EARLY VOICES
Michael Davidson
MISSING LARRY:
THE POETICS OF DISABILITY IN LARRY EIGNER
how to dance
sitting down
—CHARLES OLSON, “Tyrian Business”
My title refers to Larry Eigner, a significant figure in the New American Poetry, who is missing in a number of senses. On a personal level, I miss Larry—who died in February 1996—as a poet whose curiosity and attentiveness remain a model of poetic integrity. Although his movements were extremely restricted due to cerebral palsy contracted at birth, he was by no means “missing” from the poetry world, particularly after his move to Berkeley. Thanks to the efforts of Bob Grenier, Kathleen Frumkin and Jack Foley, Larry was present at many readings, talks and parties throughout the 1980s. Nor, as those who knew him can attest, was he a reticent presence at such events. He was a central influence in the emerging “language-writing” movement of the mid-1970s, publishing in their magazines (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bezoar, This, Hills) and participating in their talks and reading series. His emphasis on clear, direct presentation of moment-to-moment perceptions also linked him to the older Objectivists (George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky) as well as to poets of his own generation living in the San Francisco Bay region such as Robert Duncan and Michael McClure.
A second dimension to my title refers to the Eigner missing from discussions of postwar poetry. Although he was centrally identified with the Black Mountain movement and corresponded with Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Corman and others, he is seldom mentioned in synoptic studies (including my own work) of that generation. What few critical accounts exist of his work come from poets. Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Clark Coolidge, Cid Corman, Charles Bernstein, Robert Hass, Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten have all written appreciations of his work, but he has had little response from the critics.1 And although he was aligned with language writing later in his life, his name seldom appears in books or articles about that movement. Perhaps most surprisingly, given his centrality in the New American Poetry, he is seldom included in discussions of disability arts. With the exception of an appearance in Kenny Fries’ anthology of disability writing, Staring Back, he is not included in major treatments of disability arts.
This brings me to the tertiary level of my title—the absence of cerebral palsy in discussions of Eigner’s poetry. In what little critical treatment of his work exists, the fact of his physical condition is seldom mentioned. The lack of reference to cerebral palsy leads me to ask how one might theorize disability where least apparent: how to retrieve from recalcitrant silences markers of a neurological condition that mediated all aspects of Eigner’s life.2 In the process, we might discover ways of retrieving other social markers—of race, sexuality, class—where not immediately apparent. Eigner by no means adhered to New Critical warnings about the biographical fallacy—the idea that poems should finesse biographical or historical contexts through formal, rhetorical means. At the same time, he seldom foregrounded his mediated physical condition—his daily regimes of physical exercise, his limited mobility, his slurred speech—preferring to record real-time perception and observation. In order to retrieve disability from this lacuna we need to “crip” cultural forms, not simply to find disability references but to see the ways Eigner’s work unseats normalizing discourses of embodiment. Cripping Larry Eigner allows us to read the body of his work in terms of his “different” body and to understand how the silences surrounding his poetry are, in some way, a dimension of—perhaps a refusal of—that embodiment.
In order to discuss Eigner’s poetry in terms of disability we must first honor his own reticence on the subject. Throughout his memoirs, interviews and poetry, the subject of his cerebral palsy seldom appears. In his author’s biography at the end of Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, Eigner describes himself as a “shut-in partly.” Bob Grenier observes that “Larry’s work does not derive from his palsy,” but on the other hand, his poetry cannot help but be affected by it. In order to discover disability where it is not present, it is first necessary to find where it is—in Eigner’s numerous prose writings, memoirs and stories. Consider the following passage from his 1969 memoir, “What a Time, Distance”:
Cigarette cigar signs stores mostly Variety groceries and how many things candy a little not much good might very well be a good deal everything smelled bread was designed with packaged loaf fresh and down the street daily paper words flashes and then sentence dateline dispatches...
