of it many times (not often enough to give me the willies though, thank goodness with Lethe bottle, ch 2 etc., I’ve so far managed to avoid the fate of Orpheus after song, Icarus when he inherit- so much amassed, such a mass of, power), since Dec 14, anyway, when on returning here from 33 days at my brother’s in St. Louis, where I got to see Diane Wakoski read and to talk with her and others of the audience at The Mary Institute, this girls’ school, the Monday eve after Thanksgiving, I found her broadside from Storrs in the mail, abt the flute-player I think, a thing looking good for sure (oops, dont right now know where it might be, here in this envelope I’ve brought out here, where I’ve just looked, here’s Glover’s “Back On Earth” ... flyer not read till now, at settled enough moment, so much there (birds and the beautiful River‡ made anew relly; but no Flute-Player!) One thing I’ve gone off on is War and Peace, so far held to a re-reading of it (this March 42 edition someone gave me 30-odd yrs ago, falling apart, Simon & Schuster ed. of Maude translation published before Nazis headed for or anyway reached Stalingrad, one of its 3 maps that show Napoleon’s route from the Niemaren to the Moskva and back also showing Hitler’s Nov. 27 41 line n-w-s of

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Moscow - wow . . . ) by a guy broadcasting the book (Gatnet translation), since November (with usual 3 or 4+ week hiatus in December for Christom stories, shepherds and wisemen) now in his 16th year of readings, a half-hour each weeday, over ch. 2’s parent or elder-sibling radio station; and concurrently for a stretch there’s been the BBC-TV serial of the same opus, a second or third version: and so this spotlighted, focussed or lasered thing. Audio-visual aids, crutches facilities - sure welcome. 5 or 6 poems from the Tolstoi, so far, and one from T.. and Edmond Jabes, with parts of whose Livre Des Questions et al (in English), I’ve been bombarded with frm various quarters the past 13–16 months (2 or 3 pieces from Jabes seul). T.. with curious wathful (and didactic) eye on the mystery of the whole and its details, like Whitman voluminous (repetitions/facets), contradicts himself very well. Some things it’s been nice to get for myself (with these aids), going back and forth in the tale, l’histoire. I can’t recall ever getting a letter from Charles, nor cd I in 70 or 71 whe a mag.. (at one of my brother’s now?) came with an article on Charles by Ann Charters quoting a letter he wrote me where he tells me I can do anything, I can ‡huh!‡ do math. [In left margin: Wednesday] (What assumptions he shd’ve had in mind like, the availability of pencil and paper way way in the back of the head - I’ve no idea.) If memory on this score is infallible, as it seems to be, it must be he never mailed me the letter, after writing it (or, oh, some postman lost it) Mother, whose always enjoyed being right and sincere and holding and expressing downright and/ or forthright right right views, still plays schoolteacher to me of course, though now with less and less time energy ability for it, to breathe down my neck, for one thing she’s 74 now (and I’m a little more visible, being in Who’s Who in the East et al) - still has Ideas Of Order (like when your inquiry came last week she thought if only I had used the filing cabinet, crowded and hence as I’ve only one hand to go through things and pull out and push em back in with as it is jumbled really, I’d find Olson letters in just abt nil time) and so for instance once in a while proposed I weed out papers, mags and bks, anyway to put someplace where she doesn’t feel she has to keep these dust-collectors clean (she wraps the stored items in plastic) There’s really a lot piled around me, close at hand (closer the better on the whole - prosthetics in my case, specifically, up to a point though), and for my part I’m glad to pass things on, when I get the chance, rather than just have tem sit, or mostly so, on the shelves. (A new bookshop 6 blocks away, run by a 23-yr-old native of this place, a poem writer himself, has Olson’s Selected Writings, Kerouac. Mex.. City Blues et al. Night of May 15th a read-in there, Frank Minelli in whose Marblead bookshop we made the film partly, down from Newburyport where



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he is now, coming to drive me there, and monday, day before yesterday, mother, having to do errands farther alon the street, wheeled me over. . . . ) May 15th, at that, came my book from Elizabeth Press. Jim Weil in April wrote of CUNY Institute Conference and your lunching with him and Perchik there. It’s rather puzzling that you should hv told him “Calhoun was considering an all-Eigner issue of athanor & asked if ” he, Weil, wd contribute an article, since Doug wrote me Jan 22 that he was after all making the next A.. the final one, and so wd just run a selection of my stuff from tss (et al?) he had there. I haven’t heard from him as yet since then, except for a card saying he got a book or two I sent him and wd let me know of the selection when he had it done - I’m in no hurry abt anything of course. Apparently you’ve been out of touch with Doug for some weeks?! Curtis Faville (2021 Francisco #301 Berkeley Cal 94709) using 45 or so pieces of mine in #6 of his L magazine, in L 4–5 and this 5 Ron Silliman ed of ToTTeL’s does pretty hugely, greatly . . . Rbt Grenier of this (still) doing, say, one-shots (1 line things), ok enough (?) of time. Et al. Stuff from England. Rothenberg/ Quasha America a Prophecy. Etc. Keep my hand full willy-nilly, so I hardly get to wonder if and when Michael Koehler, by now spending a few weeks in Gloucester in connection with an Olson thesis he came to Yale (from W Germany) to do, wrote he was going up to Storrs weekends (maybe you’ve seen him around or met him) He invited me to do a sound tape for his s press editions, and outfit he runs with two others back in Germany, and we agreed to try after I did some explaining of the situation; then when he asked I once more got on a ball and sent him 30-odd poems to put into Geman for a mag he hoped to start after getting back home this summer. He showed me 3 done. Last wrote me in March I think - said he’d just recorded John Cage. [In left margin next to this paragraph Eigner has typed: Same in re ed of vort. Barry Alpert, who’s wanted an interview with me] The circumference of the planet so wide to me, one way and another, I’m less and less capable of sinking a deep shaft anywhere or distinguishing one from an ivory tower. Anyway, can’t get with Olson in the hospital there; or I guess “concerned” with his state means greatly puzzled, come to the big Unanswered Question all right. “. . . Prometheus do?” reminds me of Parase in Pound’s last Canto. “. . . . entire higher seriousness of an event in an art”? - so I try to imagine Prince Andrei’s death, and all of War and Peace, as real, real, real . . . (Reflex.. again, feedback or meta-realities, continuities of space and events, e.g. Tolstoi’s continuous mass of causes, and the discontinuous.) And, then, enough deaths,

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long-lasting enough and real to you, become part of your life. Hm. [In left margin next to this paragraph Eigner has typed: E.g., loud tv flashing mother so briefly to all th world’s fites, besides Lawrence Whelk’s genial songs and nice dance floor, etc. - all nght every nght. To which she goes to sleep, often. As to phone talk on the radio whenever she lies down.] “Health,” “holy,” “whole” - anyway what Duncan quotes Charles as saying, wanting a Dr who’d “attend him in ‘holy things’ ...” (a homeopath is somewhat a specialist, at that, I guess, compared to a “family Doctor” or in however many of few cases a clergyman), prompts me to show you the enclosed #792. As to #545, that, besides the July 1965 poem I also enclose, came off, quite a bit I think, in the Olson manner. Kind of hard to imagine Charles didn’t know Hebrew, as well as Greek and Latin etc etc., forwards and backwards, nor the elohim/yahyeh etymology, [In left margin: Friday] but for quite a while I thought maybe he didn’t, for instance till yesterday it scarcely looked like there was anything much in Walter Kaufmann’s Critique Of Religion and Philosophy (seemingly the only book here, as it happens, but for the P.. and H.., and possibly a bk of Buber’s, selections, that one of my 2 brothers got and read around 25 yrs ago and I read partly, that discusses the tetragrammaton) of what I came across in Pentateuch and Haftorahs (copies in the hands of all the congregation, no such book hereabts in the 30s when I was a kid and went to hbrew school in the vestry of temple and at times upstairs into pews with bookracks, while f Beth El in Lynn mother knew a word for hebrew/vernacular annotated text all along, chumesh, the word she spoke when I talked of it after she brought it to me sitting in the lobby of the Marblehead Temple as I didnt feel up to attending the service, never absorbing in the mouths of businessmen, I get unease anyway ) on being taken to a cousin’s son’s Bar Mitzvah in September 1970. (Kaufmann writes of Exodus 3.14, has it Aquinas, “unable to read the verse in the original, did not realize that it neither contained any reference to ‘the Lord’ nor, alas, the words which Thomas considered ‘the most proper name of God” - “he who is” - (Kaufmann, section 52), but Elohim (alhm) tells Moses to say to the people that “i am”, Ehveh (ahyh) sent him, true this is different from “he . . . is,” and in the next verse specifies (???) “Lord (yhwh) God (alhy, Eloy) of your fathers . . .”, ie no strange, says Hertz, newly discovered god, says Hertz, who notes YHWH is “always pronounced ‘Adonay’ . . . comes from the same Heb. root (hayah) as “I am” Ehyeh; viz. ‘to be’ . . . gives expression to the fact that He was, He is, and He ever will be.” Kaufmann (section 89) says there’s no agreement that Exodus 3.14 is intended as an interpretation: ‘. . . ehyeh asher ehyeh . . . ehyeh has sent me to you,’ and goes on to commend Buber’s idea that God is ordering Moses to say this rather than giving his name, lest



