Larry Eigner's Masterpiece - A Post-Modernist Monument

For those readers who don't know it, the work of Larry Eigner offers a unique example of a poetry whose charm and lightness of touch completely belies its underlying strength and reach. 

How did he do it?  Well, it wasn't easy.  Larry was born disabled, and spent the rest of his life mostly confined to a wheelchair. They thought he couldn't talk at first, they thought he might even be mentally handicapped. Little did they know. 

Larry grew up in a tight-knit Jewish family in Swampscott, Massachusetts, within earshot of the Atlantic Ocean. Schooling was tough, but Larry was precocious. By the age of 13 he'd become adept at composing traditional rhymed poems. At his Bar-Mitzvah, he was given a typewriter--and he set about teaching himself to type with one finger. This was the way he would make all his written communications for the rest of his life! 

Unable to move about freely, Larry wrote his poems in an enclosed porch, punching them out one slow letter (key) at a time. It was hard work, but he kept at it. Little by little, he started getting magazine acceptances. By 1951, he'd started to define a personal style; it was pretty much unlike anything that had come before. The words were scattered across the page, seemingly at random, but as you came to understand them, with an inner logic and carefully considered sequent animation that took your eye from syllable to syllable, word to word, phrase to phrase, in an inspired dance of rhythmic variation and cunning observation. Here was a poet who could think on the run, whose changes were often so abstract and improbable, you wondered if he were actually an alien from another planet.

By 1960, he'd published three books--the first by Creeley's Divers Press in Majorca, From the Sustaining Air, and he'd been included in the watershed anthology, Donald Allen's New American Poetry 1945-1960. 

The following poem isn't Larry's longest, but it bids fair to be considered his most successful long(er) poem. It's been a favorite of mine since I first read it in his Selected Poems book, (Oyez, 1972), edited by Samuel Charters. Observant readers will note that the poem is presented in Courier typeface, an equivalently spaced typewriter font that was designed to accommodate the uniform incremental spacing of the traditional typewriter's functionality, a limitation of that now-obsolete device of which younger generations of artisan-writers are probably unaware, since personal computer software routinely measures out distributed text automatically, mimicking traditional typesetting. One thing I was not able to reproduce was the proper leading, or the vertical spacing between lines, which seems impossible with the blogger service program I use. So we'll have to make do with slightly altered vertical spacing, though the horizontal space--with its precise vertical alignments--is accurate to Larry's original holographic typescript.     

the music,   the rooms

silence silence silence silence sound

          on the walls

   the beach ravelling

   times advance

    or back up

         around earth

       electric poles

      the sun a reflected color

        tropic

         how distance is to some birds

                   in the wind

            fishing

                 pinpoint

              the circling air

                    food

                the power

               with desperate ease

           food for me hits the water

           without break, the cries

             the meaning of change

         information shifted,  player-piano

           on the screen,   the swimming moon

             enters eclipse

           out the window, and other station

           none of us is watching

         the cabinet

                      instrument forgotten

            the clock shakes out

           head bent from the wing

                    in a live broadcast

               a case for various things

                   dry grassy fields

                  the blank sky

               wampum gulls broke shells

                such eyes

                 directed

                             a malnutrition

                                  Kenya

                             straightens hair it turns blond

                              scurvy is wiped out

                          the dogs come, the group

                                      on bikes

                             the street comes

                              the North Sea

                                studio on a ship

                                   pivot   spun

                                      dark life

                                    rises

                                        leaving the island

                                       the dim expanding miles

                                    a steady white light

                                       they might drive headlong into

                                          the mist like a magnet

                                      blows   lost bearings

                                        nest in fisherman's pocket

                                                  the wash

  

" ... distant thunder ... Nearer and nearer came the strange commingling sound of sleigh bells, mixed with the rumbling of an approaching storm ... I gazed in wonder and astonishment ... They passed like a cloud through the branches of the high trees, through the underbrush and over the ground ... They fluttered all about me; gently I caught two in my hands and carefully concealed them under my blanket.

      I now began to realize they were mating ... "

                -- Chief Pokagan, describing an onset of the now extinct passenger pigeon, in Michigan, May 1850

This may seem superficially to unroll sort of like a Nickelodeon, a turning roll of punched paper with old-time-y ragtime piano music played automatically by a tinny upright. In fact, that impression is part of the poem: "information shifted,     player-piano"--which queues us, ironically, like an aside on the meaning of the process. The poem is kind of like an abstract mental movie--"a graph of the mind moving"--as the poet Philip Whalen once said. The way the lines are set, horizontally shifting back and forth, underscores this effect. We're at a seaside aspect, meditating about the ecological relationship of man to resource, there are birds, kids on bicycles, detritus lying around on the beach-sand, maybe a ship on the horizon, the radio is playing in the background, night follows day, the earth turns, the soap-opera of quotidian event folds and unfolds.

So what does the quotation, which follows the poem, rather than leading it off, mean? What is its relation to the meaning of the poem? Is it somehow an explanation, or a source of the poem's subject-matter? Birds mating under a blanket on an Indian's lap! Whoa! Sex! 

From a traditional point of view, this doesn't read like a "poem" at all. The lines occur in a way which seems gratuitous; there's no "rhyme" or regular rhythmic design which would indicate a musical context. It almost seems as if the phrases and descriptive notations are laid out to follow each other in a sequence of meditative calm, rather in the manner of an automatic dream journal, during a state of mind brought on by an artifically-induced state of semi-suspended consciousness. Rational and super-rational connections follow one another freely. Black hair turns blond, a navigational instrument suggests "mist like a magnet," gulls dive into the surf while "food for me hits the water". 

This is a poetry carefully constructed out of a constellation of perception(s). Event and imaginative play are interwoven seamlessly into an integrated meditation. Eschewing a tightly constructed poetic pattern of stanzas or syntactically linked assertions, the poet presents us with a naked progression of items--"a case for various things"--spun in "the wash" of chaotic experience as it is received from the five senses and the mind's ceaseless forming and reforming of data. Dream and waking occur simultaneously in the context of the poem's relaxed susceptibility to suggestion, to metaphoric leaps, shifting interest(s), its wandering, unsettled, restless focus.

Perhaps the poet is suggesting that his meditative state is akin to an orgasmic vacancy--"mating under a blanket"--induced by the intensity of his own vision, rather than by a drug or physiological emergency. It's nothing short of amazing. 

The poem is Post-Modern in offering a meditative sequence that is neither "musical" nor syntactically predictable (connected). Things happen without apparent external logic, but with an imaginative priority which is true to the way thinking actually occurs. Our thoughts are not logical, they're not organized the way traditional poetry is. Poetry like this brings us closer to the phenomenological realities of actual sensibility, provides a glimpse into the magic of perception, of what it's really like to be alive.