Here, Eigner remembers childhood experiences in a variety store, the sights and smells of products and signage rendered in quick succession. One might imagine such passages divided into lines and splayed out over a page, but these memories are constantly mediated by conditions of restricted motion, regimes of physiotherapy and exercise, which frame his access to such “variety”:
Over the toilet rim in the bathroom at home into the bowl his weemer between large knuckles, cigarette shifted to mouth preparatory or in other of grandfather’s hands. Coffee label. Good to the last drop. Waste not want not. To go as long as you could manage it. Bread is the staff of life, Grampa said many times buttering it at the beginning of dinner. Relax, try how get to fling ahead legs loosened quick as anything in being walked to different rooms the times he wasn’t creeping to do it yourself as soon as possible, idea to make no trouble or spoil things but live when somebody agreed to a walk as he ought to have, sort of homework from the therapy exercising not to sit back need to start all over to come from behind. Thimble yarn darn stocking waterglass stretch wrongside patch, cocoon tobacco cellophane bullet wake finger ring.
A series of Joycean associations mark this passage—from peeing, with his grandfather’s help, to a coffee label and its ad (“Good to the last drop”), to Depression-era adages about thrift (“Waste not want not”) and health (“Bread is the staff of life”). These axioms rhyme with internalized parental imperatives regarding physical control (“Relax”) and self-motivation (“do it yourself”), which for the young boy with motor impairment mark his distance from an able-bodied world. Those difficulties are rendered syntactically in the phrase “try how get to fling ahead legs loosened quick as anything,” which may provide some verbal equivalent of the child’s anxiety over muscular control.3 Adult advice to “make no trouble or spoil things but live when somebody agree[s] to a walk,” expresses a world of agency where everything from urinating to walking requires assistance.
This brief passage could serve as the “missing X” for many poems in which reference to physical limits has been evacuated, leaving only the “variety” of the variety store on the page. In his prose, Eigner merges sensuous associations with things seen and felt (“thimble yarn darn stocking...”) with physical contexts of their apprehension. In his poetry, specific references to those contexts drop away, leaving acts of attention and cognition paramount. Those acts are deployed through three interrelated spaces: the page on which he worked, the room in which he lived, the weather or landscape he saw from that room. I would like to look for Larry in these three frames.
Eigner’s is decisively a poetry of the page, a field of intense activity produced entirely with his right index finger, the one digit over which he had some control. The page—specifically the 8 ½ by 11 inch typewriter page—is the measure of the poem, determining its lineation, length and typographic organization.4 Although a few poems run on for several pages, often as not Eigner continues the poem as a second column on the same page.5 Nor is the machine by which he produced those pages insignificant. Because Eigner needed to lean on the keys and peer closely at the sheet of paper, he could not use an electric typewriter and thus worked with a succession of Royal or Remington portables that permitted him a degree of flexibility in composition. The manual typewriter also allowed him to release the platen occasionally and adjust the spacing between words or lines, jamming letters or punctuation together or running one line onto the next. Eigner’s careful spacing
of letters and words, his indentations and double columns, could be seen as typographic idiosyncracy, a variation on Charles Olson’s “field” poetics, but they are also cognitive maps of his internally distanced relation to space. In a video of Eigner’s funeral made by Cloud House Productions, the filmmaker, Kush, returns to Eigner’s house following the gravesite ceremony, and trains his camera on Eigner’s typewriter for several minutes, a cenotaph for the poet’s writerly remains.
The vantage from which he creates this page and watches the world is his room. The best description of his Swampscott room is in the author’s biography at the back of Windows/Walls/Yard/Ways, which was probably written by Eigner, but utilizing a third person perspective. In it he describes:
a 2-windowed bedroom (summer heat, winter cold, and snow, wind, springtime, Fall) overlooking backyard and porch with clothesreel in a closed-in while big enough neighborhood (sidestreet and 2 dead-end sidestreets, a path through woods, shortcut to the beach before the easterly one nearer the shore ended, after its joint with Eigner’s street at the foot of the hill much steeper than the one going down from the town’s main road.