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he be conjured (an Egyptian concept - and, at that, in The White Goddess, which Creeley put me on to, Rbt Graves says your god’s name was, all across from Egypt to England, a powerful thing to be kept secret, as a military matter) or pinned down like, I recall, Proteus. “‘I shall be present as whoever I shall be present.’ I shall be there, but you cannot predict the mode of my presence. ‘In sum, you do not have to conjure me, neither do you have to conjure me.’” Then Kaufmann, who’s said St. Thomas misquoted Exodus 3.14, states “The Tetragrammaton ‡which is in 3.15‡,‡ with the initial J or Y which indicates the third person, though would then mean: he is present.” Hertz on “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh” I am that I am . . . ” ascribes an identical interpretation to the Midrash, maybe - quotes it but doesnt translate evidently, anyhow not literally, and says “Most moderns follow Rashi in rendering ‘I will be what I will be,’ i.e., . . . . ‘I shall save in the way that I shall save.’ . . . “Around the bend/ of the next second” Anyway at sundry times as I picked up on things on my own (recently I’ve seen in sparrow #14 (“Inside Out,” his March 73 lecture at SUNYB) where Creeley cites Olson on the greek root of history, “to go and find out for yourself,” and now I vaguely recall at least one similar observation, in ph..stat of John Wieners’ Black Mtn syllabus my father made somewhere in Boston, maybe at his (IRS) office, other such remarks too, maybe, in Causal Mythology), I imagined Charles getting a kick out of them. Hertz says somewhere that “the ancient Rabbis” considered Elohim and yhwh [yhvh and Elohim typed above] inseparable (reminds me of Jefferson’s “. . . life and liberty . . .”, familiar as it’s been seen from Randall Thompson’s choral setting, as well as “Hear, O Israel . . .”, the big thing, monotheist credo), which fits in with purpose/involvement (or i../p.. from the human viewpoint), to my mind, as you cant have one without more or less (always there’s the rub or one of the Unanswered Questions in the increasingly humptydumpty and/or grassroots universe nowadays), and so, further, with Greek Justice (might be for one thing self-restraining in being fairly blind?), due proportion (which is groped towards, I now gather from Kaufmann Maimonedes would agree more than for instance wd Aquinas), as well as with the Trimurti, Creation/Destruction, and Preservation (besides Brahma, the Whole), i.e. beginning/ending/continuing, though I have that only from the dictionary, M-Webster’s Collegiate. (Bathing in the Ganges, Tiber, Mo., Red,. . . Yllow Rs, day by day, ChinBy now it’s Saturday. (Oops! here’s another Divine Name, El Shaddi, in Genesis 17.2, “God Almighty”, shaddai usually derived from, says Hertz at Numbers 1.5, “a Heb. Root ‘to overpower’. It has also been derived from the Arabic sh-d-a, . . . . ‘to heap benefits’ and ‘to reconcile persons at enmity with one another’. This idea of beneficence and peace is amply borne out by the passages in Genesis in which

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Shaddai occurs (Gen.17.1; 23.3; 44.14). . . . Friend and Protector . . . ” But I sure forget often enough how deep the waters are always likely to be. I look again at Gen. 6.2 note and see “. . . in poetic Hebrew, elohim often means ‘mighty’ . . .” At Gen. 1.1 Hertz says “Elohim im is a plural form which is often used to denote plenitude of might.” Hh. And I have Alcheringa #5 - Rothenberg sent it to me 12 months ago. (Oh! pp.49f just read, after 34–48, and wks ago the Olson in Alb 5 for xample.) Well, it does seem far away, long ago and abstract enough, and that without Buber, Hertz, Olson, Rothenberg et al Kissinger wd still be less of a Zionist than people here; well, maybe Golda M.. wd be more Z.. than she is, and Sadat et al., if not people in Gaza more anti-Z.. than they are. And the 2nd (or more) M Luther, wow, at the end!, the yellowing disease” and all. (And it’s of course it’s interesting to learn, or be reminded, maybe, relearn, that Charles was into and had The Scientific American - at that, maybe Duncan still gets it, or maybe it was he borrowed it from a library, while in St Louis my microbiologist brothe stopped getting it or somehow stopped its coming to his place, bulky with so many ads, either a sub.. to that or to Science, which he gets along on, a part of membership in chemists’ or biochemists’ Society. [In left margin: And too many ads from military contractors, he thght - he active in the anti-Viet War movement.] ‡Sunday‡ And speculate Charles might may have bn instrumental in getting Brown to do see Charles helped Br do Berkman’s Prison Memoirs, which with Lenz, Spring & All and the very moving Long/de Cabeza bk Ron Caplan the Frontier Press designer sent here January 71 soon after phoning me from Pittsburgh in the wee hr of New Yrs Day, in the midst of a letter to me feeling like it, wow! . . . And I recall the bks at Fort Sq., first my brother describing what he saw after finding Olson out and his dr open, then next yr or so ‡68 it appears‡ he and Charles carried me up, and a poem* [in left margin: *“The hours, keepers of heaven” I’ll make copies and try to enclose one. Never yet published; Montgomery at Fulcrum Press has it, with tss of look at the park, where I almost included it.] I had with me, done a couple of days before, Charles, instantly taking out his portable, copied right then and there - then the photo of Olson’s table piled with books like Babel, I’m afraid, in this #1, the same # of this which has the poem I did from my visit. ) This fire-in-the-eyes poem strikes me as another good hard straining against the public wall/mass/speed/slow/around ‡?‡ - not read too closely or puzzled over, which the interview and your notes, welcome to me, are antidotes for (budge the wall, imossible/ eyes/ to see/ fire). And in the interview there’s the distinction between productive and exploiting busi-ness (p.24) - well, anyhow there’s fishing

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and overfishing, the white man’s or european’s disease, maybe, trouble, a paradox, and “to care and not to care . . . ” (pages 25, 11–13) and the good of danger in the (common) pursuit of livelihood and (infinite) security. . . . So it strikes me this magazine may be in lieu of and maybe better than (like a book is a fixed thing?) a Guide to the Maximus Poems. Ah! But by now I’m far from being deliberate about reading or writing (. . . anything), over any appreciable length of time, anyway, and the abundance here is so massive my own inertia as to adding to it is quite enormous (and specie or piggybank here is still far away enough, with a lot less exchange and communication, communion, than at my brothers’, for instance.) I can easily get bogged down over my head. . . . Oh well . . . [In left margin: Golden mean point between activity and in- or nonactivity indeterminate, unfathomable.] Regards certainly and thanks Larry L Eigner

Onward outward round and round

‡‡ Guru—Sanskrit for venerable one ‡‡ [The following note begins in the top left margin of the first page; it runs down the first page and finishes on the bottom of the second.] fathar 5 one mag. Still ahd of me; so much here I never know when/if i’ll get to a thng. Thick enough woods I’ve always been a babe in must be part at least what’s led me to take the consideration formed at Walden Pond of traveling light, doing little enough in or off nature, not “lay waste our powers.” (Now I see there’s the country or peasant figure in War and Peace. Platon K.., as well as DHL . . . ) I now am, I’m kind of leery of mining all nooks and crannies of And, wary of overdoing things as Olson’s cave—sunlit rock(s)—or I can’t say how many, as, anyhow, theres no dire danger I guess of Charles being taken for a savior very much, in Chaos and the humptydumpty (grassroots) world we’re in (?), seem to be irrevocably, while he sure was/is a saint in it. (Is guru holy or wise or both ???) [The following note is typed in the left margin under “Wednesday.”] A few wks ago I got word from Sam Charters that Ann will be teaching at Storrs come September, at U. C. Wow! So, as he says, I might see them then, ah! Well,

