Craft: Larry Eigner

Eigner in 1989: “I feel my life again the strangeness / it should be the same / sky grass tree level the eye / with silence the picture / bright / the gift of thought” [photo by Allen Ginsberg]

Larry Eigner (1927-1996) was a principal figure of the Black Mountain School (associated with Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan) and a major influence on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. As a result of an accident during his birth, Eigner had cerebral palsy and was limited to typing poems with only his right thumb and index finger. His medium was a Royal manual typewriter, which he received for his bar mitzvah in August 1940.

Though the physical act of writing was extremely difficult for Eigner, he wrote all day most days; as a result, his Collected Poems exceeds 2,000 pages and is in four volumes. The editors of Calligraphy Typewriters, his selected poems, have expertly made a portable version that shows Eigner’s breadth over the years. A recent biography of Eigner by Jennifer Bartlett focuses on Eigner’s life and work from a disability justice perspective.

Eigner lived with his parents, Bessie and Israel Eigner, in their house in Swampscott, Massachusetts until 1978 when he moved into a group home in Berkeley, California.These two phases of his life—one living under his mother’s rules and care and another of relative freedom and independence—are reflected in his poetic output. 

Eigner’s poems are spaced across the field of the page and show a marvelous interplay of space and text both of which are part of its expression. Most of the poems are untitled and begin in the middle of a moment.