Two Eigner poems in memoriam of Larry:

This one was published in THE GERTRUDE STEIN AWARDS volume. Norma Cole reminded me its appropriateness:

n o  m o r e  p o e t r y !


                but the window

                          I suddenly shifted positon and

                                really have to go



          N o w  a g a i n



          Mountain ice

                on the rocky path
                with the knockout view
                                  ---I watch my step
                                        in time



                                       *

 G o o d


     I've had the bagel and I've
                    eaten it too



FROM Eigner's forthcoming volume:  readiness / enough / depends / on



                 If life,
                         things,
                                weren't so
                                           intersting, it,
                                                          they,
                                                               would kill
                                                                     me

One of the great surprises to me upon moving to the Bay area in '87 was hearing the conversations between Eigner and poet friends around town. I was never able to undersatnd Larry Eigner's speech, but poets who had gotten to know him carried on deeply interesting conversations with him, which I followed as best I could as if listening to one side of a phone conversation.

Which is by way of lead up to mention that at the conclusion of that tremendous tribute reading for Eigner at Berkeley, Eigner gave an extended reading himself. Hearing his reading of the work gave me a new sense of his use of line break and space -- not sure I can explain it, but I think I had been reading over the line breaks too quickly before....

He's been my friend for ten years--I'd see him once a week and hear from him on the phone quite often. Our birthdays were two days apart--we had a joint party once. He wrote a preface to my first book, LETTERS/LIGHTS--WORDS FOR ADELLE, the only preface he wrote to anyone's book. (Except for the few remarks he made at the beginning of Ron Silliman's CROW. I had asked Larry for a blurb. He responded with a preface.) My current book, EXILES, was at his bedside during the last conscious week of his life.

His voice on a message machine was something to hear. He once left a message on Michael McClure's machine. Michael couldn't make heads nor tails of it, but I was able to catch what Larry was saying. Larry was not easy to be friends with. The pattern tended to be for people to visit him for a while, make some effort to understand his speech, and then to drift away. I was able to stay friends partly because I didn't live with him and partly because I understood his speech as well as anyone. This was more something I willed than something I learned. I was running a poetry series in Berkeley and I admired Larry's work and wanted him to read in the series. Barry Watten gave me Larry's phone number, not his address, only his phone number. I've never known whether this was some sort of joke on Barry's part, since he certainly had his address as well as his phone number. I phoned and Larry answered, saying something like "UNGHHHHH." I had known that Larry was disabled but hadn't realized until that moment that the disability extended to his speech. I simply decided I would understand Larry. There is no other way to put it. By the time the conversation was over, Larry had given me his address and directions to his house, and we had agreed on a date when he was to read. Kathleen Frumkin told me later that she had been listening on an extension phone and had been ready to help me out if I needed it. She never said anything because I seemed to be managing. You write, "His will to think was unsuppressible." Yes, but so was his will to speak--to speak in any manner he could. You've been with Larry and know how he would talk all the time. "To break out with a man's cry," if I'm quoting correctly. His writing, with all its silences, necessarily partook of that urge towards talk. People complained of it--Bob and others accused him of "monologuing."
Yet there it was, at his very center, controlled in certain ways but in others not. Hard to think of him silent.

Here is the piece I wrote at the request of the Eigner family:

LARRY EIGNER: 1927-1996

Distinguished American poet and writer Lawrence Joel (Larry) Eigner died Saturday February 3rd of pneumonia at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. Eigner was 68 and is survived by two brothers, Richard, who lives in Berkeley, and Joseph, who lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Born August 7, 1927, in Swampscott, Massachusetts, on the North Shore of Boston, Eigner got cerebral palsy as a result of a birth injury. Though he remained "non-ambulatory" throughout his life, he recalled that his mother, Bessie Eigner, encouraged him to develop a "work ethic," and his schooling was conducted at home through Swampscott High School. Later, seven correspondence courses from the University of Chicago gave him "a toe-hold of application and hope." Curiosity, he claimed, was always an important factor, "my eyes still big for my head, most things...always tantalizing beyond or almost beyond sight and hearing, out of reach."

In 1949 Eigner "bumped into [poet] Cid Corman reading Yeats, on the radio" and wrote a letter disagreeing with Corman's non-declamatory way of reciting. "This began a correspondence in which I got introduced to things, and the ice broke considerably." Donald Allen's landmark 1960 anthology, THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, includes Eigner's exquisite, often enigmatic verse in the section devoted to "The Black Mountain Poets," a group of writers publishing in THE BLACK MOUNTAIN REVIEW, an experimental magazine printed by Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Many of these poets had also appeared in Corman's magazine, ORIGIN. Among the poets associated with this group were Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley, whose Divers Press published Eigner's first mature book, FROM THE SUSTAINING AIR, in 1953. After reading that book, William Carlos Williams remarked on Eigner's "perfect ear" and added, "It's strange how oldfashioned he makes much of the work of the past appear. But it is always so with every new and outstanding writer."

