Larry Eigner on . . .

Before, within, and after any readers’ responses to Larry Eigner’s work – including those of poet-readers (click here) – are the views of Eigner himself. A poet’s statements aren’t the be-and-end-all, but should be given serious thought. They can also serve as a kind of lens, an often clarifying one, through which to read the poetry. (Some of that is done in another post, on Eigner’s poems form the news, which you can find here, if you please.)

I present below a kind of bouquet of Eigner’s own words, more or less directly about his poetry. Perhaps this will be a joy to read, show something about Eigner and his poetry, whet the appetite, and provide a kind of platform upon which to read at the poems. Get thee, if you can, into the gardens (the poetry itself), and see what you think. Here’s Eigner, on Eigner:

I thought myself that immediacy and force have to take precedence over clarity in a poem . . .

. . . so the poem does become a thought process or arc or course of thought or trace or artifact of the same, maybe more than a machine made of words.

. . . the poem (piece of language) as a full realization (well, not in a majority of 2500 poems all told!) or recognition of things come to (me) . . .

I'm cautious, and come onto things by understatement. Wary of exaggeration. Sotto voce has resulted in the suppression of words.

. . . eliminating connective words (more and more in my head, automatically, less and less after writing them down) to keep up the movement, the force . . .

. . . the less of a margin the less set and rigid a poem appeared, the more easily it seemed, seems, to come off the page into speech, into the head: so too, I've generally chosen not to put a word flush with the word above it, even a few lines above it . . .

And writing a poem has often enough been like discovering things.

. . . a poem can extend itself pretty much unexpectedly, like a walk you're out on . . .

. . . a poem can be assay(s) of things come upon, can be a stretch of thinking.

And beyond technical skill have felt some good poems from my life, which is likewise a matter of luck. I try to make the punctuation, including spacing, distancing, as good as I can. Else I am dissatisfied.

If you are willing to stop anywhere, anytime . . . a poem can be like walking down the street and noticing things, extending itself without obscurity or too much effort. [ . . . ] Trying too hard gets you nowhere, you can only do about the best you can . . . .

What kps me interested (overload or not)? Ears and eyes, I guess. Being alive . . . .

And writing a poem has often enough been like discovering things.

Accuracy of the moment, whenever one comes, is the greatest you can have.

My eyes still big for my head, most things were always tantalizingly beyond or almost beyond sight and hearing, out of reach, I’ve had quite an impression of this anyway, and often enough of 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 cyrosurgery that tamed my wild left arm and leg – in September ‘62, 5 or 6 weeks after I turned 35 – 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.

. . . serendipitous spontaneity . . .

. . . for quite a while I’ve realized the priority of immediacy and force over understanding, as to a poem, you don’t have to get every detail, reference, in order to get a lift or whatever from it . . .

A poem can’t be too long, anything like an equatorial superduper highway girdling the thick rotund earth, but is all right and can extend itself an additional bit if you’re sufficiently willing to stop anywhere.

. . . with a poem, there’s no or relatively little need to attain length: it can be five or ten words, even fewer . . .

Distances between words are not negligible elements of a piece: pauses or silences.

Immediacy and force take priority over notes clarifying allusions.

. . . the indents and other spacings becoming distancings, not in a derived way, but directly realized. [ . . . ] You play and feel your way by eye and ear.

And no poetry can raise anyone’s hopes for a medical cure, say, or any sort of miracle. Just “refresh the eyes / against the abyss,” as I’ve said in a poem . . .

I can’t skip about, yet curiosity pulls me about. It has led me on to see what’s next.

. . . what happens in one man’s head is always dialogue enough . . .

Poems now seem spin-offs from life . . .

. . . as far back as I recall, I’ve had dbts what’s engh sd or trop peu, how much to make of anything, to find // the weight // of things.

. . . by chance amid abundance . . .

I in brownian motion, attention given according to occasion, serendipitously . . . .

I'm still kind of tantalized in all directions.

And to name is to destroy, yes, or at least to transfix or petrify. Mentioning or referring to things is better than naming them.

. . . people, occupied with one thing or another (cars, stereos) look around them less and less.

. . . the inadequacies of language aren’t constant or relentless, wholly unrelieved, unyielding.

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The above quotations, in which Eigner’s spelling has been preserved, are gathered from three main sources: areas lights heights (Roof Books, 1989), an invaluable collection of Eigner essays, statements, and interviews; Eigner’s “Unpublished Letter to Ina Forster,” February 11, 1987 (available on-line here); and Larry Eigner Letters (Moving Letter Press, 1987), which collects about 15 letters to Joseph Guglielmi and Claude Royet-Journoud.

Obviously, I’ve not sourced each specific quotation, but would be happy to do so if anyone’s curious about something in particular. Although I tried to not duplicate matters, a few things are repeated or almost so. Eigner sometimes quoted himself, and my view is that if Eigner said something more than once, or in slightly different ways, it was probably particularly important to him.

