the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica: Reading (part 4) The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner

The Wonderful Weirdness

of

“ah, so, yes”

Among the superabundance of sensational poems in The Collected Eigner (Stanford, 2010) are those that even amongst the uniquely Eigner-atic energy are so particularly idiosyncratic that all the reader can do is stop in the name of what-the-heck-is-this.

And so today the glade, in this the ninth – yes, ninth – post here this year on The Collected Eigner – presents the wonderful weirdness and puzzling (indulge me please) perplex-osity of one such “what-the-heck-is-this” Eigner poem. Known (since it’s untitled) by its first line – “ah, so, yes” – the poem was written in early September 1987 and is found on page 1600 in Volume IV of the Stanford edition. Here’s the poem, in a typeface (Courier) and spacing roughly equivalent to Eigner’s:

    ah, so, yes

      that’s where things leave you ,
           full of abstractions

         animality

                    chordatsm

            vertobrodoty

                 mammaly

                primetcy

                        . . .

                        . . .

                     mer can

                    jdeo crt

                           ny
                              c

May I count or more precisely point out a few of the marvelous oddities here? How about the opening line? That is an unusual poem-starter for sure. It seems to jump us right into a three-part moment-in-time comprised, one after the other, of an instant of (1) recognition (“ah”), (2) logic-connection (“so”), and then (3) some certain conclusion or affirmation (“yes”). The line presents this series informally, even conversationally, and it perhaps is all entirely internal to the mind of the poet. Most amazing, the thought process all happens via three simple, monosyllabic words and a bit of punctuation (and the two commas, with their pauses, make it feel, marvelously, as if Eigner’s cogitating, his turning of the gears between the ears, happens right there on the page).

After the line break, Eigner in the following two lines delivers the conclusion he has seemingly just reached:

that’s where things leave you ,
full of abstractions

Of course, the use of the “you” here raises the question of who’s being addressed, with the further question being what “things” have left that person, in Eigner’s mind at least, “full of abstractions.” It was at this point that I happened to turn to the endnote for this poem, wherein it’s stated that on the typescript of this poem Eigner had written:

“this on a card to Bernadette Mayer, 9/8/87, a while after she sent me her book, Utopia [United Artists Books, 1984] . . . Sept. 8 too. Oh yes . . . new york city, i.e. [re: last line].”

A-ha, I concluded from this endnote, “ah, so, yes” responds to Mayer’s book, and in that way it’s not unusual at all. As I wrote in my post (click here) about his version of Rimbaud’s “Après le Déluge”, there are dozens of Eigner poems that arise from or were inspired (he sometimes said “occasioned”) by other people’s creative work. And so, being the curious sort, both about Mayer’s work (which I enjoy), and this particular Eigner poem, I went out and found then bought then read a copy of Utopia.

Bernadette Mayer
Utopia
(New York: United Artists Books, 1984)

Reading Mayer’s book – interesting as that was – did not immediately or entirely clear up the perplexity of Eigner’s poem. Part of that may be that Utopia itself is an extremely odd duck. It’s a mostly prose collection, with approximately twenty different works, that mainly features writing by Mayer but also includes a few contributions from others (e.g., Hannah Weiner, Charles Bernstein, and Anne Waldman). There’s also, and this is yet another mark of its unusualness, an index so detailed and lengthy – it covers seventeen double-columned pages and contains well over 1,500 entries to the book’s 130 pages – that it’s a piece of work itself.

Utopia is also different in the sense that its writings don’t provide any easily stated view or even views about the subject suggested by the book’s title. There’s no straight-line narrative or critical examination of the concept, and while utopia is mentioned and discussed somewhat in some of the twenty or so pieces no over-arching or even competing directions or possibilities seem apparent in the sum of those parts.

As such, I cannot explain what Eigner means when he suggests in “ah, so, yes” that “abstractions” are what Mayer is left with in her book. Unless I’m just being dense and have overlooked something (which is possible, feel free to suggest the same in the comment box here), this perplexing suggestion by Eigner is a key part of the “what-the-heck-is-this”-ness of the poem. Of course, the “abstractions” that “you” are left with might refer to what is left for a reader of Mayer’s book (including Eigner himself). This possible ambiguity is yet another facet of the “what-the-heck-is-this”-ness.

