am,     am,     reading

             (with struggle

                              the poems (o  o  o  o



                  wish

                        The Left Margins were out here

                    here
             here even
                              (as in early BlackSparrow+ElizabethPress
                                           \Tottel’s too)

             as Eigner typed them on his page

but here they will always be
here always
always here)
                    (can move (not really)             in mind)


                        so I read
                                        and stop.

                    Read.Stop.    read   read CURSE stop.    Read



                             E     i     g     n     e     r

                                w     o     r     d     s

                    E
                         I
                            G
                                N
                                    E
                                        R
                            l_ i_ n_ e_ s


                                    so    many    ¡eigner!   poems

                   (and no guide to what’s newly published)

                                p o e m s                p o e m s

                            so                             many

                                        ¡really good!
                                                (oddi
                                                    ties too)

                                so

                                    ¡great!

                                                   p o e m s

                                                            !

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UPDATE: March 26, 2010: As I read The Collected Eigner, I still find that thoughts of where the words should be on the page too often overwhelm the reading of the poems themselves. This is especially so for poems remembered from the Black Sparrow and Elizabeth Press books of the 1970s and early 1980s, or ‘zines from that time, which featured Eigner’s left-side starting point margins as he mostly typed them, at distance from the page edge. The frustration of seeing these margins moved so close to the left-side of each page in the Stanford volume still makes me close the books on occasion, sometimes emphatically so.

But Eigner’s poetry always draw me back. And so I open the books again, and read and read, until the margins frustration becomes too much. By this start-and-stop-and-start-again method, aided considerably by several sleepless or sleep-short nights (a few caused by my despair at the shifted margins, I kid you not) and more than once carrying a volume with me for a 30 minute each way commute to work on BART, I’ve read through The Collected Eigner, and re-read much of it multiple times.

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Before celebrating more (and of course I’m still reading (and, due to the shifted margins, stopping), and will be for some time, there are more than 3,000 poems) I need to – sorry, folks – point out a minor but unfortunate production error in The Collected Eigner: a page of poems is repeated, and as a result two poems are missing. I’m hoping the editors and publisher can remedy this, and I think they easily can.

Here are the details: In Volume III, the same three Eigner poems are printed on both page 1074 and page 1174. Eigner’s numbering of the three poems (# 812a, # 812’, and # 812’’) makes clear that when they first appear, on page 1074, they are out of order (they are preceded and followed by ## 623 and 626, respectively). Eigner’s numbering also makes clear that poems ## 624 and 625, which should appear where the three erroneously placed poems are printed, are missing. Unfortunately, The Collected Eigner does not include these two poems.

While unfortunate, this kind of repeated page sometimes happens in projects this large. I’ve seen similar screw-ups two or three times in the 25 years I’ve received the annual desktop edition of the California Penal Code, which runs over 2000 pages. The legal book publisher always uses the same solution, and it’s one that I hope Stanford can use here.

An insert page should be printed that contains the two missing poems (# 624 and # 625). The page should be a bit smaller than the pages in the book, so that it can be laid or tipped in, either at the front of the volume, or at the actual page, without hanging over the existing page ends. Alternatively (and this is what the legal publishers do), the reverse of the page with the correct, replacement text should have a peel-away, non-acidic, adhesive backing, so that it can pasted over the erroneously repeated poems on page 1074. This insert or sheet, of course, should be made available to those who bought The Collected Eigner.

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               meanwhile,

                           more

                                       to

                                              come

(click here, for one)
[poet-readers on Larry Eigner's poetry]


(click here, for another)
[Eigner on Eigner's poetry]

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The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
(Stanford University Press, 2010)

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