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The image at the head of the post is adapted
(read PhotoShopped)
from the cover of the beautiful Burning Deck
edition of Eigner's poetry, titled
lined up bulk senses
and which was published in 1980.

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“three different views of Brownian motion”

Per Wikipedia:
“Brownian motion (named after the
Scottish botanist Robert Brown) is
the seemingly random movement of
particles suspended in a fluid . . . .”

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                                               poet-readers
                                                                             on                   (a
                                                                                 the               gathering)

                                                                    P    O    E    T    R    Y

                                                                                                   of

                                                                        L   A   R   R   Y      E   I   G   N   E   R

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W.C. Williams / Denise Levertov / Robert Duncan
Cid Corman / Clark Coolidge / Barrett Watten
Ron Silliman / Charles Bernstein / Robert Grenier
Curtis Faville / Michael McClure / Benjamin Friedlander
Michael Davidson / Jack Foley

During the months of run-up to the release of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Stanford, 2010), I kept busy – channeled the anticipation – in a couple of ways. First, I read previous editions of Eigner’s work, and sought out things he had said about his own poetry. I also searched around the house and elsewhere for comments that others – other poets – had previously made about Eigner’s work.

This post presents a gathering of what others – specifically, previous poet-readers – have written over the decades about Larry Eigner’s poetry. I do this as a kind of public service, for two main reasons.

First, I found that reading what others have said about Eigner whetted my appetite for the poems, made me want to read them and bad. Such reading also allowed me to travel more deeply in them when I did. Maybe others will find the ideas of others on Eigner useful in that way too.

Second, a collected edition – especially when, as here, so much work is published for the first time – naturally enough raises the question of whether previous ideas about a poet need re-thinking. I haven’t yet read all The Collected Eigner (there are more than 3,000 poems), let alone gotten to know them all. My guess is that there won’t be cause to radically re-do what previous poet-readers have written. If anything, those assessments will be further supported, and a number of nuances or less noticed facets of the work – perhaps regarding Eigner’s humor, for example – will be added.

With that, here’s the gathering of comments by poet-readers on Eigner’s work. I selected from what I had at hand or could find on the web. No doubt I’ve missed things. For example, I could not find my copy of the 1997 issue of Shadow Play devoted in the main to tributes to Eigner by poets, and only now [the day after putting this post up, with formatting not easily changed] came across Samuel Charter’s review of Eigner in Caterpillar no. 8/9 (1969). I also did not mine the eight large-paragraph blurbs (by Lyn Hejinian, Stephen Ratcliffe, and Kit Robinson, among others) printed on the rear dust-jacket of each Stanford volume, and have not included certain very brief (though important) statements made by poets regarding Eigner (e.g., Robert Creeley’s assessment of him as a “singular genius”).

From what I did find, I took excerpts that seemed most helpful to me, that served to either remind me about, or teach, something that seemed important in Eigner’s poems. Sources for quotations are given, or linked to directly. The matters are mostly presented in chronological order.

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[front cover]
Larry Eigner
On My Eyes
(Jargon Press, 1960)
[photograph by Harry Callahan]

Larry Eigner’s second major book, following From The Sustaining Air (Divers Press, 1953), was On My Eyes, pictured above. The prefatory material in that book quoted William Carlos Williams on Eigner’s first book. Williams remarked on the poetry’s lack of tension and “feeling of eternity.”

Denise Levertov, in her lengthy introducting “Note” to On My Eyes (she edited the book) observed that Eigner’s poetry requires “suppleness” in a reader, “an imaginative agility, a willingness and ability to leap with him from image to image . . . .” Levertov also stated that she “did not understand” some of Eigner’s poems, a laudably honest admission that to me suggests some of the mystery in the work.

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another time in fragments
(Fulcrum Press, 1967)

Robert Duncan wrote two long paragraphs about Eigner for the front flap of the dust jacket of another time in fragments (Fulcrum Press, 1967). Eigner, Duncan in part wrote:

. . . has created melodies of perception, fabrics of experience, spaces and times so intensely felt in his spiritual body – this poet so living by, in, and through, words – I know of no comparable focus. [ . . . ] His eye, searching into the depths of the visual field, his ear, attentive to sounds beyond, command the poem directly, his mind dances with them. [ . . . ] Eigner has suggested a new development of William’s line: his phrasings are not broken off in an abrupt juncture but hover, having a margin of their own – stanzaic phrases – suspended in their own time within the time of the poem: as in turn each poem, the immediate occasion of Eigner’s life consciousness, has a time of its own in the continuity of poems.

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Cid Corman

Cid Corman in the late 1940s and early 1950s had a radio show in Boston that was heard by Eigner, and it was a catalytic experience, re-sparking his poetic spirit. Subsequently, Corman in his magazine Origin published Eigner, including in the early 1950s.

