If you never received a letter from the late Larry Eigner, you should go out and buy Raddle Moon 20 at once. An issue devoted to the problematics of image & text, editor Susan Clark has chosen to print an exceptionally typical letter of Larry’s, along with several other interesting works by the likes of Robert Glück, Norma Cole, Kirsten Forkert, Javant Biarujia and Gary Hill. As a whole, the issue is a testament about to do a journal intelligently: focus on just enough writers to provide for range while confining none of them. As has been true for every issue I’ve seen, it’s a gold mine of literary treasures.

 

Eigner’s letter was sent in the spring of 1993 in response to Raddle Moon 10. The letter itself is dated, literally “Jan 26           March 56  93” – off to the right a second set of numbers offers even less elucidation. It might be read as:

 

1 7;2;1 . 1

 

Might because the first semicolon appears directly above a “2” so that perhaps it should have read

 

1 722:1 . 1

 

Or some other variation – Eigner’s letters are full of such marks, sometimes scratched out in pencil (as at least one phrase in this letter appears to have been), sometimes not.

 

The part of the letter might be read as a poem, dedicated to Robert Grenier and Norman Fischer, both friends of Eigner. The text, as I read it, might be:

 

 

    O u i       G e e ! . . .  !

 

Pea wee wee

chai      tea- hlea

 

    wee bee eye sea

     two or more peas can’t ever be

                                 just one and the same

                                                   real identity

 

              Still hopefully a few see

                 enough of singularity

                    at times to drop such perplexity

 

Might be, because there appear to be at least 20 places in 9 lines in which textual interpretation & discretion would come into play, as they needed to for every editor that Eigner ever had. Just one instance, that last word, literally is typed “prtp:exity” with an additional “r” impinging from below on that first “t.”

 

Around this text, palimpsest fashion, are a series of notes:

 

  this of crs doesn

get far at all

soon peters out

 

-----------

 

In Bob’s multi-

colored crayon script,

 some 2 or 3 lttrs

looked like othrs,

implied them, and he

 prolonged, in high-

pithed voice squaled

out, quite a few

words, “we” for in-

stance.

 

-----------

 

   The above from seeing/hearing Grenier read/show

slides from his notebook, mss \ poems, akin to his calligraphic

words, poems, Jan 24, and then reading                                ed

Fischer’s 1-line poem in RADDLE MOON #10

 

Even with all the typos left in (“othrs” for “others,” “pithed” for “pitched”), the text I’m presenting here is greatly cleaned up.

 

There is a second poem on the page, with a similar set of notes, plus Eigner’s own signature of sorts penciled in to one of the open spaces on the page. I’m not going to quote it here, because you really need to see the issue, not just this report of it.

 

I feel an enormous pang reading all of this, some of it simply a continuing sense of loss at Larry’s death six years ago, but much of it directed more at myself & the community of readers of which I’m a part – I often think we have gone only a very little way toward understanding all that might be gotten from the work of somebody like Eigner, and that as a result we have only the most superficial understanding not only of what we have lost, but of all that we had among us for so many decades.

 

Larry’s physical problems were immense – he had the ability to use a few fingers on one hand, the ability to grasp with the other. His speech, even after surgery and years of practice in a community that wanted to communicate, was at best difficult-to-impossible. But Eigner was brilliant & used his challenges to consider precisely what the implications for language might be of his situation. His poetry & critical writing represents one of the most intense explorations of this terrain we have ever had, or likely ever will have. Stein, Olson, Pound – anyone you want to think of – by comparison was a lazy & casual writer.

 

So many of Eigner’s letters entail just these critical palimpsests around every stanza, almost every line. Before he moved to Berkeley, when he was still dependent on his parents in Swampscott for such basics as typewriter ribbons, paper & postage, his correspondence was often faint beyond all legibility. But as Raddle Moon makes all too evident, even later the exigencies of his process & his physical limitations doesn’t fully eradicate the problem. In a sense, I think Larry understood the interpretive dance any reader would have to make around each line, sometimes every word, not at all unlike his own metacommentaries upon the text, and decided that this was just fine.

 

In “O u i     G e e” the word “leaf” appears hidden, barely recognizable in the second line. To spell it out of course would dampen the use of internal rhyme that Eigner is playing out in this lines. To make it appear visually while disappearing aurally is a complex little moment. The only other poet I can think of who is even capable of such an effect might be Hannah Weiner, also a brilliant writer confined within some difficult personal constraints.

 

A project is underway, involving several poets, including Bob Grenier, Lyn Hejinian, Curtis Faville & others, to prepare a Larry Eigner Collected Poems. As the letter in Raddle Moon suggests, this is not going to be an easy project & every poem – there are literally thousands – is going to require the sort of editorial decisions alluded to here. Here’s hoping that they don’t “solve” all the blind spots but, like “hlea” in the second line here, leave enough in to suggest precisely the cognitive grind forever at work in the language of these great works.