Curtis Faville raises the question of spacing & fonts once again. 

 

Dear Ron:

 

Reading just now your "blog" on Eigner's letter/poetics—you surmise how Larry may have begun to perceive his writing efforts in terms of a sort of Sapphic fragmentary phenomenon—where bits of partially realized text—or disintegrating text—stand as integral, or "free-standing" (?) examples of completed, end-point data. I.e., "finished." So, the effort— Bob [Grenier] has Larry's old typewriter which sits like a piece of relevant sculpture in his livingroom in Bolinas. Sort of like Kerouac's, with the "roll" threaded through the cylinder. Bob views this pre-Cambrian instrument as a sort of Living Lincoln railsplitter rustic, pre-IBM Selectric, pre-computer, but "still" literate grid generator. I view Larry's slavishness to equal spacing as a physical and rude requirement forced upon him by necessity, but in other universes, etc., what might he have done? Could we but create poems in magic mid-air jagged swipes & swirls of our digits, as Bob seems intent on doing now, where would "accuracy" and "accountability" to text be?

 

Strange to note that Larry's own typewritten text was fairly accurate and even impressive into the 'fifties and 'sixties—but then after he moved to California, he seems to have developed—or there was a kind of breakdown in this discipline which he came to view as naturally worth thinking about, so his "letters" and "notes" begin to be increasingly arcane, "private" (?), "sloppy," "indecipherable"—and he seems to have felt that (like Olson) these "specimens" of unedited calligraphy were themselves more "hip" and "artistic" than spruced up versions. The Kansas archive contains dozens of such typewritten "scribbles" often on odd-shaped papers (backs of torn envelopes, pieces of letters (from other correspondents), with sometimes only partially realized poems, notes and whatnot. They often exhibit an increasingly flip quick-witted humor which evidently shows Grenier's influence, and I think joy at the freedom and fun this implied/showed. I think one among his several thoughts/meditations was how posterity might come to deal with this—and even hear him chuckling in hyperspace as I peer into his crumbling manuscript pages. Certainly if (like Larry did) you've felt decades of frustration that people keep misinterpreting you, typo-ing you to death—in addition to your own crude uncoordination—eventually you either get apathetic or start to view it with some sort of creative amusement and even to "use" it as a part of your continuing inventories/inquiries. The "effort" of "getting it out there" with the attendant "slowness" —Larry said in interviews he'd compose an entire poem in his head, then wait, maybe, hours until he'd be able to get to the typewriter to graph it. That's a quiz-show memory at work and how!

 

I just gave Bob the "corrected" text of another time in fragments based on the third typescript draft of it at Stanford. Which raises questions: Bob and I both first substantially "discovered" Larry's work through that book, but the text of the bookscript is entirely arbitrary, i.e., the typesetter changed the spacing of virtually every line in it because of the unequal width of the letters, yielding a reinterpretation of each poems arrangement on the page. I asked Bob about this—did our unconscious "misreading" of Larry's text in the "books" actually show that the spacing issue is an illusion? Does not the "reinterpreted" text actually have an historical integrity—which we are now about the "correct"?

 

I put it to you—

 

Curtis Faville

Compass Rose Books

faville@batnet.com

 

As the very blog entry Curtis was responding to demonstrates, I’ve railed against the impact of Robert Duncan insisting on publishing Ground Work: Before the War in Courier. There are monospace fonts beyond Courier—Lucida not only offers a “typewriter” script, but other options such as the Lucida Sans font this paragraph is set in that approximates a fairly close compromise and avoids the problematic surface of a truly typewritten script.

 

It’s interesting—beyond interesting actually—that projectivists, who were so obsessive in their prescription of the line as a score for speech*, turn out also to be obsessive in replicating a certain stage of the work itself, the typed draft. Duncan of course published other works in holograph, albeit (as with Phil Whalen) a performative holograph rather than a notational scrawl. As I noted then, platform independence strikes me as a fundamental feature of the best poetry (and, alas, lots of not the best poetry as well). These kinds of self-limiting circumstances are a poet’s prerogative, of course. It would be tragic if people fail to respond to Eigner’s larger canon not because of what’s in it, but rather due to a typesetting decision. Having once seen an Eigner poem mounted in letters a few feet high on the outer walls of the Berkeley Art Museum, I’m convinced that platform independence – which can be achieved by a non-intrusive typeface – would be the way to go.

 

 

 

 

* Eigner’s own speech skills were minimal due to cerebral palsy. They improved markedly during the years he lived in Berkeley, when he had to interact with many different people every day, but never were fluid.