In a November 1969 review of another time in fragments, collected in At Their Word (Black Sparrow, 1968), Corman wrote of Eigner’s “acute and wandering” attentions, his “alert mind mingling ideas, facts, as wires, hinges, bolts, and sometimes just flashes.” Corman also pointed to the “play” everywhere in Eigner’s poems, their “dancing vision,” and the way “[o]ne perception moves upon another with that instantaneity Olson counseled in his Projective Verse essay . . . .” Corman also neatly characterized Eigner’s work as “juggleries of language as perception” that are presented with “the grace of one who sees what is given him.”

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There is then the deep interest in and appreciation of Eigner by the Language writers and those associated with them. Eigner’s work was included in the first five issues of This, a magazine published between 1971 and 1974, edited by Robert Greiner and Barrett Watten. Eigner was also published in two early issues of the Ron Silliman edited Tottel’s, published from 1970 to 1981 and issue No. 15 of that ’zine (newsletter of poetry, more precisely), published I believe in the late 1970s, was wholly given over to Eigner’s poems.

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L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E # 1
(February, 1978)
Bruce Andrews + Charles Bernstein, editors
[click image for a super-clear enlargement]

The first work in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (February 1978) was an essay by Eigner (click here to read, if you please). In that essay’s first paragraph, there’s a parenthetical pairing “(things, words)” that perhaps suggests something about the materiality of the signifier, a concept key to Language writers and arising almost sui generis from the way words are arranged in Eigner’s poems.

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Clark Coolidge

The second piece in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E #1 was an appreciation of Eigner by Clark Coolidge, titled “Larry Eigner Notes” (again, click here to read). A few choice excerpts:

each line a new mind (focus)
rather than divisions determined by breaks
of sound, syntax, etc.

these “scenes” don’t exist, never have
these words comb them through mind.
The poem is built.

air, his medium . . .

each line
equals
its own completion

and every next line
its consequence

wholes are only made by motion

word-activation of the imagination in the act of seeing

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Barrett Watten
Total Syntax (1985)

Barrett Watten in his Total Syntax (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), published a detailed essay on Eigner, explaining among much else that “Eigner’s work can be seen as one long poem, with the separate parts as autonomous instances.” Watten also emphasized how the poems proceed “word to word, line to line, and do not create an illusionistic space,” that reference and predication are suppressed or generalized, and that patterns of autonomy and connection, including of sound, are key.

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Ron Silliman, Editor
In The American Tree (1986)

Eigner was the dedicatee of the Language writing anthology In The American Tree (1986), edited by Ron Silliman. Silliman’s preface suggested that Eigner’s work (along with Robert Creeley’s) had “transcended the problematic constraints” of projectivitism and that it offered offered “models of rigorous and honest practice.” Silliman also wrote, ten years later, that the Eigner’s seemingly “‘light, airy’ poems are in fact the complex choreography of one whose total physical vocabulary is in use in the composition of the poem.”

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detail of Eigner poem-display on facade of
Berkeley Art Museum (1993)

For the 1993 Eigner celebration at the Berkeley Art Museum (at which an Eigner poem was displayed in large letters on the building’s facade), Charles Bernstein wrote a statement about Eigner’s work. He empahsized the “vivid[ness] of Eigner’s writing, how “the page becomes a model of the thinking field.” Bernstein also pointed to the poetics both of (quoting Eigner) “‘noticing things’ and “of coincidence, where ‘serendipity’ (contingency) takes its rightful place as animating spirit, displacing the anthropocentric sentimentality of much of the verse of our time.”

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Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville, of course, are the editors of The Collected Eigner (Grenier was also Eigner’s housemate for approximately a decade, a friend, editorial organizer/assistant, and caretaker). In his introduction to the books, Grenier remarks on Eigner’s “extraordinary ability . . . to synchronize the progress of the writing itself with the actual occasion progressing.” Faville, writing pre-publication on his Compass Rose blog, stated that in certain works Eigner creates “a poetry carefully constructed out of a constellation of perception(s). Event and imaginative play are interwoven seamlessly into an integrated meditation.”

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Michael McClure

After Eigner’s death, Michael McClure in Sulfur #38 wrote that he had always seen Eigner “as a kind of astronaut.” McClure explained that Eigner was “always exploring” the space the rest of us take for granted. As such, when Eigner wrote of things, “he returned them . . . in a different measure” and “in a different structure” than what others, including McClure, had perceived and imagined them.

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Benjamin Friedlander

Benjamin Friedlander, following Eigner’s death, wrote a concise and informative obituary for The Poetry Project Newsletter. In it, he wrote:

The gestural clarity of Eigner's poems—their verbal modesty and perceptual acuity, their signature shape and utilitarian use of typewriter and page—are utterly without precedent. Superficially they resemble the staggered stanzas of Williams and Marianne Moore, the acrobatics of cummings, the random spill of Mallarme. But Eigner's achievement is less a matter of formal innovation than an attitude about life. Eigner took Modernism's hard-won freedom from mechanical reiteration of shape and sound to a necessary conclusion in the freedom to follow his mind wherever it might go, however near or far. Poetry hasn't looked or felt the same since.