When he moved to Berkeley, that room, as the PBS United States of Poetry documentary segment on him indicates, was crammed with pages, each filed in dated folders and placed in shelves at wheelchair height. Like Emily Dickinson, Eigner’s “endless/Room at the center” plays a significant role in determining the content of the poems. Until 1978 when he moved to California, Eigner spent most of his time in a porch at the front of his parents’s home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, from which vantage he observed the birds, trees, passing cars, clouds, storms and sunlight that populate his verse, as in these two selections from Things Stirring Together or Far Away.
squirrels everywhere all
of
a
sudden (p.59)
what birds say comes in
all the windows
no end of wires through trees (p.36)
The haiku-like spareness of such lines suggests an Imagist emphasis on objects, but it becomes clear that Eigner’s room is porous. He may hear birds through the windows, but he observes that they sit on the same wires that penetrate the house with news from elsewhere. What might appear as a limited perspective is instead figured by him as “inward performance,” the active measurement of spaces and distances by an unusually sensuous, alert mind:
The midnight birds remind me of day
though they are
out in the night
beyond the curtain I can’t see
Somehow bedrooms don’t carry
tradition I
and the boxed radio
is off. But what am I reading
inward performance
Has relevance. Allows me to hear
while something speaks. As for the bed
straightened by visible hands
only it is huge
when I feel Down in darkness (Selected Poems, p.4)
Lying in bed at midnight, listening to birds outside, the poet feels like a radio, an instrument that although turned off continues to receive messages. The birds beyond his room, the tradition beyond the bedroom, “visible hands” that straighten the bed—these are forms of agency that seem “huge” and threatening. Yet against these “outward” forces, “inward performance” (of which the poem is a record) sustains his nocturnal reverie. The awkward phrase, “Somehow bedrooms don’t carry / tradition” can be seen as a rueful recognition of the poet’s confined position. In a world where individual talent is measured against a heroic tradition, one realized in domestic spaces like bedrooms may seem insignificant. Opposed to outward measures of cultural and social value rests the “inward” ability to imagine absent birds as present, night birds in day.
Once again, these examples do not address cerebral palsy directly; but they embody its effects on the poet as he registers the world from a stationary vantage. So attentive is Eigner to the processes of measuring thought and attention that the subject often dissolves into its acts of perception and cognition. This gives the work an oddly unstable feel as lines shift from one location to another, never pausing to conceptualize a scene but allowing, rather, the play of attentions to govern movement. What might be regarded as a form of impersonality turns out to be an immersion of the subject into his perceptual acts.
For Eigner in his closed-in porch, the issue of access is a problem and a way of being. For him, “travel and distance” do proportion themselves, relative to physical ability. The imperative to “be animate, and walk/turn, abruptly” can only be performed on the page; as a physical possibility, such imperatives must be measured in terms of “lines, broken curbs.” One of the key provisions of the ADA was the erecting of curb cuts for wheelchair users, and although Eigner could not, in the late 1950s when the poem was written, imagine such accommodation, he is speaking of irregular surfaces within the poem as a prosodic principle, and in the world, as a physical set of limitations. That is, Eigner measures an objective world full of “lines” and “broken curbs” (“back to it,” Selected Poems, p.4) as one which he must negotiate with difficulty.
Larry Eigner
JULY 3 64
if the earth were an eye
disembodied or not
there would still be frames
mist the road up
the hedges
bringing the sea to life
views
transparent
beside each other
this is all
the small
and the relative
the trees sharpening windows
taper to steady
the wind turns them
enhance the feel
the visible is the air
the hood the
glass
reflecting to the sky
sit on the hard surface
tug the small tree
the dog’s sleeping under
times it rains
and the sun shines
the far-away gets dim
the stars sleep in your dreams
AUGUST 12 65
there are all kinds of love many kinds perhaps for each
object don’t think of yourself
there is always something else
the boats quiet in the sea
that have been to harbor , the skyline coast
heavy white gulls
grade the bus windows
not to escape father, mother, but get away from crowds
everywhere fog in the distance
earth water come to the air
clouds say in the sunshine to
have you as if
by how much more than one
AUGUST 16 65
quiet thing quiet thing
walk
in my eyes death
in the certain distance how many
go on
I live not far away
over the horizon
still
JULY 21 69
The moon is cold
a background by
all hardward more and more to
go to a heavier place
more miles
in little pieces
poor restless imagination
bouyant motion awhile
in stillness
JUNE19-SEPTEMBER 9 70
the window opening
no, already opened
nothing but the wind up
DECEMBER 2-3 92
the whole orchestra
risen
up into the air
for dancing
after the storm
Tom Andrews
from Codeine Diary
On November 15, 1972—one week after Nixon was re-elected—I clapped my hands for fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes. I was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records. I was eleven years old.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 3