Larry Eigner | watching/how or why / 1977 || The World and Its Streets, Places / 1977

broadcasting silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Eigner watching/how or why (New Rochelle, New York: The Elizabeth Press, 1977)

Larry Eigner The World and Its Streets, Places (Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1977)

 

Few American poets have sustained the consistency of voice, style, and poetic integrity that Larry Eigner has. After twenty-two collections of poetry and the publication of hundreds of as yet uncollected poems from little magazines, Eigner's two most recent books, watching/how or why and The World and Its Streets, Places still present a world of people and things as fresh and revealing as his earliest works.     This is even more remarkable considering the seeming narrowness of Eigner's poetic range. Too much has been made of his cerebral palsy and his primarily house-bound life, yet the fact cannot be ignored that Eigner's subject and focus is almost entirely centered around the natural images viewed from the glassed-in front porch of his Massachusetts home. And in vocabulary alone, for example, Eigner's poetry is limited in scope. Words such as "sky," "tree," "squirrel," "street," "bird," and "sun" are key words in poem after poem. His poetry, accordingly, is without many of the effects—the Surrealist juxtapositions, the discontinuous narrative, the exotic images and vocabulary—that are so predominant in contemporary American poetry. Yet for all this, Eigner's work has continued to attract readers of "experimental" poetry and experimentalists themselves. From the Objectivist experiments of the early 1950s to the present-day linguistic experiments of the New York and California-based "Language" poets, Eigner and his work have continued to exert an important influence.

     But it is difficult to describe what it is about an Eigner poem that makes for such an impact. in the first place, Eigner would probably decry any such attempt. Like many poets writing since the 1950s, Eigner eschews intellectual analysis of his poems or poetics. And, secondly, the typical Eigner poem breathes simplicity:

 

                                            ominous

      

                                                sinister

 

                                                        the rain

                             

                                                    smiles

 

                                                                         (TWAIS, p. 11)

 

Poems such as this, in their naive-like use of pathetic fallacy, carry with them an illusion of primitivism, an illusion Eigner himself often perpetuates. Writing recently in a letter to the magazine Là-bas, Eigner remarked of his poetics: "I myself go on serendipity.... I'm another H. Rosseau if not Grandma Moses."

     However, while some of his weaker poems never transcend this primitivist impression of landscape, Eigner's best poems—of which there are many in these two volumes—reveal a personal involvement with "things" that is as intellectually sophisticated as the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Indeed, it is to the Pound-Williams tradition that Eigner is most often linked. As Samuel Charters, in his introduction to Eigner's Selected Poems of 1972, has perceived,

 

                    It [Eigner's work] is a poetry that accepts implicitly the point

                    of language and image that Williams had honed out of the

                    Rutherford, New Jersey, doctor's office windows....

 

Eigner's poetry, like Williams', is of things rather than ideas; as Eigner wrote very recently in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, "behind words and whatever language comes about are things...things and people...." And Eigner's image is something akin to Pound's "radiant node or cluster...through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing." Thus, while Eigner's images are often grounded in the visual and the aural, the poems, like Pounds' and Williams', are dependent upon his engagement with the landscapes he presents. If meaning, as Eigner suggests in The World and Its Streets, Places, "depends on your eyes" (p. 78), it also depends upon the poet's and, ultimately, the reader's participation in this world of things.

 

                                   thunder

                                     planes

                                        I sneeze

                                           a lot

                                                    of

                                              things

                                                  slow

                                                    to take

                                                       slipped

                                                            look

                                                      higher than itself

                                                           some second ago

                                                                      the dam

                                                                                      broke

 

                                                                                              (w/how, p. 36)

 

     In this poem, the thunder, the sound of the plane and the poet's sneeze, are bound in a sequential relationship that results in both the natural and emotional releases expressed in the metaphoric "breaking of the dam" (in rainfall and psychological relief).

     Yet here we also see where Eigner's poetry is radically different from Williams's more tightly controlled "machine of words." What is most important in the Eigner poem is not syntax or even line break, but the relation of words through their placement on the page. Superficially, this appears to have a great deal in common with Olson's theories expressed in his "Projective Verse," but as Eigner has explained, while Olson saw the poem as a field of energy, he (Eigner) thinks of the poem as "spatial quantity" (Charters, quoting Eigner in Selected Poems, p. xiii). This is a crucial distinction. Whereas Olson's kineticism demands that the poem be structured around a connective flow of ideation (as Olson wrote in "Projective Verse," "One perception must immediately and directly lead to A FURTHER PERCEPTION."), Eigner's use of space tends to break connections, to sever ideational flow, to isolate and dissociate words and phrases.