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Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson, in his essay “Missing Larry” (available on the web (click here) and as part of the in-print collection Concerto for the Left Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2008)), wrote:

Eigner’s is decisively a poetry of the page, a field of intense activity produced entirely with his right index finger, the one digit over which he had some control. The page––specifically the 8 ½” by 11" typewriter page––is the measure of the poem, determining its lineation, length and typographic organization.

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, never pausing to conceptualize a scene but allowing, rather, the play of attentions to govern movement. What might be regarded as a form of impersonality turns out to be an immersion of the subject into his perceptual acts . . .

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Jack Foley

Finally today among poet-readers of Eigner, I think of Jack Foley, who was his close friend as well as fellow poet. One story that Foley relates has especially stuck with me when thinking on Eigner’s poetry. Eigner once handed Foley a 25 line poem, a poem loaded with observed or heard details, and asked Foley to write a story from it, telling him that the last four lines (which mention a parked car and railroad crossing near-by) “were fiction.” This made-up element in the poem wasn’t an isolated instance. Eigner, in an October 22, 1973 letter to Claude Royet-Journoud, also mentioned that an image (“waves”) in another poem was “nowhere, imaginary.” To me, this was not only interesting, but important. Eigner’s work involved not just the presentation of actual, experienced facts, but at times the envisioned, the independently created, as well.

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Are you hungry to read Eigner poems? Well, I hope so. As the above-presented excerpts from the poet-readers make clear, there is much original, intriguing, interesting, and moving in his work. You know what you need to do.

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The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
Volumes I - IV
Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier, editors
(Stanford, 2010)

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I have twice before posted on The Collected Eigner. The first post concerns the left-side margins and other matters (click here). The second serves as a kind of coda to that first post, and which also discusses an unfortunate although fixable production error involving a single page in the books (click here).

Planned for the near future is a post somewhat similar to the present one, presenting excerpts from Eigner himself about his poetry [add-on: that post is now up, click here to read, if you please!]. Also in the works is a post or maybe more about the poems in The Collected Eigner, including on the two poems I consider the most unusual in the books.

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                                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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The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner

¿¿ Fidelity to Eigner’s Poem-Pages ??

(no no oh no oh no no no)

Folks, I have some news that probably you aren’t going to like. It’s unfortunate, really, but must be said.

The just published The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Stanford, 2010) is hugely flawed. The editors repeatedly claim that they present Eigner’s poems as he originally typed them, his exacting designs for each poem-page, but in fact markedly and fundamentally change the way the poems look on the page, in a way that greatly mars the poetry.

Specifically, compared with how Eigner actually made them (with a left-side margin set far closer to the center of each poem-page), each poem’s left-side margin has been shifted approximately two inches towards the left side of the page. As such, each poem is cramped close to the page edge and eliminates the space (the silence and the air) that surrounds Eigner’s work when set in accord with how he actually typed it.

As illustrated below, this design decision – which is neither acknowledged nor explained by the editors or publisher – greatly changes, for the worse, how Eigner’s marvelous and wondrous poems look, read, and feel.

Dear readers, I feel as if I’ve been had, as if a grand fraud has been foisted on the world of poetry. It’s an extreme disappointment, a real outrage. It’s an error so grievous, with respect to Eigner’s magnificent poems, that it almost makes me cry.

Editors Curtis Faville, Robert Grenier, and the publisher (Stanford) should be ashamed. It’s so bad – and I’m not kidding one bit – the publisher should recall all the books, pulp the entire edition, and start over. It’s that bad, it really is.

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One of the key claims of The Collected Eigner is that it presents Eigner’s poems more or less just as he created them on the page. They do so because how the poem looked was key to the poet. The editors on this point rely on Eigner himself, quoting him (at page xxxvi of Vol. IV) as insisting that:

“ . . . everything you do on the page matters.”

The editors’ prefatory “A Note On The Text” (Vol. I, page xvi) reinforces this cardinal principle, stating that Eigner was “very particular about where everything went . . . .” The editorial appendix, touting the use of equivalent courier font (since that’s what Eigner used when he typed the poems), similarly states (at page xxxiii) that “Eigner regarded the setting of his poems . . . as organizations of exact spatial relationships.”

Along the same lines, editor Grenier, in his separate introduction (at page xii), emphasizes the importance of the typewriter’s “capacity to precisely indicate exactly where each letter ‘goes’” and the experiencing of Eigner’s poems as ‘beautiful’/exact letter-relations/marks in space – i.e., ‘typewriter calligraphy’!”

The editors thus used the equivalently spaced font, and the large, 8 ½ x 11" page “to replicate Larry Eigner’s ‘home page’ (during is life) – the platform into which all his great works ‘went’/the typewriter page . . .” (Vol. 1, page xvi). All this, they proclaim (in editor Faville’s words, atVolume 4, page xxxiii), “. . . in order that the original designs and settings are not lost . . . . ” The editors declare that they considered the “establish[ing of] a reliable benchmark” as “the first responsibility to Eigner’s text, [and] to present and future audiences, is to establish a reliable benchmark.” Id.

