The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner brings together, for the first time, all of the approximately 3,072 published and unpublished poems composed by Larry Eigner (1927-1996), a prominent American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the influential Black Mountain School. Scrupulously edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville from the extensive archives of Eigner typescripts at the University of Kansas and Stanford University, this monumental, four-volume, 8 1/2 by 11 inch edition sets forth in chronological sequence the story of Eigner's achievement, from his modest beginnings as the boy-author of traditional rhymes to his highly original (and often profoundly moving) constructions made of letters in the space of his typewriter page, which have gained him widespread recognition and placed him in the forefront of the literary avant-garde.
For over 40 years, beginning in the early 1950's, Larry Eigner's writing was a wonder and a delight to readers of contemporary poetry, appearing in countless little magazines and in over 75 books and pamphlets. With the publication of The Collected Poems―faithfully reproducing the precise visual and aural relationships envisioned by the author in an equivalently spaced Courier computer font which preserves typewriter spacing―the fact of Eigner's amazing accomplishment can finally be known, appreciated and appraised by a much-better-informed, wider audience.
Palsied from hard birth, growing up in a close-knit, nurturing household in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Eigner courageously overcame a series of physical obstacles and limitations to achieve a mastery over the material text, producing his typescripts on his 1940 Royal manual typewriter using only his right index finger and thumb to create shifting constellations of words in space whose musical and visual designs are realized in a language at once immediate and highly abstract.
Perhaps the best realization to date of the idea of "composition by field" proposed by Charles Olson in his landmark essay "Projective Verse," The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner is a literary event of the first order.
Larry Eigner (1927–1996) was a prominent American poet of the postwar era. Poet, essayist and drawing poem text artist Robert Grenier, a leading figure in the Language Writing movement, attended Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught literature and creative writing at U.C. Berkeley, Tufts, Franconia College, New College of California and Mills College. He has held an Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship and two NEA Fellowships in Creative Writing. Working together with the author, Grenier previously edited three books of poems by Larry Eigner: Waters/Places/A Time, Windows/Walls/Yard/Ways and readiness/enough/depends/on. From 1979 to 1989, as part of a shared living arrangement in Berkeley, Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin provided for Eigner's daily needs (including him in their family), and Grenier (working with Eigner) completed the preparation of some 1,800 'established texts' of Larry Eigner's poems, in contemplation of the future occasion of a Collected Poems. An archive of Grenier's work over the years, the Robert Grenier Papers, is housed in Stanford University's Green Library. Curtis Faville has worked as a teacher, editor, publisher, bureaucrat and―since 1998―rare book dealer. He holds degrees in English, creative writing, and landscape architecture. He has published four collections of poetry―Stanzas For An Evening Out, Ready, Wittgenstein's Door, and Metro―and published books by Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, and Larry Eigner, among others, under the L Publications/Compass Rose Books imprimatur. He lives with his wife in Kensington, California.