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I think I did write the Ch..s my puzzlement abt that letter. Not possible to get mother to look among the letters from Corman and Creeley et al. down cellar, as she doesnt rmeber taking em down, insists she didnt. [Below “Friday,” Eigner has typed this note in the left margin near the discussion of the bar mitzvah he attended.] A cousin-in-law, at some time Pres of this temple, sent my mother to me with the bk open to whr Noah boards the Ark, the kid’s passage, portion, sedrah. I took it home, allowed to borrow it—and a week later, just as Dad was nosing his chevvy out of our driveway to return it, a mail-truck brought me a new copy, a surprise gift from my proselytizing relation, who advised me to take it all in little by little over about 2 yrs and later remarked it (the Bibl) (O T ) is a great book, millions of people hv like it [The following note is typed in the left margin of the fifth page and runs to the bottom of the page. It begins next to the quote “I shall save in the way that I shall save.”] So it seems Buber might have got his “I/Thou” most directly from this ch. As 10 verses before Moses when called says “I’m here”—well, I don’t know, likely just “here,” only verbs starting with A 1st person, and o yes, Moses says just one word, no hyh but ?? hgny. Well, so the primary meaning of Elohim isnt “very mighty” but for instance I’ve been helped to some gd poems. (E.g. in Elizabeth Press bk, pp. 11 and 52—52: “justice or purpose among things// i try balance and/ time slips”)

L E T O J O S E P H E I G N E R FA M I LY ∙ 0 2 / 2 7 / 7 5 – 0 3 / 0 1 / 7 5

In this letter, Eigner offers writing advice to his young niece and describes how he spends his days at home in Swampscott, watching TV, following the news, and reading popular novels borrowed from the family’s housekeeper. (Larry Eigner Papers, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)

Thursday eve.. Feb 27 75

Dear Naomi, Adam, Joe and Janet, I neglected putting N..’s poem in my room or out on the porch and I don’t know just where it is now except a little too far in back of my head. Anyway I got a rise out it, certainly. And I’be puzzled a lot of times about what’s outside the sky except more sky and yet how can there be not be something else eventually, on past the more and more sky, something different or else nothing beyond it. (I figure Naomi, it might be better to say “. . . and . . . but . . . ” instead of “, , , but .. but . . . ” Since it would make better sense. And it would get rid of the repetion there, in this place where I’d rather not have it, while maybe you do. Words and the world. Well the conundrum is less paradoxical sometimes since four days ago whe I saw Jacob Bronow- during the 6th episode of The Ascent Of Man when he came to Einstein after Newton say space (as Lieniz had it vs Newton) isn’t everywhere the same, and that light carries information between and this links different parts of the universe, which are various in their measurements but these alway corm with the one velocity of light or information. [In left margin: ab = -yz = c] Well, I’d read the same or about the same before, and if I think enough I’m still pretty bewildered; but Bronowski also said that a clock on the rim of a spun phonograph has now been shown to run slower than one on its center, and to that and my thought that if in one part and another (and all subparts) of any room or piece of equipment or clock ab, pr, yz and so forth didnt equal c the information and/or else relationship of parts would incoherently be very unlike a laser beam and diffuse, is due the enclosed lines I’ve marked #913a, besides which there’s #913b.

LE to Joseph Eigner Family

266

Fine to hear abt the man from U of Kansas at E P A. On nova series was a dramatization based on 2 bks abt Lysenko, of his career, ie of the Soviet attemt, too impatient, at an agricultural breakthough. Quite a sidelight on the hope or expetation in re fusion power etc. And of course the drawbacks of Borland’s . . . successful green revolution have cropped up in what seems a foreshortened time. “The Weather Machine,” a 2-hr documentary from London Monday, for instance showed pollu emission monitoring in St Louis. And now it apprs there were 20 ice ages rather than four, with brief periods of 10.000 yrs between - by this it seems we’re in for another ice age abt now.

Friday

And in a December Time a fellow shopper gave mother a month ago there was a review of the book Supeship. Fine perceptive writing, it says, reminiscent of Conrad. Besides such unpleasant tidings as that quite a few oveloaded super-tanker in the last 7–8 yrs have gone down around off the Cape of Gd Hope spilling abt 10 million barrels of oil per annum into south sea abundant with fish. So I’m hooked up into ye audio/visual aids. While our new Homemaker Mrs MacDonald of Marblehead, who reads “Gothic stories” rather than watch tv (as she said when I asked what shows she likes), last week brought me Joshua, Son of None, a paperback science fiction piece in which a yng shocked surgeon in Dallas who’s idolized JFK, filches some tissue from his trachea a second or two after he dies to clone him with and soon get a millionaire who’d like to be father of a President to finance a Caltech biologist who on the quiet is keeping on with cloning and is too wayout to get NSF funds and to raise the result of the experiment as his own son with the one his wife’s been able to have and three or four adopted sister the number Kennedy had. The rest take on Kennedy’s biography, the variations this writer Nancy Freedman’s coming up with as she goes along or otherwise. After making out he’s Kennedy’s natural son he succeeds brilliantly in matching his career at Harvard Joshua Francis Kellogg joins the “Space Corps” he’s wrtten in his bestselling thesis (proposing the U. S. and Russa make up with China by inviting it to participate in it) and replicating Kenndy’s mettle in the PT Boat rescues a pilot 300 miles from earth in 1985 in the world’s color tv screens entering the disabled sngle-seat craft - on splashdown it’s beginning to dawn on him the whole emergecy is framed. Where I stopped last nght. I’ve lent her for one thing the C S Lewis you bought for me in U.. City. She and



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her 15-yr-old daughter (“a voracious reader”) have rd it and now mother’s into it. from time to time. Salem State mag I sent stuff to in October is taking two poems, two days ago I got 7 back. Maria Gitin’s first book, come 2 or 3 wks ago, still ahead. Dad looked at it on arrival, found a poem to me in there. A tape came from David G.. today - I suspect with verse of mine on it. We’ll see. My own tape is still on the machine. Regards to all and Howard when you see him and Don. Larry Thanks to Sam Borash I’ve got off to Black Sparrow the 143-piece collection Grenier helped assemple and then typed up in 71. [A long note on The Ascent of Man begins in the left margin halfway down the first page and continues through the top half of the next.] Bronowski’s 7th progrm seen Tuesday gave pretty vivid (hstorical, cultural) dpth, reconciling enough, to resources etc. situation; program linking Am/Frnch revolutions and the industrial, Wordsworth’s nature and Joule’s energy United (“ . . . for me/ Nature was all in all” and “the grand agents of Nature are indestructible”) Darwin’s grandfathers Erasmus D and Josiah Wedgewood were frinds in Birmingham or maybe Bronowski said Manchestor, both in this grp of inventive and searhing types. . . . which I’m thus learning about [In the left margin of the second page, Eigner has typed these notes on the novel he was reading.] One thing space corps does is it hauls industrial waste into “Jupiter’s gravity field”, which then hrls it into th sun’s corona. Saturday: Well, Joshua gimmicky and operatic maybe soap-operish enough. Joshua . . . (Dell, 1973) bannered as: “The startling new novel that surpasses the andromeda strain”

L E T O A R T H U R M A C FA R L A N D ∙ 0 1 / 0 7 / 8 0

Writing to his longtime friend in Friendship, Maine, Eigner describes his new living situation in Berkeley, California. After an unsatisfying attempt to live with other adults with disabilities through the independent living movement, Eigner’s younger brother Richard bought a house that Eigner lived in with fellow poets who were his caregivers. (Larry Eigner Papers, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)