Well, they missed the mark, profoundly. Yes, they used an equivalently spaced font, same as Eigner’s typewriter, but that’s minor compared to what they didn’t do, which was honor AT ALL where Eigner placed his poem on the page with regard to the left and right margins or edges. Instead of doing what Eigner did in that regard, the editors here in hundreds and hundreds of poems shifted the left-side margin, and substantially so, towards the left edge of the page.

Let me be very specific. Poems that Eigner – the poet who insists that “everything on the page matters” – had typed such that the left margin was approximately 2" or 3" from the left-side of the page have been re-set so that the left-side margin is less than an inch ( approximately 13/16ths of an inch, to be more precise) from the left edge. In short, Eigner’s decision to set his margins closer to the middle of the page – a decision which gives his words and lines substantial space (or air, or silence) on the left side – IS ENTIRELY DISREGARDED, in poem after poem.

This act of editorial vandalism is outrageous and obvious to anyone who’s read any other book of Eigner poems. The poems in The Collected Eigner just don’t look right. Wait, that’s too dissembling. The poems here look wrong, very, very, wrong.

A shocking part of all this is that the evidence of the crime against the poetry is provided right in The Collected Eigner itself. The final volume contains images of almost 50 pages manuscript pages typed by Eigner. Take a look at those, compare them to the printed text, and you (anyone!) can plainly see how the poet actually put his poems on the page, and how the editors botched the job of replicating his creations.

If you love poetry and Eigner’s work it will, this is going to make you sick, but take a look please, compare a couple manuscript pages with the poems as presented on The Collected Eigner pages. Here’s a photo, with ruler added of a manuscript reproduced in Volume 4 at page 1717, of a poem (with the first line “the music of”) made by Eigner in May, 1971. This page as presented in the book appears slightly reduced from its actual size; nevertheless it is plain that the poem’s first line begins at least two and closer to three inches from the left edge of the paper on which Eigner typed (click to enlarge):

See? There’s ample space (again I’ll add silence and air) on both sides of the line. The poem, each of its lines, start near or around almost the center of the page. As such, it’s a beautiful work of calligraphed typewritten poetry, occupying in an interesting way the space between the left and right page edges.

And now here’s a photo of the same poem as printed in The Collected Eigner. As in the manuscript photo above, a ruler straddles the book’s gutter on the left. As such, you can clearly see that instead of a left margin of between two and three inches, the poem’s first line is placed a bit less than inch from the gutter:

This discrepancy or disparity between what was actually made and what is presented is apparent in every poem, at least every poem that I know. Here’s another example, starting with the manuscript page for a poem (first line = “the sound of”) which Eigner typed in 1975. This particular manuscript page is especially instructive because it happens to have a vertical line printed or drawn on it’s left side, near the actual edge of the paper. As such, there can be no question regarding the relation between the starting point of what Eigner considered the left edge, the margin he set, and the placement of the poem’s words and lines:

You see that vertical line, and the spacing between that left margin and the lines and words? It’s as if Eigner himself reminds us here of how exactly the poem is supposed to look on the page! The first line – from which all others take their cue, is a solid two inches in from the straight line near the left edge, and the entire poem presents as near the center of the page. Indeed, it’s final line ends well over the center of the page. The words are surrounded by silence, air, and space.

But alas, and ugh, and oh no oh no, here’s what we get in The Collected Eigner:

What a difference! Faville, Grenier, and Stanford give us a poem whose first line begins less than an inch from the left-side margin (the gutter) and whose last line – the furthest to the right – ends well short of the page’s horizontal center point. It looks cramped; heck, it is cramped, pushed way too the left, with the huge space to the poem’s right leaving the text looking forlorn, almost an after-thought, instead of the strong and unique calligraphic presence that Eigner created.

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You follow me here? While claiming to honor the exacting nature of Eigner’s poems, The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner in fact mangles the work, badly, by substantially shifting the margins towards the left-side of the page. There’s no explanation for this, perhaps because none could be made. The poem-setting mis-presents, falsifies, the poems Eigner created.

By shifting the margins to the far left, the Stanford Collected Eigner straitjackets the poems; it constricts and suffocates them. They almost look still-born on the page. It’s an ugly look. Even more so because the surpassingly narrow left-side margin used (again, it’s only about 13/16ths of an inch) makes the poems, at least on the versos (the right-side pages) look as if they are about to dive into the big center gutter. The look here, the reading experience, the feel in the gut, is NOTHING like the beautiful poems that Eigner made, which if presented as he actually typed them are surrounded, particularly to their left, by much “sustaining air.”

