Announcing Larry Eigner's Selected Poems: Calligraphy Typewriters

The University of Alabama Press has just published Calligraphy Typewriters: The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner, Edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier [ISBN: 978-0-8173-5874-7, Quality Paper $24.95]. 334pp. with a Foreword by Charles Bernstein, Index and Notes on the Text. The book measures 7 x 9 inches, with sewn signature binding, and a glossy cover (designed by me and George Mattingly).  

The publication of Eigner's Selected follows our earlier work on the Collected Poems of Larry Eigner [Stanford University Press, 2010, Edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier], a four volume hardcover set of 1868 pages.     

Any selection will be a reflection of the taste and discrimination of its editor(s), and with a poet as prolific as Eigner was, there can never be a completely settled subset of universal correctness. Certainly all of Larry's famous poems have been included, but the work's overall consistent quality virtually guarantees that any selection will have a satisfying and familiar confirmation, no matter how partisan. 

Our determination to include as many poems as would reasonably fit--our selection actually comprises less than a third of Eigner's total published out-put in his life--meant that we used as much of each page as possible, often stretching the limits of traditional margin-practice. Due to a slight trim error, some of the pages are a bit too low on the page, a problem which we could not have foreseen at the proof stage. 

Unlike the earlier Stanford edition, in which we established a fixed left-hand margin for all the poems, in the Alabama edition we chose to present each poem roughly centered, in order to give each a degree of autonomy. The resulting shifting margins makes for more variety of placement, and creates a sense of balance. 

Calligraphy / Typewriters is intended to reach a wider audience than the bulky Stanford Collected. Our hope is that it will become a sort of textbook of his work for use in classrooms and study-groups, and for the general reader. 

For my part, Eigner's work belongs in the handful of major post-Modern writers who broke from the strict confines of traditional verse to create a kinetic, deconstructed experimental work that revisions poetic perception and sensibility in unexpected and astonishing ways. I'm proud to have had a hand in husbanding his contribution to subsequent generations of readers.