Sometimes when faced with this kind of uncertainty or perplexity when reading a poem it’s best to just read on. The lines that follow, either directly or by providing additional context, can sometimes shed light on if not totally illuminate something that had been baffling or hidden. And so after the couplet in “ah, so, yes” that asserts the conclusion about “abstractions” Eigner writes:

         animality

                    chordatsm

            vertobrodoty

                 mammaly

                primetcy

and oh my don’t these lines, especially on a first reading, just seem to add to the “what-the-heck-is-this”-ness quality of this poem!? I mean, some of the “words” here don’t even look like words: except for “animality” they aren’t going to be found in any dictionary and appear to involve idiosyncratic spellings or lexical coinages.

These four latter lines/words, after decoding (by which I mean staring at them for a good bit, trying to figure out what was going on), reveal themselves– at least I think they do – as Eigner-made nouns that denote or refer, as does “animality,” to taxonomic classifications or ranks related to humans. These classifications proceed, top-to-bottom in the poem, from the more general to the more specific: animal, chordates, vertebrates, mammals, and finally primates.

Notably and significantly, the suffixes Eigner uses here, both actual and invented (“ity” or the variants, including “[i]sm”) act to make more abstract the classifications (e.g., chordates) which are themselves abstractions. So as it turns out these lines do indeed reflect on, even serve as examples of, the “abstractions” that Eigner believes the things in Mayer’s book leave you with.

But then there is the puzzle of how the listed taxonomic ranks relate in particular to Mayer’s Utopia. Again, I can again only guess. Eigner possibly, maybe even probably, was spurred to list these classifications by a single phrase that appears almost at the very end of one of the twenty works in Mayer’s book. Specifically, at page 103, in a piece titled “The Fish That Looks Like A Bishop” – a delightful imagined dialogue (styled a “debate” by Mayer) between various and ever-shifting historical and contemporary figures – is a statement (in the voice of Giordano Bruno, the Italian Renaissance philosopher, mathematician and astronomer) that includes the phrase, “and all the land animals and all their types and forms.”

That phrase, I think, can rightly be read as the generative force for Eigner’s taxonomic listing. But while that seems right, it remains a puzzle why Eigner, out of all things in the 130 page book, seized upon that one phrase. Some mysteries here, I think, can’t be solved.

And as such, let’s once again keep moving with the text, and take another look at the rest of Eigner’s poem, which continues (and ends) with:

                        . . .

                        . . .

                     mer can

                    jdeo crt

                           ny
                              c

Here again it’s fair to say that Eigner’s lines initially baffle, except of course for the endnote’s explanation (quoted above) that the final three letters (spread over two lines) refer to New York City. As for what’s going on in the other, preceding, lines, I again have a hypothesis to suggest. Eigner’s ellipses signify omissions from what might otherwise be including on the taxonomic list, while the “words” that follow are further sub-categories, types or kinds of humans: “[a]mer[i]can” / j[u]deo c[h]r[is]t[ian]. Now I’m not sure whether the order of classifications is exactly perfect here (wouldn’t the latter precede the former?), but arguably it works and in any event nothing else seems plausible.

So that’s almost a wrap here, I think. The poem, after it’s very effective you-are-right-there-in-the-moment-with-Eigner opening line, suggests that things in Mayer’s book leave you full of abstractions, and then proceeds to list, as a sort of object example, abstracted or abbreviated taxonomic classifications relating to humans, from the most general (animality) down to the most specific, New York City, where Mayer lived at the time.

Of course, a further question is what Eigner means to connote with all this, including in particular the string of classifications which in the main are oddly or incompletely spelled, is another layer of what-the-heck-is-this-ness in his poem. Is the presumably intentional difficulty here a reflection of Eigner’s own difficulties in coming to terms, in puzzling through, Mayer’s work? I think that’s might be exactly what’s going on, given that Eigner sometimes wrote that he found L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing difficult, even as he admired and read deeply those writers (as they deeply read and admired him). If I’m right, then the object-lesson in difficulty in Eigner’s poem is one very special poetic mirroring of his readerly response to Mayer, with that mirroring as wonderfully weird, intelligently idiosyncratic, and excellently eccentric as “ah, so, yes” is as whole.

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