I can’t imagine how this happened, or why it happened WITH NO EDITORIAL MENTION AT ALL, even as the book editors trumpet their supposed fidelity to Eigner’s poem-pages. Was there some perfect storm of bureaucratic dunderheadedness, poetic screw loose-osity, and/or institutional rigidity?

Let me put it another way: great effort, the editors tell us, went into making sure the precise space between the letters of Eigner’s letters was exactly perfect. But the matter of where the words went on the page, seemingly as great in importance in terms of what Eigner actually created, and for establishing an authentic edition of that work, was not only ignored, but (apparently) purposefully changed, in poem after poem. Without a word said about it, as if maybe they thought nobody would notice! “Nothing to see here, just move along.”

At this point, the reasons why this all happened don’t matter. It’s been published, in a brickhouse of an edition that’ll probably last three hundred years. The (mis)deed has been done, and it’s sickening. I love Eigner’s poetry deeply. These books profoundly violate his poems.

How sad.

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End note:

Here, for your enjoyment and edification, is the final poem from Eigner’s first book, From The Sustaining Air (Divers Press, 1953). You’ll see, of course, that the poem has an ample left-side margin, as do all the poems in that book. In fact, that same sort of ample left-side margin marks the poems in all the Eigner collections I’ve ever seen, including On My Eyes (Jargon Press, 1959) and Selected Poems (Oyez, 1972). Of course, as shown above, it’s also what you see if you look at what Eigner actually created:

Additional Notes

For a post subsequent to the one above, that serves as a kind of coda it, and describes among other things my experience reading The Collected Eigner, please click here.

For a post that gathers comments about Eigner’s work made over the decades by approximately one dozen poets, please click here.

For a post that gathers comments made by Eigner himself, more or less directly about his poetry, please click here.

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A Garden In The Pocket

an essay by
John Olson

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~ Chinese Proverb

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Introductory Note: the glade today happily presents an essay by Seattle poet and writer John Olson. This is the essay’s first publication. The accompanying illustrations have been supplied by your humble host.

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A Garden In The Pocket

If you have to argue someone into seeing how superior a book is to an electronic gadget, you’re never going to win that argument. You might as well be talking to a curlew, or a scoop of chocolate ice cream.

          But if you do choose to make such an argument, you might begin by saying that a book is a sensual object, a generous clairvoyance, like an elegy of snow, or a palomino doing handsprings down the sidewalk.

          A book is a simple, portable, companionable entity. It does not need batteries, signal, click wheel, account, flash memory, digital rights management or global positioning system, and does not need to be plugged into anything. If you bring that one book with you to the beach, to work for a lunch break, carry it on a plane or pack it into your suitcase, you will only be able to access that book. But I see that as an asset, not a liability.

          The ability to access an unlimited number of books, blogs, bogs, slogs, frogs, ezines, bee-zines, enchiridions, periodicals, articles, particles, or farticles on a single device is eminently convenient, but leads, inevitably, to superficial flirtations, bits of flimsy data that never cohere, never synthesize like a polymerase chain reaction into the strand of a thought, or the protein of an idea. A book requires commitment. Some books are easy to disappear into but many books require a cooperation that rigorously exercises on one’s capacity to focus. This is the downfall of the Internet: surfing.

          This is the boon of the book: duration.

          There are times when surfing and dalliance are good. Too much concentration can weigh the mind down. Caprice is an appetizer. A stimulant. But you cannot rely on appetizers for nourishment. Popcorn can only go so far. Eventually the mind craves real substance. And for that you need a book. Letter and leather. A stratum with a spine.

          A book has a feel and a smell that you cannot find in anything electronic. A book is an object which is the end result of a great deal of effort. So that whatever making goes into the making of the book will make you wonder at what a wonderful thing a book is. Especially by comparison to a clothes iron, or a TV, or a set of patio furniture.

          Look down. Down at the ground. There is consolation in seeds. They become trees. Leaves. Pages in a book. The book opens, and a skeleton of sound dances from page to page in an astronomy of ink.

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          I would love to see a tornado leap out of a book and capitalize on the turbulence of its spectral cartilage, turning electronic gadgetry, laptops and cell phones and iPods and Kindles into cataclysms of doubt and speculation. A tornado of thought a big whirling column of air a disaster on the ground throwing debris around and around like the chaos of thought in somebody’s head. A column of words in a column of air whirling from paragraph to paragraph. Word to word in a syntax of slippery association ideas engorged with ink constellations of thought embedded in warm paper and dark spines of golden titles.

          Gravity and books go hand in hand we live in a universe of weights and spatial relationships, sensations, secretions, perceptions, a physical world is what I am getting at, a world in which it feels good to have a body, inhabit a body, affirm a body, even when it ages and creaks and wrinkles it’s better to have a body than walk around without one. Is that what a ghost is? A personality who has forgotten their skin, bone, glands, needs, desires? An eidolon without hair? Muscle? Proprioception?

