When exploring the poems for this week, I became intrigued with Larry Eigner, initially because of his seemingly simplistic poems and then because of his life story. I reread the poems we were assigned a few times and [Out of the wind and leaves] particularly stuck with me. I started researching Eigner’s life and became more and more fascinated as I learned of his lifelong journey living with cerebral palsy and viewing his entire life from a wheelchair. Born just North of Boston in Swampscott, MA, Eigner developed cerebral palsy due to a forceps injury during the time of his birth. I was interested to learn more about how his writing style and poem subject matter both reflect and define his poetry and came across the article “Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework” by Rebecca Gaydos. The article effectively addresses both Eigner’s life with his disability as well as explores the projectivist form his poetics take, and the relation of the two. Her thesis centers around the argument that “writing was his life”, comparing Eigner to Emily Dickinson in the way that writing poetry defined his life’s purpose, as well as the other meaning that he was writing about his life as he experienced it (167). At the same time, her thesis argues the biopoetics of this connection are “…conceptualized and created his oeuvre not as something situated within a life, i.e. his life’s work, but as a genuinely life-like configuration” (167).
Gaydos uses examples of Eigner’s object poems to establish arguments for and against his form being an ambiguous representation of his life, where “… the individual poem ‘is and is not . . . set off,’ and the oeuvre appears equally as a continuous poem and as a cluster of fragments—is in fact fundamental to Eigner’s aesthetics” (167). The idea that his poems could be part of a whole, or are pieces of a whole, are explored through scientific organism definitions and then through Eigner’s words and writing. Eigner described his writing as “a stretch of thinking”, not just about one object or idea (167). But his overall aesthetic theory and philosophy do fit into the Black Mountain School and relate to John Dewey’s “Art as Experience”, highlighting everyday things and happenings and the universality of certain experiences (169). She makes a distinction between two facets of the Black Mountain College, “the modernist valorization of the biological” and the “cybernetic elision of the human-machine boundary” and uses mathematics and scientific examples to essentially define the difference between a living and non-living organism (170). I found this part to be a little dry, but her goal of defining what it is to be human and drawing that connection back to Eigner’s life was effective. From her extensive biological definitions and viewpoints, the main idea emerges: the downsides of viewing something as a “holistic postulate”, which is viewing something as one entity instead of breaking it down into its different parts and giving it closer attention.
As we saw in the poems we read by Eigner, the length of his poems is a largely recognizable characteristic of his writing. He defined his writing as that which “can stop anywhere”, as noticed in poems like [Out of the wind and leaves] that tell a great amount of info in only 6 short lines that seem they could keep going, but don’t (Gaydos 175). Gaydos details how Eigner’s preference for shorter poems represents not just an aesthetic but an ethical orientation, directly relating length as “… intimately connected to the human dread of impermanence and the hubristic quest for immortality” (Gaydos 175). Eigner was known for saying “a poem can stop at any word”, which the author relates to life itself and existence (168). Because of this, the poem can simultaneously continue, and “extend itself an additional bit” because the open form of writing allows the reader to imagine the possibility and the content of it continuing (176).
One of the most interesting parts of this article was the reference to an essay by Olson on “inclusive poetics” and the way this can relate to Eigner’s overall poetic form. His practice of “discontinuity” in his poems is a form of inclusion because it is open and allows room and literal space for the poet. Learning the background of his disability, how he used only his thumb and forefinger to write over 3,000 “verbal objects in space” was eye-opening (171). His practice of writing several poems on one paper wasn’t just due to being environmentally conscious – it was because it was a difficult task to use the typewriter and change the page out for a new one. To separate them, he would type dotted lines, saying things like “a line that may be cut”, a place where a division could be made, but doesn’t necessarily have to (177). This allows the poems to continue as they are or create an opportunity for them to change.
With this in mind, the open form and content of the poems does stand out more and it was fascinating to see how the poems serve as observations by Eigner, not just of his surroundings but of himself and his life. I really enjoyed the last line of Gaydos article because it is a good summary of the topic as well as Eigner: “In this sense, it’s fair to say that Eigner is less interested in “things” as such than he is in their “stirring together or far away.”’(180).
Gaydos, Rebecca. “Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2014, pp. 166–82. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.38.1.166. Accessed 1 Sept. 2024.
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