Monday Jan 7 80

Dear Arthur, Wow!—here since Dec..1, with Bob Grenier, Kathleen Frumkin, his 12-yr-old Amy and at times her 8-yr-old Ezra, and so far it’s seemed one long party, just abt. (5 rooms here, 3 or 4 upstrs under the eaves, a ‡bed‡room‡ in basement besides big laundry room, storage room and big garage, quite a back yrd with a 1-flat 3-room “Cottage” bringing up its rear, part of the yard mulched, a garden, and a bike shed or small garage off the front corner of the yrd, flanking back (SW) corne of house after gate to back stairs and yard, the place built we hear by a carpenter and wd-be sea-captain, if or if not that has anything to do with the wide “big front doors,” to cite HMS Pinafore, so there are some, 2 or 3, wall-cabinets and other intriguingly fit areas, spaces, off the kitchen, and the shipshape-appearing strcase.) Bob invited Creeley and his wife (the one now from NZ down under, easygoing ie affable and steady she seemed) to stay with us and they did, 7–8 days rather than 5, as Dec 31, last Monday, their 12-yr-old VW broke down, and it took a few days before they cd get a new car (VW agn after all) and head back to Albuquerque. Bob edited Creeley’s last Scribner’s book in 75 (Scr failed to mention him somehow, and rearranged poems - now anyway Creeley pblishes with New Directions (et al?) He still teaches, in the Fall of the year, at U of NY in Buffalo.) Dec 27–30 in 3 of the big SF Hotels was the M L A Convention, and Sat. and Sunday Rch took me, we sat in at 2 lecture panels and at 3 others, including the Creeley/Duncan/Warren Tallman thng Sat. afternoon, he left me to go to panels in other hotels. Larking various ways. (So many a radio program I’ve missed) Bob worked at parking garage like every week-end (he’s quit,



LE to Arthur MacFarland 269

though, New Yrs his last day) Sat. nght we drove back , Kathln and I going to a poetry reading at the Hyatt (Snyder, Whalen, Bly, Brautigan, L Stryck, Whalen came and sd hello after wrds, whn we, abt to leave, had gone to the back), while Bob went for a 2nd job interview at the St. Francis. He’ll be here at least a yr but has to go on looking for a tching job, doesnt want to drop out of the job market and be lost sight of. . . . I’m at bedroom desk in front (NE) crner of hs. In the livingrm bck of me (S/E crnr) I’ve a real big dsk whc eg has partitioned drawers on its left by git luck, so I can really have a propped/open notebk or two agn, or more’n evr, and under the front windows are wooden boxes tilted back, crates Rchie varnished and sectioned abt 17 months ago, so they’re virtual racks for cardbrd folders (files), those sections anyway which I’ve now cut the depth of in half by putting 6-pack cartons in bottom of, besides those made shallow 16 moons ago by slats between the boards. Ah Rob..Crusoe, ah clevernss etc. (Ok feasible with 6-packs. In a diffrnt situation, Crelley got drunk Wednesday at and maybe after lunch in SF with Brautigan, came home and then we went to a Me restaurant.) While I’m always at if not close to my limits. And have to rely on memory a gd deal (still), even as anybody. As poor as it’s getting. Well, today I do seem to recollect, pretty certainly, that in my last letter I listed some of the tss I’ve no lack of here, and/or somethng tss Leif has already, so you wdnt get or ask for copies of those. However it is I’ve the impression I can obtain xeroxes more readily frm you than Kansas, maybe solely because I get around to writing there less readily and often. Well, if you’re willing to bill me for any copying (and on a semi annual basis rather than, when it is done, yes), I’d feel better and wdnt hesitate between you and Kansas. There’s that factotor in there somew. (For 4 wks I’ve had $21.00 on me, pressed on me by R, no chance of disbursement, while eventually I’ll reimburse Bob for Wednesday’s supper.) I’d hv to pay Kansas by the way, for more ph..stats of anything already copied in past yrs. Tss Gitin had to sell, at an Oakland bkseller’s now, the bksller has xeroxed and Bob will get copies soon, ##417 and 419 among them, and maybe all later ones that I miss (frm the list Bob made, maybe not) ##140 and 269 I’ll have from Oakland too. I’ll pay and/or sell thngs to the bk dealer. 384, 268, 128 and 129 no, not nrly Thinking to do little again, I (oops!) left yr inventory list back east. [In left margin, typed perpendicular to main text: Oh, you’ve inventory list, rght? Yeh, snafu, e.g. ew-fg dated bfr ea-eu, Best maybe t get pre-66 tss frm Knsas.] Hmph! Well, we cd as well say what’s missing here, all of it I guess, as you tell me agn all you have One problem eterne, how much listing to go through. Happy new yr, Bt merci bein sur. Bt tout Larry [signed in pencil]

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[The following note is typed upside down on top of first page.] PS Oh, you say you’ve ##1–705 wth gaps. So I’ll get some at least frm Kansas most, in a few bunches, all from Kansas . . .

L E T O C L AY T O N E S H L E M A N ∙ 0 5 / 2 1 / 8 2

Writing to fellow poet and editor Eshleman, Eigner describes his participation in group activities for people with disabilities and relays information about friends in common. Eigner was a reader of Eshleman’s Caterpillar and Sulfur, two important journals of postmodern art and poetry, and one of his letters to Eshleman was published in Sulfur 14, 1985, pp. 140–43. (Clayton Eshleman Papers, Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego) Dear Clayton,

Friday May 21 82

Ah! Embarras du richesse - mltiple choices so much x yrs (at age 7 or 8, maybe it was, I wanted to read everything in the folks’ bookcase, out of curiosity, then too trying to make out in life, be viable, ego/altruistically ‡of course, as in that sufficiently poetic quote of M L King’s frm Hillel‡ like in physiotherapy and any time else)! And it seems the more time out I take or rope I give myself the worse I am when I come back to the mail, books, mag..s . . . (urged though not nagged to by Bob, Kathleen and my brother and s..-in-law I’ve at last taken “Wilderness Project” trips with groups of the disabled here, last month to Calistoga where we each had a 20-minut glider flight near Mt. St. Helena and last weekend, 14th-15th to Yosemite, apparently John Muir coming out here to big country and trying to take in, be adeqate to abt all he faced, and/or T Roosevelt, Pinchot and pple since whenever, got to be pretty different, or rather was early on, from Thoreau, yah, quite a few Nat’l Parks, due ultimately I guess to large population, critical mess/ mass of it hence “goods” and services, only one Waldon Pond while also Shaker house, New Harmony et al. likewise pre-Civill Warr beyond slave states, and (?) still nowaday the Amish and others and bible belts including somewhat the KKK as well as Americans who settle in the West Bank and think they need to show the Arabs they belong there for 2,000 years) Maybe not oversimplistic to say I’m lazy. [In left margin: Check came. Another srprise! No #3 has yet come, I’ll let you know if tmorrw or nxt wk - hope to get no more than 2 copies.] Considerable dither I’ve bn in though, this morning and a few times before, the past wks, to subscribe or not to. But loaded shelves left and right are still here, and 7 more books have come from Jim Weil at Elizabeth Press for instance. So many suprises. Though on the other hand, what bread to put on the water, where? how