Eigner's many books, all of them published through small presses, include: ON MY EYES (1960, edited by Denise Levertov); ANOTHER TIME IN FRAGMENTS (1967); SELECTED POEMS (1972, edited by Samuel Charters and Andrea Wyatt); THINGS STIRRING TOGETHER OR FAR AWAY (1974); COUNTRY / HARBOR / QUIET / ACT / AROUND (1978, selected prose edited by Barrett Watten), and WATERS / PLACES / A TIME (edited by Robert Grenier, the book was co-winner of the San Francisco State Poetry Award in 1983). AREAS LIGHTS HEIGHTS, SELECTED WRITINGS 1954-1989, edited by Benjamin Friedlander, appeared from Roof Books in 1989. Eigner's current book of poetry, again edited by Grenier, WINDOWS WALLS YARD WAYS, appeared in 1994 from Black Sparrow Press, publisher of many of his titles. Another volume of poetry edited by Grenier, READINESS / ENOUGH / DEPENDS / ON, is forthcoming from Sun & Moon Press. In 1967 Toad Press published a second, expanded edition of FROM THE SUSTAINING AIR, and in 1988 The Coincidence Press reprinted the original edition. Ron Silliman's 1986 anthology of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, IN THE AMERICAN TREE, was dedicated to Larry Eigner. A short "Autobiography" is forthcoming from Gale Research, Inc. in Detroit. In Eigner's poems, themes of ecology and explorations of his Jewish heritage exist side by side with the most advanced experimental techniques and deep, deceptively simple, sensuous evocations of the world around him. "Parodying Socrates a little," he wrote, "you might say I know enough to feel naive."

In August, 1978, a few months after his father's death, Eigner relocated to Berkeley, CA, where his brother Richard was residing and where he lived till his death. Many young poets visited him there, and he carried on an active correspondence with poets throughout the world. The door to his home was frequently unlocked. As a regular at Jack Foley's Larry Blake's reading series in Berkeley, Eigner became a familiar figure to the Bay Area poetry scene. Despite the difficulty many people had in understanding his speech, he gave many readings of his poetry, often in the company of Foley.

Eigner was also something of a media figure. In 1973, Leonard Henny and Jan Boon made GETTING IT TOGETHER, a documentary film about Eigner with poetry readings by Allen Ginsberg. In August, 1994, Foley broadcast an hour-long interview with Eigner on KPFA radio. THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY, a forthcoming series made for public television by Bob Holman, has a segment featuring Eigner. In the summer of 1993, at the suggestion of Berkeley poet Lyn Hejinian, the UC Berkeley University Art Museum paid tribute to Eigner with a special MATRIX exhibition. His poem, "again dawn," from ANOTHER TIME IN FRAGMENTS, was inscribed on the building's facade. A special poetry reading at which Eigner appeared was held to commemorate the event. Eigner's last public appearance was at a tribute to Gertrude Stein which Hejinian presented at New College of California in November, 1995.

Eigner's innovative poetry was widely admired by poets of very different persuasions. The poets to whom he returned again and again were Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. Denise Levertov wrote, "More than almost any poet I can think of, he demands a suppleness, an imaginative agility, a willingness and ability to leap with him from image to image...." Robert Duncan asserted that Eigner had produced "a new development of Williams's line: his phrasings are not broken off in an abrupt juncture but hover, having a margin of their own--stanzaic phrasings--suspended in their own time within the time of the poem."

Funeral services will take place on Tuesday, at 2 p.m., at The Rolling Hills Memorial Park (Tel Shalom section), Richmond, Interstate 80 at Hilltop Drive. Eigner's family requests that the public and freinds not send flowers. A contribution can be made in Larry Eigner's name to

KPFA-FM
1929 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Berkeley, CA 94704.

Jack

Loss Pequeño Glazier

WHAT SOUND A WALL

For Larry Eigner

walls, soundless, are stable, allow the application of pressure as swallows reflect sound

where you think of what a wall is. How it reflects. How its position swounds an acoustic

however auditory acrostic of stunned steps from the straits of its audiational vista

bay is a bowl the geographic sun room's horticulture not hormuz how zounds leads

is the wall that stands outside which sends windows sounds "The Music, The Rooms"

in "silence silence silence silence sound" where sound only capable amid the profusion

of wounds. Silence marks the beat, its time, makes sounds possible within the noise

of whitespace caterwauling when insisted marking to side is what words spark remark

"on the walls" sustain. On both sides, whether the push outside punctuates birds

its conscious present of paper cosmos whether "times advance" ie tides, ties, pools

or manmade poles, pinpoints, power ... "with desperate ease" sees color's infrared

light also from a punctuation of circling, "the food, the power" inside its simple strait

plunge which is the food and the powder, torpid "tropic" for fleck, as light is a speck

or inspect how birds themselves circle before blunting, plunging, plageant "pinpoint"

"how distance is to some birds" simply said how IS distance to some? Is any distance

possible when circling--no distance--leads to food? The answer that such distance is the

"pinpoint"--the sun point, the pole from perspective of bird's sky view, "back up" its cries

"the meaning of change" is in a change of rooms. This is information itself, which room

and which side is outside (or "so the words go up/ into thin air" how "the parlor" pauses

"the speaking" only existing against the parlor and MADE POSSIBLE by a physical pause

as this pause leads to "room". Room for pause and the pause which makes room

place once inside. There windowed against the spoken pause musical parlor under skies

skies hold mutable pause midwing "birds pass the window" pause "the curves together")

sound only plays against its instrument (forgotten) "on the screen" "the clock shakes out"

as is player piano--a scroll of white of "silence silence silence silence sound" where sound

only capable amid the profusion of wounds--the punctuations as punctures the scroll

makes room for. The player piano is an instrument forgotten of silence which produces

sound song written as if through a wall which pauses sense of sound. Elsewise

a vase for precarious things "a live broadcast" indeed when marks behind screen

which mars sounds themselves how ... circling ... how silence is to some birds.

It takes some remembering, but I think it's probably easy to see those
clusters of words about the page in such a way as to interpret them as
airy, even wispy, and I think that's an error a lot of people do make (rs)

                        a steady white light

                             they might drive headlong into

                                the mist like a magnet

                             blows     lost bearings

                             -----------------------------------------

                             belows     of hearings

... as if the poems had become

 an organ, the sky bellows. (cb)

                                pivot          spun

                              sERK Life

                        irises*

                        ----------------------------------------------

                        *headlights, sights, "a steady white light"