     The effect of this, of course, is to put stress on the word, the syllable and phonemic relationships, which, in turn, forces the reader to examine the word or syllable and to reevaluate it. Even in a poem that is primarily thematic we can see this at work.

 

               what a

               uniform is

              one thing

 

                        yellow yellow yellow

                                            star

 

                                       (allowed publicly not to wear)

                                              Sol Rossi      Mantua

                                                       composer      court musician

                                                 l8th cent. syn

                                                       agog     sound    special

                                                           mark

                                      .......................

                                                                                   (TWAIS, p. 173)

 

     In the fragment printed above, Eigner obviously is writing about the uniform that Jews were forces to wear in persecution, and the rest of the poem deals with other uniforms which are forced upon people at the expense of their freedom and individual identity. But just as important as what this is about is how the poem breaks up thematic continuity. The repetition of "yellow yellow yellow," for example, pounds yellow into the reader's mind, so saturating it with the color that the word almost loses meaning and becomes a yell of frustration instead. It is only in the next line, with the word "star," that the obsession with the color and that resulting frustration make sense. A few lines later Eigner even takes apart words, as in "18th cent. syn/agog sound special." The abbreviation of century, and the separation of the syllables "syn" and "agog" here allow for all sorts of new linguistic possibilities (including the concepts of "sin," and the intense excitement of being associated with that "sin"; the Sol Rossi to which Eigner refers was a Jewish musician, Salamone Rossi, court musician to the Gonzoga Dukes of Mantua in the Renaissance), as meaning is derived from prefix and suffix and attached by the reader to the words surrounding it.

     In less thematically oriented poems, moreover, this process is carried even further.

 

                                            D e p t h

 

                                      a tree

                                         inches    felt

                                                   distance

 

                                           a phonepole the sky slants

 

                                      Leaves crying death, death, the wind

                                              in the sun

                                                          rises

 

                                                                            (TWAIS, p. 102)

 

Here, except for the possible continuous flow of meaning between "a tree" and "inches," the reader is presented with only fragments. Even more than in the other poem above, the reader must focus on the phrase, the word, or as in "D e p t h," on the letter, rather than the continuous flow of ideas. The language itself, then, its sounds, its rhythms, its denotative meaning wrenched from associative context, are almost all the reader has to go on. It is no wonder that the "Language" poets are so attracted to his work.

     Just as significantly, however, the emphasis on word and partial phrase draws the reader's attention to what is not on the page, to what is missing, to the space which surrounds the isolate fragments. And it is there, as much as in the language, where Eigner's poems grown into meaning. In an Eigner poem it is as if most of the words have been erased, and the few that are left are merely clues to a complex mental process.  The reader must be as attentive to space, to what happens between lines or between words, as he has been previously to the words themselves. In the poem above, for example, everything hinges upon what the reader makes of the space between "distance" and "a phonepole the sky slants." This forces the reader to participate, to search beyond the linguistic surface in an attempt to make meaning. In this process, paradoxically, Eigner's "things"—his "sky," "sun," "tree," "phonepole"—although originally grounded in specificity—become for the reader abstractions, universals which permit him his own specificity in confronting and resolving the void of Eigner's space.

     Eigner poetically expresses this paradox as "broadcasting silence" ("the broadcast silence/like the sky," TWAIS, p. 94), a phrase which recognizes, it seems to me, the separateness of each individual; what for the reader is meaning can only be expressed by the author as silence, and vice versa. The shards of Eigner's language, then, serve as touchstones to the reader's discovery of his own life.

     On the other hand, this does not mean Eigner's poems work primarily through association, that they serve the reader as a sort of Rorschach blot. In his best poems, reader and poet work together to make the world around them startlingly new. And there is something serendipitous about this process. One example will have to serve as illustration:

 

                            noise absorbed

                                           in the air

 

                                       happiness

                                             is quiet

 

                                       have fun,      they say

 

                                           the birds lean on bark

                                                    and sing

                                                              to our ears

 

                                                                               (TWAIS, p. 110)

 

After the thousands of years and thousands of poems containing bird imagery, there is something truly wondrous about Eigner's birds leaning on that bark, upon the noise of their own singing.

 

College Park, Maryland, 1977

Reprinted from PIP (The Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog (June 2013).