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much? (Glad anyway I gave Citizens for a Better Environment $2 when pair of em came to the door afternoon before last, I’m not sorry, it’s a bird out the window, though something puzzling. I doubt I’ll stick any cash in this env. . . kind of riky and risque. Spent nothing at Yosemite, food et al paid for May 2 or so . . . Ahem!) Brother’s money . . . quite a mortgage on this place. When the check came from Cal.. Tech, I thought at first of tearing it up but then saw the reply envelope and the form to be filled out for the IRS, something new to me, I figured I better ask abt it, was curious anyway. Phoned brother, he was away a couple of days. Bob when he got back from someplace that nght said it was a paychck. I think I had The Loom once, why not now I wonder. Kelly’s ’79 bk still down from shelf, not looked at yet! Sure baffling to find frnds unreliable, even new acquaintance, whater may be the cause(s) for dropping out or anythng. Others besides myslf of crs feel more or less erratic, know their own limits, and are surprised at the failings of other ppl, memory lapses etc., let alone breach of promise, robbery, assault . . . Disappointing and beyond that pretty much different from unpredicted weather or a bump in a good road. Like, I’m surprised, also, at Jonathan Wms being miffed at having certain poems turned down - well, anyway unless/until I recall how much effort you and he and so many others have put into publication, all along. Long time since I have any, except when somebody asks for stuff, and there have ever bn many diversions from whatever spilled milk (while eg the old work ethic I still have some of, other pple’s interest too, led me to inquire abt the bk tss sent Circle Press in Surrey bck in 82, every once in a while, till it came out last yr after 9 1/2 yrs), and every day’s a new day. I just fell bad abt death, hunger (as in Soma-lia, say) and all, besides of crs quandary and confusion. Neglect of solar power . . . scarcity of Walden Pods . . . (the indian-summer in my head too, somewhat, or words seeming less sbstantial than 20 yrs back, though why have anything last forever unless it might do that, I wonder, and I still have some inclination to write if I can manage to) Cid continues in a bad way, his business back in Boston does, by his own account and Jim Weil’s I’ve heard nothing of his being in or coming to SF. I spoke of his situation last summer, at that, and in your Sept.. 18th leter you told me your impression that Cid was expecting an awful lot from “aandful of people” and was prone to “sit on his can” I was surprised at what you said and hardly if at all knew what to make of it (this month I wonder, quite a bit maybe, what’s to be done abt your working 25 hrs a week on sulfur, raising dough and all, wow, or how much action do you need or, as may be likely, without the mag.. as ancor wd you feel too many different thngs that better be seen to, or need doing . . . ) [In left margin: That’s me, anyway Wow, Mother Teresa!] Well, Sept/Oct/November Cid



LE to Clayton Eshleman 273

was in Iowa City at Iowa U as director of the International Writers’ Workshop there, I guess that’s it, the I..W..W.. (hm) I hope anyway you havent come dow with any bug. For instance. We’re all in good hlth now (Ezra’s collarbone, busted during baseball practice whn he reached for a fly ball and fell is on the mend, he’ll stop wearing the brace 2 or 3 wks hence, after six weeks) Regards Larry [signed in pencil] [The following note is typed perpendicular to the main text in left margin, at the top of the first page.] What you say abt R..Johnson seems [words cut off] to store in my hd and chck out if I cd. I got to his pages some as they were on the wall and he lectured on them (so my attention-span was stretched out some) and they were “grounded” in physics etc., thing I keep wondering abt and going over.

L E T O “ D . . R F O L K S ( M I K E , PA U L ) ” ∙ 1 0 / 0 5 / 9 0 – 1 0 / 0 7 / 9 0

Eigner’s habit of replying to anyone who mailed him books or journals extended into his later years. In this letter, he demonstrates his awareness of the emerging climate crisis. It is typed on the back of a Xerox copy of the first page of his essay “Integration Interchange” (Areas 43). Typing the date, Eigner hit the 8 instead of the 9 on his keyboard, making the year 1980. It has been corrected according to the date of the newspaper article he mentions in the letter. (Courtesy of Larry Eigner Papers, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas) 2338 McGee Avenue Berkeley Cal.. 94703 Friday-Saturdy

Oct 5–7 90

D..r folks (Mike, Paul), The poem and stories in RR #1 are enjoyable enough, and the imagination always feeds on, is fueled by, facts or purported facts, starting with firsthand ones and changing the others into experienced enough ones, integrating as many as it can. Maybe even now it can have help us to get along with (or beside?) realities, problems we can get none too far from. While it may need too much detail to do that after all (see I, end of p. 43, over), what with over 5.2 billion people on this earth by now, too much CO2, methane and CFCs, likely as not enough material goods to block community by for one thing anyway choking imagination in any number of places. and so, then, even too much poetry, fiction, music . . . Ah well. Everything’s serious and everything’s a game - and just today I’ve realized that if a game is serious or purposeful enough it can take your mind off things that, however necessary, you can’t do or have (chess or checkers may not be, seeing how much/what you can do indoors without light, partly considering acid rain, or seeing how long you can just as well do without a bath or wear the same clothes so as to do less laundry and thus save some water, besides time, maybe). Not to make too much of th “Think globally act locally,” but we can aim for too much, as if we were immortal (still, though, I guess I wdn’t run a gas-powered car ad any more than a car ad, as impactical and dependant as I’ve been all through life - I can’t tell when I cd use a new typewriter ribbon, by the way, because of cerebral palsy, wch has me typing with only one finger, and, now I’m 63, I hardly go fast at the keyboard or pound on it any more). Anyway, since seeing your statement of purpose a couple weeks ago, and your



LE to “D..r folks (Mike, Paul)” 275

reprints from old writers, I’ve thought you might like to use or take a look at the enclosed. (A writer friend’s one of these is, thinking my spacings wch have come from the accuracy of the moment significant, even the indents in all their various degrees, he’s reproduced many on his machine, from my tss.) Kind of too bad I can’t follow through with anybody for long at all, or don’t feel up to it, at least when it comes to reaing/writing But good luck to everybody, to us all. Larry Eigner [The following note begins at the bottom of this page, continues in two blocks typed perpendicular to the main text in left margin, and wraps around the top of the page.] Looks enough like we either shut down or pretty quickly phase out for at least some while xyz% of all production, and buying/selling/advertising, thus making for vast unemployment and so on, or letting the sea level come up for instance. Though when you hear abt thngs like hydrogen-powered cars and looking into the possibilities of getting algae to produce, utilizing solar energy, sunlight, great amounts of oil and coal, both [illegible correction in pencil] of news come to me ove the radio this week, or anyway that more salt in sea air from warmer faster winds whipping up waves cd cause more clouds of the reflective rather than entrapping variety and so “Ease Global Warming” as says the hdline on p. B9 of Tuesday’s NYTimes (Oct 2 90). you think again, somewhat, that where there’s life there’s hope.

L E TO RU T H P OL A N SK Y BLO OM ∙ 0 8 / 0 3 / 9 2 – 0 8 / 0 5 / 9 2

In this letter of condolence to his cousin, Eigner recalls his memories of the deceased. As Eigner mentions here, his typing has become more erratic with age, and the letter contains numerous penciled corrections; these have been incorporated when legible. The letter is typed on stationery that Eigner has turned upside down; in the bottom left corner, which would be the top right if the paper was right side up, there are the initials LE with intricate leaves twining around them; “Larry Eigner” is printed below the initials. Next to the initials, Eigner has typed: “A box of this stationary ye gay editor of a homsxl (partly) little mag and small press gave me for my 60th birthday 5 yrs back, but I’ve hardly used it any, it looks a dmn sight too fancy to me.” The poems inserted by Eigner can be found in The Collected Poetry (3: 1172). (Courtesy of Larry Eigner Papers, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas)



Monday Aug.. 3 92

Dear Ruth, Joe phoned Thursday, from St Louis giving me the news of Maishe’s dth (and your address, I hope I’ve the town right, Richie confirmed it Thrsday the day of the funeral, I learned on asking. I thght of writing Millie some minutes after we hung up - I’m always frgetting some things or others, to do. I’ve asked Richie for the Thom’s River address, I guess he has it. Oh well. (Time does march on for sure - here it is nearly the middle of next week.) Again I’ve bn thinking what crossed my mind when Uncle Ike died after quite a few yrs of taking a good number of pills daily and driving around the U S and Mexico: Whether an old acquaintance, a familiar, is within arm’s reach or 100x miles away or 5 or 10 feet under, he or she’s in your head (memory or mind). Often or not - or eventually, maybe, hardly ever, as nothing lasts forever, is infinite. Which seems ok in the end. Years are enough, if not some minutes, day, weeks or moons. (Uncle Ike had brought me a typewriter from his basement in Connecticut a couple of mnths before, for instance, so I got a little poem—

LE to Ruth Polansky Bloom 277



Sept 30 73

the typewriter of a man recently dead what spirits in our heads all we depend on the same day – a brave materialist sport