          Society can do that to people. It can make you numb to yourself. Not just routine and monotony and the chronicles of our lives told in the pull of cables and grease but the denial of impulses the killing of instincts.

          Colors climb into the sky and float. That’s what colors do. The elevator chronicles are full of such tales. Colors rise into the sky and bleed hills of undulating water. One’s brain arranges a thought to form patterns and finds that the color of despair is a stained glass window full of parables and angels, that it is possible to decorate your anguish with cathedral glass, dimes of moisture intriguing as mirrors, wisps of incense spiraling upward in languid curls, a pair of lips producing animals of sound.

          My head is a bowl, my nose is a solicitation. Coins of pain jingle in pockets of pleasure. Jellyfish dangle in open sea reverie. I open a book and find a realm of wilderness, a sweet chunk of living cognition erratic and rich as the jungles of Borneo, a clod of earth teeming with seeds and worms.

          In the Trobriand Islands, a magician lays an assortment of herbs down on a mat, then covers that with another mat, to make a kind of magical sandwich. Then he recites an incantation into it, holding his head close so that nothing escapes the movement of his breath, but is stirred by it, because the magic of the incantation, the magic of the words, is in his breath. The herbs sandwiched between the mats is a voice trap. Where the words are carried to another world. Not unlike a book.

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          I admit, I am tempted to buy a Kindle because it would be nice to be able to read under the covers when my wife is trying to sleep. That sounds very cozy. Certainly better than trying to hold a penlight and maneuver the pages of a book. But when I read something on a screen, I do not feel private, I do not feel autonomous or unrestricted, I do not feel independent in my thinking and reflections. The medium is the message, and the medium in the instance of anything electronic is highly public. It is a public domain. Smacks of corporate culture. The glib and dehumanized. Cramped cubicles and glossy desks. You cannot get around that.

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          When I think of books I think of them housed in magnificent libraries with spiral staircases and gargoyles dribbling the liquor of heaven. Hunchbacks diving behind shelves in secrecies of alchemical transformation. Women in illumined solitudes like the women in the Dutch paintings of the 17th century, Vermeer’s maiden holding a letter in pensive discrimination.

          When I read a book, especially a large, fairly hefty book, I feel that I am inside something. I feel private. I feel that my interior self, the one I choose to keep out of the public light and its scrutiny, is at liberty to roam.

          It never ceases to amaze me how complicated life can be and it is for that very reason that I prefer the astonishing simplicity of a book.

          That is the beauty of the thing.

          One cannot fail to feel the warmth and fiber of a book, its infinite variety of shape, and grain, and cloth. Text begins with texture. We can lift a perception into the world by scrawling it into the sand with a stick by the side of the ocean. But it is not the frenzied bowing of the violin and its intricate notes that we hear when we find deliverance in the stirring of pages. That requires a spine, and a block of paper.

          Shake a thought until an idea falls out of it. Thought attracts thought and rolls around the sun. The tongue unrolls the word ‘accordion’ and an accordion unfolds making accordion sounds. All this can go into a book with the same felicitous fit as a willow delineating druids and shadows by a tumbling brook.

          If you need to explain to someone why the direct rays of the sun feel better than the heat emanating from a steam radiator, or why the crackling gold of a campfire is more delicious to the skin than the heat coming from a baseboard heater or vent on the floor, then you will never convince that person of anything because that person is dead.

          You get my point.

          I am sympathetic to alligators but I do not want one with me on the bus.

          I feel the same way about laptops. They eat books. They devour them. Suck them into a realm of pixels and electricity and binary digits. A ghostly realm of ephemeral passages, wisps of knowledge, gossip, rumor, chat, fleeting communications that glow without bone, shine without substance.

          Could it be that the juggernaut of digital communication is more than a matter of novelty and convenience? Perhaps this is the most apt medium for a language drained of meaning. Politicians say one thing while campaigning, then, elected, do just the opposite. Pundits on TV make statements void of fact, or even reality. And nobody seems to mind. One hears one thing, sees another. There is often no correspondence between what is claimed, and what is actually experienced. The only real way to find if something is true, is to go there yourself. See it, hear it, feel it, taste it, smell it yourself. There will come a day when even Google lets you down.

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          One day I pulled a meaning out of a word I did not expect and it grew into an orchard of fruit, peaches and plums swollen with light, a larynx extending the granite of a wooded solitude.

          But now I don’t remember what the word was.

          It was in a book. I know that. And the book was full of words like drops of rain. And the streams had meanings and the eggnog was aloud and robins were alert to the worms in the dirt and the amber sweat on the handle of a paragraph was like the dry chrome of form bending in the light of the afternoon which slid down from the sky and became a chin of thought frisky as any abstraction high and sweet and smooth as the circulation of blood and a studio full of spinning excuses forged a crucial understanding of buffalo and a voyage took place in a web of words where veins of silver converged in a pool and the only noise was my mind squeezing the fruit of hypothetical absences.