I forget Maishe’s age - 7 or 8 yrs more than mine maybe. I vaguely remember more or less following him, around, or more or less wanting to anyway, looking up to/at him from the floor before I got wheels, a “walker” with a seat at the back and 4 swivels. About the time of the Polansky golden wedding gala in the Salem shul, sort of - I recall being underfoot there or, say, among people’s legs., I sure trying to listen to what was being said halfway up to the ceiling and nearly always of course not getting a word, or hardly any.[In left margin: Tuesday] And Maishe’s 2 places in Peabody, the first one in a Vets’ housing project. Then of course there were the times he drove me down to you on Thom’s River and back to Swampscott again, in 68; and the weekend in 83 (March/ the beginning of Prsach( in Thom’s River, M a 2nd time after coming to see me and Bob G.. read in St Mark’s at 10th and 2nd, drove up to NYC again, 2 or 3 days later, to take me to their place, the shop, and the dr’s near it, as my tongue was still sore, I’d accidentally bitten it during supper just before the reading at a Ukrainian restaurant across the street

278

LE to Ruth Polansky Bloom

from the church. (the bitten tongue was preoccupying and so pretty surely I read the better for it, we’ve been more nervous if it hadn’t been sore). Memo-rable too; pretty vividly so, at that, has been the weekend in the Hawthorne by Salem common 25 moons ago, yrs And it must’ve bn abt 10 mnths back you were here with a friend. One guy living here likes to take me out on walks, pushing me along, one place we go to is the “Crntral” public library nearby, to see what there (3 of my books for instance and Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg and so much else) - no good to think of getting to an awful lot, be too greedy, eager. I’ve bn borrowing Dickens’ O.. C.. Shop ever since Feb.. or March, taking out one of the 2 edns when I have to return the other one, and am a little over a 3rd of the way through. We’re all doing ok. Here’s hoping you are too, -Larry [signed in pencil] Wednesday Rich was here last night, but I ddnt ask a 3rd time abt the T River address, didnt want to - he’s busy as usual no doubt, or more. I think I’ll get xeroxes of this sheet in a couple of day -one for you, one for Millie if you thing she’d like some of the above, one for Paul (did I see him at St Mark’s in 83?) - and send this piece of sta.. to the U.. of Kansas Library that collects my tss, poems, . . . letters. (The curator there, a good one, wd also like to have lttrs pple write me. Ok to send there what you might mail me, I imagine It will nvr even make the back page. But we’ll see. Let me know if you’ve any objections. No big deal, and I may not get arnd to it. Enclosed poems 1687-m (the no.s just tags to make records by, as before 1 ‡July 66‡ I did 800–900 or more‡ appeared a few wks bck in a little mag from Grand Isle Vt. 1687 is frm the plane ride to E. Boston and 1687b tries to describe my room at the Hawthorne Hotel. [In left margin, next to the poems, Eigner has typed the following note.] -pound/pound- ‡Typing less and less I grow unfamiliar wth the keyboard and, not looking at it enough, hit wrong keys more and more, ah! Time was, I was at the machine enough so i cd type in the semi-darkness of twilight with one finger, sure thing,‡

Works Cited ARCHIVES Athanor Collection (PCMS-003), the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Amiri Baraka Papers (Collection 491), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Paul Blackburn Papers (MSS 4), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. Tom Clark, Paris Review Archives (MS 55), Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Cid Corman Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Robert Creeley Papers (M662), Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Robert Duncan Papers (PCMS-0110), the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Larry Eigner Papers (MSS 1974–0001), Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Library. Larry Eigner Papers (MS 39), Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Larry Eigner Papers (M0902), Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Clayton Eshleman Papers (MSS 21), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. Denise Levertov Papers (M601), Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Jackson Mac Low Papers (MSS 180), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. Ron Silliman Papers (MSS 75), Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. Wild Dog Collection, 1961–2011, SHSU Special Collections, Newton Gresham Library, Sam Houston State University.

PUBLISHED SOURCES Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. Vintage, 1997.

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Contributors Stephanie Anderson is an assistant professor of American literature at Duke Kunshan University. Her interviews and essays have appeared in Chicago Review, nonsite.org, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and elsewhere. Her most recent book of poetry is If You Love Error So Love Zero (Trembling Pillow Press, 2018). You can read more of her work at www.octoberinapril.com. Jennifer Bartlett is the author of four books of poetry. She coedited Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Bartlett founded the AWP Disabled and D/deaf Writers Caucus. She also cofounded the Elevator Action Group, which advocates for disabled people having access to NYC Transit. She also cofounded and is the programming director of Zoeglossia, a nonprofit for poets with disabilities. She is currently writing a biography of Larry Eigner. Seth Forrest chairs the Department of Arts and Humanities at Coppin State University in Baltimore. He writes on poetry and poetics from early modernism to the present. His current projects focus on noise in modern and contemporary art and poetry. George Hart is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His publications include articles on Larry Eigner, Kenneth Rexroth, Ronald Johnson, and William Carlos Williams, and he is the author of Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness (Fordham University Press, 2013). He is currently working on a study of Larry Eigner’s postmodern ecopoetics. Marie Landau writes and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She holds a master of arts in literature, with a focus on mid- to late twentieth-century American poetry, from the University of New Mexico. She makes her living as a grant writer and writes poetry as a creative pursuit. A 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in Spry, SOFTBLOW, Litbreak, District Lit, and elsewhere. She can be found on the web at marielandau.com.

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Contributors

Andrew Rippeon is the author of Letters to Jargon: The Correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams, which was published by the University of Alabama Press in September 2019. He specializes in recent and contemporary poetry and poetics, with emphases on print-material culture and sound studies. Currently, he teaches in the College Writing Program at Davidson College. Linda Russo is the author of To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light (Subito Press) and three books of poetry, most recently Participant (Lost Roads Press). She coedited Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press) and Geopoetics in Practice (Routledge). She teaches at Washington State University on the ceded lands of the Nez Perce Tribe and also directs EcoArtsonthePalouse.com. Jonathan Skinner is a poet, field recordist, editor, and critic, best known for founding the journal ecopoetics. His poetry collections and chapbooks include Chip Calls (Little Red Leaves, 2014), Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He has published numerous essays at the intersection of poetry, ecology, activism, landscape, and sound studies. Skinner teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Barrett Watten is a professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2004 René Wellek Prize), Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016), and numerous volumes of poetry, including Frame (1971–1990), Bad History, and Progress/Under Erasure. With Lyn Hejinian, he coedited A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, and with Carrie Noland, Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009). He was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany in 2005 and is working on a book on transnational modernism @ 1945. Recent longer poems appear in Lana Turner and Chant de la Sirène.

Index Ackerman, Ondrea E., on Eigner and Grenier, 11–12 Alcheringa (US journal), 262 Allison, Raphael, on Eigner, 14–15 Alpert, Barry, 100; mentioned in letters, 259 Andrews, Bruce, 42 Ascent of Man, The (television program). See Bronowski, Jacob Athanor (US journal), 100; mentioned in letters, 259. See also Calhoun, Douglas Baraka, Amiri. See Jones, LeRoi Barthes, Roland, 72, 87 Basho, 233 Bernstein, Charles, 42 Bernstein, Leonard, 134–36, 137–38 Berry, Wendell, 180 Big Venus (UK journal), 252 Bishop. Elizabeth, 5 Black Mountain College, 14, 50, 96, 180; mentioned in letters, 234 Black Mountain Review, 14, 126, 132; mentioned in letters, 226 Black Mountain (school), 19, 50, 69, 76, 85, 123, 124, 173 Blackburn, Paul, and tape recording, 78–79; mentioned in letters, 235 Blake, Robert, 246 Borash, Sam, 267 Bowering, George, 236, 237, 240, 241 Bradbury, Malcolm, 233 Brautigan, Richard, 269 Brecht, Berthold, 230 Bronowski, Jacob, 265, 267 Brown, Christy, 5

Browning, Robert, 246 Buber, Martin, 260, 264 Cage, John, 81, 179–80; mentioned in letters, 230, 259 Calder, Joseph, mobiles of, 143–44, 161, 167n2 Calhoun, Douglas, 100, 165; mentioned in letters, 259 Callahan, Harry, 237 Carson, Rachel, 63, 192 Caterpillar (US journal), 245, 248 Charters, Ann, 258, 263 Charters, Samuel, 247, 263 Child Life Magazine, 2 Circle Press (UK publisher), 272 City Lights (US publisher), 236 Civil Rights movement, 63 Clark, Tom, correspondence with Eigner, 144, 145, 148, 161–62, 164–65, 167 Clinton, Alan Ramón, on Eigner, 10 Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, The, as archive, 147, 166, 193; editing of, 88–89, 109–10, 111–12. See also Fama, Steven Commentary (magazine), 245 Contact (Canadian journal), 220, 223 Coolidge, Clark, 3, 89, 97, 98, 99; Eigner’s correspondence with, 102–03; mentioned in letters, 255 Corman, Cid, 3, 5, 29, 50, 95, 124, 137; on Eigner’s poetry, 143; mentioned in letters, 224, 226, 227, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237, 264, 272. See also This Is Poetry Corso, Gregory, 236 Crane, Hart, 6–7; mentioned in letters, 235, 245

292

Index

Creeley, Robert, 3, 6, 19, 23, 43, 70, 98; and projective verse, 30–31; “Sound” (poem), 188–89; mentioned in letters, 226, 227, 229, 232, 234, 235, 240, 261, 263, 268, 269 Cummings, E.E., 4, 113; mentioned in letters, 229, 235 cybernetics, 94, 96–97, 108. See also Wiener, Norbert Dante Alighieri, 232, 246 Davidson, Michael, “Missing Larry,” 6, 7–8, 9, 70, 108, 125, 193 Debussy, Claude, 134 Derrida, Jacques, 86 Dickinson, Emily, 109, 110 Dorn, Ed, 19, 23, 26–27, 28–29; Gunslinger, 256; “What I See in The Maximus Poems,” 50 Douglass, Frederick, 55, 60, 62, 66; mentioned in letters, 246 Duende (US journal), 130, 133; mentioned in letters, 247 Duncan, Robert, 3, 6, 79; on Olson 132; mentioned in letters, 235, 236, 243, 244, 257, 260, 262 Earth Read Out (newsletter), 252 Earth Ship (UK journal), 162, 163, 164; mentioned in letters, 256. See also Hemensley, Nick Eigner, Bessie (mother), background, 1; as mother, 2; mentioned in letters, 220, 237, 239–40, 241, 242, 258, 260, 263 Eigner, Edwin (cousin), 227 Eigner, Israel (father), 237, 241, 255, 261 Eigner, Janet (sister-in-law), 256 Eigner, Joseph (brother), 60; mentioned in letters, 233, 242, 256, 276; political views of, 262 Eigner, Larry, and ableism, 20, 22,

44–45n23, 77, 127, 130, 160, 193, 196, 214n8; air travel of, 56, 60, 62, 160; and ambient poetics, 177–78, 186; archive of, 145, 151–57; and aurality vs. orality, 69–70; and biophilia, 195, 200, 213n5; birth of, 1; and broadcast media, 81, 124–25, 127, 157, 178; cerebral palsy of, 1, 2, 34, 44n1, 45n3, 47n23, 53, 70, 76, 85, 124, 145, 160, 193; childhood of, 2; and composition by field, 3, 12, 20, 44, 76, 91, 94–95, 195, 200; correspondence of, 88, 100; and ecology, 55, 56, 62, 66, 171, 173, 177, 180, 193, 206, 211–12; and ecopoetics, 8–9, 56, 62–63, 66, 102, 171, 192, 193, 201, 212, 213n2; education of, 3, 95, 250, 260; and exterioception, 20, 27; and fractal poetics, 101; on global warming, 274–75; in Gloucester, 262; and Jewish tradition, 248; and Language poetry/writing, 40, 42; and materiality of language, 41; and math, 171, 173, 184, 189; on McGee Avenue house, 268, 269; and moment form, 29, 73; and music, 72–73, 79, 84, 124, 134–35, 137–38, 171, 177–80; on Olson, 128–29; and phenomenology, 22, 26, 29, 37, 41, 43; physical abilities of, 4–5, 20, 51, 53, 86, 96, 112, 181; poems in letters, 99; poems, dating of, 148–50, 151 (see also Collected Poems of Larry Eigner); and poetic grounding, 54, 63; poetry readings of, at Franconia College, 97, 256, poetry readings of, at St. Mark’s, 277, poetry readings of, at University of Missouri, 256; and projective verse, 23, 29, 30, 44, 72, 200; and prostheses, 69, 79, 85, 86, 124; and proxemics, 200, 204, 211 (see also Hall, Edward T.); and publishing, 144, 146; and radio, 79, 81, 161, 178; and sensory casting, 147, 157, 160–63, 167; and



Index 293

soundscape, 178–79, 184–86, 190, 195 (see also Schafer, R. Murray); and tape recording, 130; thalamus surgery of, 77, 228, 239, 240; typing of, 3, 77, 100, 109, 133, 228, 236, 239–40, 278; and walking, 180–82, 186; Wilderness Project, participation in, 271 Eigner, Larry, poems quoted in full: “3hour,” 27; “4th 4th,” 79–80; “Again dawn,” 38; “at one day,” 106; “big wind in the tree tops,” 177; “birds / forest,” 199–200; “Branches,” 35; “calligraphy / typewriters,” 112; “close / far,” 102; “cloud the wind,” 185–86; “clouds complicated as stars,” 73–74; “damp breeze through,” 182; “different times,” 158; “dirty / leftover newspaper,” 39; “do it yrself,” 75; “down the street in the sunlight,” 32; “dream-like / varieties,” 93; “enough new,” 165–66; “everything like,” 172; “explanation / tangent,” 207; “Frederick Douglass,” 61–62; “from the sustaining air,” 77–78; “go and sleep outdoors,” 200–201; “going out,” 41; “his life,” 192; “horizon,” 101; “I think we’re doomed,” 172–73; “imagination heavy with,” 107–8, “indeterminacy of love,” 158; “Indoor outdoor life,” 41; “it’s just a,” 174–75; “live bird which,” 191; “Looks like / a tall bird,” 92; “news hungry,” 104–5; “no more poetry,” 41; “Of all the pleasant times in May,” 2; “oil at St.a Barbara,” 209–10; “OR FEAR ITSELF,” 82–83; “roofs / leveled,” 184; “rustle / emptiness,” 187; “silence lost,” 153–54; “some lines I don’t understand,” 159; “sound horizon,” 173; “stand on one foot,” 36; “still,” 183; “sun filled,” 176; “the birds / sing,” 209; “the dying man’s car,” 92; “The Fine Life,” 71; “the language of birds,” 197; “The

midnight birds remind me of day,” 78, 195–96; “the shadow of the tree,” 25; “the sunrise,” 201; “trees / light,” 20; “twig stick,” 151–52; “trail nest upper tree,” 199; “what a moment,” 163; “wind huge outside since when,” 189–90; “what time is,” 201; “what’s a tree to a bird,” 203–4; “wood porch” 181 Eigner, Larry, poems and books mentioned or quoted in part: Air the Trees, 55; “among the birds to sing,” 60; Another Time in Fragments, 35, 37; “As soon as you lay down,” 58, “Brink,” 231; circuits, 165, 166; “CALCUTTA,” 65; “For the Long Season 2,” 198; “formations in the blue,” 249; “foxes stepping,” 64; From the Sustaining Air, 221; “health / holy,” 260; “hit em brass,” 58; “justice or purpose among things,” 264; “Last day on earth,” 60; Lined Up Bulk Senses, 155, 164; Look at the Park, 82, 85, 262; “made,” 265; “mirror window beside,” 278; “more car doors opening than,” 208; Murder-Talk (play), 130–32, 139; On My Eyes, 53, 71, 123, 237; “only the thought,” 212; “settling out setting out,” 251; “Small, flightless birds,” 63; “so many cars,” 246, 248; “the closed system,” 260; “The Confederacy, you have to” 58; “The hours, keepers of heaven,” 262; “the illusion of something,” 206; “the light various,” 265; “the music, the rooms,” 64–65; “the shadow of the tree,” 203; “the steep town,” 58; “the white shirts there,” 136; “theatre charged with,” 56–58; “Things in the world happen,” 245; Things Stirring Together or Far Away, 55; “through a small window, yes,” 278; “to open your ears,” 204–5; what you hear, 164 (see also Fisher, Allen); “Whitman’s