          There is an authenticity in heft that cannot be paralleled among the pixels of a computer screen. There is more scrupulous attention, sweat and devotion, to what goes into a book than what gets floated on a screen. Pixels are ephemeral. Ink is adamant.

          Even if what is written is utterly silly once it’s in a book it’s there and you cannot get it out unless you burn the book. But even that won’t stop it. Because there will be more books. None of which will require a battery or an outlet or an account or a modem. But they will require fingers and hands and skin and a functioning brain. Blood. Thumbs. Hooks will do if your arms have been blown off in a war. Which sometimes happens.

          There are people who like killing and people who don’t. I don’t know which group prefers reading books to burning books but it doesn’t really matter. Because if you begin generalizing about people you just get lost. Generalizations don’t belong in books. Or do they? Maybe a book is a pretty good place to put generalizations. If a generalization goes into a book it must be supported. It’s not like a conversation where any opinion can get floated and it won’t matter, even if you’re on television or the radio you can always deny what you said or say you’ve been misinterpreted. A generalization in a book will need an index and footnotes and an appendix and a pancreas and a stomach to digest it all. It’s all there in the anatomy of a book. Which is why it feels so good in the hands and yields so wonderfully to the fingers. You don’t have to mess with a cursor or crash or scroll anything down like you are possibly doing this minute.

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          Books may disappear but their essence will not. Who has not fantasized being one of the people in Fahrenheit 451? What book would you memorize? I would memorize Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Or Hamlet. Or Moby Dick. I can never make up my mind. Maybe instead of memorizing a book I would make one up. You can’t stop books. Even Socrates argued against them. Because there is a drug there. Deliriums. Hallucinations. Fantasias.

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          It always pains me when, at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero hurls his book of magic into the sea. But I can see the necessity of it. Given the era in which Shakespeare lived, in which Christianity had so much sway, a time not unlike the one we are now in again, another slide into the dark ages with ignorant, superstitious people antagonistic toward blaspheming intellectuals and the laboratories and scalpels of science. Because creating storms and gorgeous palaces was a lot of power for a mortal. It is godlike.

          To bring about the events that Prospero was able to control, a disturbing circumstance in which the imagination and external world are weirdly fused, so that what one speaks becomes reality, requires the special knowledge of books, which are the receptacles of long inquiry. Argument and exploration. Which makes books powerful devices of sedition. Ideas can topple kingdoms.

          A book incubates. Its ideas develop slowly. It goes to print after a long gestation. But once it has arrived in the world, it is fixed and autonomous, subject only to the person who brings the words to life by reading them. One enters a charmed domain. Prospero’s world. “The isle,” says Caliban, “is full of noises. Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” It is a place where the laws of the physical universe are suspended. The spirit is exhilarated by the taste of the infinite.

          This holds true for all books. Whatever controls are imposed on a book during its creation, by religion, by law, or by the body politic, will be fully evident to the reader, provided that the reader has learned the practice of keeping an open mind, and has learned to think critically. The outer world gives us sensation, but it is our mental life that arranges those sensations in patterns that make sense to us.

          When we open a book, there is no intervening force. Whereas everything connected by electronic means is controlled by an outside source. Information is monitored, filtered, surveilled. Even, in the case of DynamicBooks, a subsidiary of MacMillan, to give “instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.” How deeply sad that MacMillan, who has published poetry by Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, W.B. Yeats and James Schuyler, has chosen to drop their pants, squat, and defecate on the written word.

          You can delete sedition from a screen but you cannot delete sedition from a book.

          Because somewhere anywhere it doesn’t matter where the sun will go on shining and the palomino will continue doing handsprings down the sidewalk until someone closes the book and pays for the coffee and gets up from their chair and begins walking. Walking where does not matter. But there will be comfort in the weight of the book, the feel of its spine, lode upon load in the leaves of its light.

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End-note, by John Olson: You might be wondering why, if the author of this diatribe is so against digitalized media, is he presenting his argument on a blog? First, I love irony. Secondly, I am not altogether hostile to digitalized media. It gets information into the world very quickly. I respect it. I admire it. I salute it. But I do not love it. I’m just sayin’: there are major caveats that go along with this convenience. Thirdly, reality. Go into any coffehouse or airport or bus station and what are people most apt to be reading? Laptops. And it is you who I am trying hardest to reach.

“. . . a garden carried in the pocket.”

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John Olson’s essay “Extreme Reading” was published here in the glade last June (click to go). Other essays published by Olson in 2009 were discussed and linked to in a post this past December (click to read, if you please).

Black Widow Press will publish Larynx Galaxy, an all new collection of Olson’s prose poems, in late summer. Olson’s The Nothing That Is, an autobiography written in the second person, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press.

John Olson is also the author of Backscatter: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2008), and Souls of Wind (Quale Press, 2008); the latter’s a fiction in which Arthur Rimbaud and Billy the Kid meet up on the American frontier.

“. . . the weight of the book,
the feel of its spine,
lode upon load in the leaves of its light.”

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