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Index

Eigner, Larry (continued) cry at starvation,” 65–66; World and Its Streets, Places, The, 55, 171 Eigner, Louis (uncle) 233, 234 Eigner, Richard (brother), 3; mentioned in letters, 228, 229, 233, 235, 269, 271, 276, 278 Ellis, Havelock, 254 Enslin, Theodore, 255 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 266 Eschleman, Clayton, 245 Evergreen Review (US journal), 131 Fabilli, Mary, 247 Fama, Steven, 113–14 Fathar (US journal), 263 Faville, Curtis, email exchange with Watten, 110–11; on typewriter, 113; mentioned in letters, 259 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 231 Ferrini, Vincent, 224 Fisher, Allen, on design of What You Hear, 170n27 Foley, Jack, 5, 42, 139 Forester, Ina, Eigner’s letter to, 147, 157, 162 Forrest, Seth, on Eigner in The New American Poetry, 15 Franklin, George, 255 Freifeld, Larry, 252 Frumkin, Kathleen, 5, 42; mentioned in letters, 268, 269, 271 Garrison, William Lloyd, 246 Gaydos, Rebecca, on Eigner, 13 Ginsberg, Allen, 235, 241 Gitin, David, 146, 150; mentioned in letters, 267, 269 Gitin, Maria, 146, 150; mentioned in letters, 267 Goodell, Larry, 130, 140; mentioned in letters, 247

Goodman, Mitchell, 232 Gravendyk, Hillary, on Eigner, 12–13, 193, 211–12 Grenier, Robert, 5, 42, 97, 110, 181; mentioned in letters, 259, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272 Hall, Edward T., 195, 199. See also Eigner, Larry, and proxemics Haraway, Donna, 192 Harper’s (magazine), 231, 238 Hart, George, “Postmodernist Nature/ Poetry,” 6, 8–9, 177 Hawley, Robert, 247 Hayles, Katherine N., 91, 98 Hejinian, Lyn, 87 Hemensley, Nick, 162. See also Earth Ship Hirschman, Jack, 235 Hitler, Adolph, 247 Holland, Joyce, 255 Hoff, Diane, 233 Ives, Charles, 246 Jabes, T and Edmond, 258 Jakobson, Roman, 87 Jargon Society (publisher), 123, 138. See also Williams, Jonathan Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 247 Johnson, Ronald, 273 Jones, James, 227, 230 Jones, Hettie Cohen, 49, 53, 55, 60, 63 Jones, LeRoi, 3, 49 Joshua, Son of None (science fiction novel), 266 Kaufman, Walter 260, 261 Keats, John 234, 245, 246 Kelly, Robert, 234, 272 Kemp, Lysander, 247–48 Kerouac, Jack, 230, 232, 235 Kimberly, Nick, 252 Kocik, Robert, 181



Index 295

Koehler, Michael, 259 Kulchur (US journal), 228 Lampe, Keith, 252 Language poetry/writing, 6, 87–88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 101, 123, 173. See also Eigner, Larry Laughlin, James, mentioned in letters, 233, 236, 240 Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Lindsay Waggoner, on Eigner, 13–14 Layton, Irving, 235 Lazer, Hank, on Eigner, 11 Leif, Irving P., 269 Leopold, Aldo, 200 Levertov, Denise, 3, 6, 59, 138; mentioned in letters, 232, 233, 235 Life (magazine), 239 Lincoln, Abraham, 246 Loewinsohn, Ron, 233 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 232 Lorts, Jack, 227 Lowell, Robert, 5, 50 Luck, Jessica Lewis, on Eigner, 9 Mac Low, Jackson, 89; mentioned in letters, 230, 238; “23rd Light Poem for Larry Eigner,” 251 Macy Conferences, 91 Magnificent Obsession (film), 124, 128, 139 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 133; mentioned in letters, 230 Martin, John, 251, 256 Massachusetts Hospital School, 247, 249 McClure, Michael, 249, 252 McFarland, Arthur, 233, 238, 239 McLuhan, Marshall, 79, 96 Mead, Margaret, 245 Meyer, Tom, 255 Minelli, Frank, 258 Modern Language Association (MLA), 268 Montgomery, Stuart, 262

New American Poetry, The (anthology), 19, 94, 95, 125, 138, 150; mentioned in letters, 231, 233 New American poetry (school), 19, 49, 69, 91 New Directions (publisher), 233, 240, 268 New Mexico Quarterly, The (US journal), 248 Niedecker, Lorine, 146 NOLA Express (newspaper), 255 Nomad (US journal), 230 Noose (US journal), 252, 253 NOVA (television program), 266 Olson, Charles, 3, 5, 6, 19, 23, 54, 56, 66– 67, 126; “The Kingfishers,” 88, 96–97; The Maximus Poems, 23, 24–25, 50, 51– 52, 54, 57, 85; projective verse, 3–4, 50, 72, 85, 95, 127, 128, 180, 194; “Proprioception,” 20; “Special View of History,” 234; and tape recording, 126–27; and typewriter, 95–96; mentioned in letters, 224, 227, 232, 235, 242, 249, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263. See also Eigner, Larry Open Letter (Canadian journal), 251 Oppenheimer, Joel, 230 Origin (US journal), 224, 231, 233, 234 Owens, Rochelle, 237 Peace News (newsletter), 252 Poetic and Critic (US journal), 228 Pound, Ezra, 223, 232; Cantos of, 71, 234, 259 Purnelle, Gerald, 114 Quasha, George, 245, 259 Ravel, Maurice, 135 Red Badge of Courage, The (novel), 53 Rexroth, Kenneth, 225 Rilke, Rainier Maria, 245 Rimbaud, Arthur, 234

296

Index

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 82, 84 Roosevelt, Theodore, 63 Rosenthal, M. L., 233, 234 Rothenberg, Jerome, 237, 259, 262 Rusk, Dean, 247 Sanesi, Roberto, 237 Santa Barbara Oil Spill, 210, 213n1 Santayana, George, 66 Schafer, R. Murray, soundscape, 178–79; listening walk, 181, 182 Schlesinger, Kyle, 127 Scientific American, Eigner’s letter to, 171 Shakespeare, William, 243; Twelfth Night, 234; Macbeth (character), 247 Shaw, Lytle, on Eigner 14, 15, 160 Silliman, Ron, 70, 87, 90–91, 97, 114; mentioned in letters, 259 Skinner, Jonathan, 9 Snodgrass, W. D., 49 Snyder, Gary, 231; “Four Changes,” 252, 253 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 49 Spicer, Jack, 79 Stein, Gertrude, 89, 100, 146 Stevens, Wallace, 235 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 2 Stravinsky, Igor, 230 Sulfur (US journal), 272 The (US journal), 251 This (US journal), 88, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100; mentioned in letters, 255, 256, 261 This Is Poetry (radio program), 3, 79, 125, 149, 179, 196, 229. See also Corman, Cid Thomas, Dylan, 235 Thoreau, Henry David, 54, 63, 64, 180 Time (magazine), 266 Tish (Canadian journal), 235, 240 Toklas, Alice B., 146 Tottlels’ (US journal), 255, 259 Tyson, Ian, 251

Vort (US journal), 259 Wagon, Hugh “Drew,” 145 Wakoski, Diane, 257 Waldrop, Keith, 156 War and Peace (novel), 53, 100; mentioned in letters, 257, 259, 263 Watten, Barrett, 42; works by, “Missing ‘X,’” 6–7, 8, 9, 69–70, 107, 175; Progress, 89–90 Weil, James, 259, 271, 272 Wesleyan University Press, 236 Whalen, Philip, 148 White Goddess, The (Graves), 261 Whitehead, Alfred North, 234 Whitman, Walt, 63, 65–66; mentioned in letters, 235 Wild Dog (US journal), 145, 158 Wiener, Norbert, 88, 96 Williams, Jonathan, 3, 123, 127; homosexuality of, 124; mentioned in letters, 233, 237, 254, 272 Williams, William Carlos, 4, 71; mentioned in letters 229, 233, 234, 240, 241; Paterson, 24; mentioned in letters, 224, 225, 234 Wieners, John, 261 WIN (US journal), 251, 252 Wordsworth, William, 226 Wyatt, Andrea, 130; mentioned in letters, 247, 249 Yeats, William Butler, 141, 230 Yom Kippur (holiday), 106 Yom Kippur War, 104 Young, Le Monte, 230 Yugen (US journal), 49, 53 Zukofsky, Louis, 89