Calligraphy Typewriters

The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner

By Larry Eigner; Edited by Curtis Faville and Robert B. Grenier; Foreword by Charles Bernstein

SERIES: Modern and Contemporary Poetics

University of Alabama Press

The first and only single-volume collection of Larry Eigner’s most significant poems, gathering in one place the most celebrated of the several thousand poems that constitute his remarkable life’s work

Larry Eigner began writing poetry at age eight and was first published at age nine. Revered by poets and artists across a broad spectrum of generations and schools, Eigner’s remarkably moving poetry was created through enormous effort: because of severe physical disabilities, he produced his texts by typing with only one index finger and thumb on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter, creating a body of work that is unparalleled in its originality.

Calligraphy Typewriters showcases the most celebrated of Eigner's several thousand poems, which are an important part of the Black Mountain/Projectivist movement that began in the 1950s and which remain a primary inspiration for many younger writers, including those in the Language movement that began in the 1970s. In its two sections—Swampscott and Berkeley, named for the two locales where Eigner lived and worked—the volume traces his fantastic perception of the ordinary and his zeal for language. Eigner’s use of visual space, metaphor, and description provide fascinating insights into both his own life and the world that surrounded him. This volume maintains the distinctive visual spacing of his original typescripts, reminders of his method, aesthetic sensibility, and creative ability to compose on the typewriter.

A collection that reimagines the ordinary, Calligraphy Typewriters is the definitive selection of Eigner’s poems, and will serve well not only poets and students of poetry, but readers and writers of every vein.

Reviews
Author

[Calligraphy Typewriters] is a lovely book to hold and to look at. It too reproduces the signature appearance of Eigner’s poems. It maintains their distinctive itineraries as they sally forth across the page from a lefthand margin to which they never return. The book is an essential introduction to Eigner’s achievement and allows us to begin to account for what he was up to.’
—Jacket2‘Following publication of the massive (and magnifcent) four-volume edition of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, its two editors, Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville, set about the difficult task of making a selection of Eigner’s poems for a volume that could be more handily used as a travel companion, or as a classroom text. Probably no one at this point knows Eigner’s work better than Grenier and Faville, and their familiarity with it has allowed them to identify for inclusion in this book key works, indicative of the diverse moves and moods with which Eigner negotiated panoramas, corners, and crevices of the perceivable world. Eigner cast clarity onto the real, variously catching change at its precise swift moment and tracking the drift of slow specks of notability past the senses. The editors of Calligraphy Typewriters: The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner have managed to intensify his oeuvre, even as they make it more available. The book reminds us always to attend to the live world that the senses activate and phrases ruffle.’
—Lyn Hejinian

'For anyone interested in American poetry post-WW2 at its experimental, processual best, who was not able to pick up the set of Collected Volumes (very expensive indeed) or only owns a few (there were many!) of the small-press chapbooks books Larry Eigner published during his life-time, this is THE BOOK.'
—Pierre Joris

Larry Eigner’s poetry is one of the splendors of postwar American culture. There is no more perfect introduction to Eigner’s sublime actualizations of the ‘sustaining air’ of the everyday than this selection, incisively edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville.'
—Charles Bernstein, author of Recalculating, All the Whiskey in Heaven, and Girly Man

‘Calligraphy Typewriters is a tremendously important collection. It is apt to become the single most purchased, read, and used volume of Eigner’s work.'
—Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit, Poems Hidden in Plain View, and Lyric Spirit: Selected Essays 1996–2008, and editor of What is a Poet?

Widely respected American poet Larry Eigner, the author of over 75 books and broadsides, was born “palsied from hard birth” (as he phrased it) in Lynn, Massachusetts, on August 7, 1927. With the exception of two teenage years in residence at the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton, Eigner spent his first fifty years at home in his parents’ house in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where he was cared for by his mother, Bessie, and his father, Israel, and where he came to do his writing in a space prepared for him on the glassed-in front porch basically every day.

Curtis Faville has worked as a teacher, editor, and publisher with degrees in English, creative writing, and landscape architecture. He has published four collections of poetry—Stanzas for an Evening Out, Ready, Wittgenstein’s Door, and Metro—as well as books by Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, and Larry Eigner, among others, under the L Publications/Compass Rose Books imprint. He maintains an eclectic Internet blog, The Compass Rose.

Poet, essayist, and visual artist Robert Grenier has taught literature and creative writing at UC Berkeley, Tufts, Franconia College, and Mills College. He edited Robert Creeley’s first Selected Poems for Scribner’s, and subsequently edited three books of poems by Larry Eigner: Waters / Places / A Time; Windows / Walls / Yard / Ways; and readiness / enough / depends / on. Working with Eigner, Grenier completed the preparation of some 1,800 “established texts” of Eigner’s poems. An archive of Grenier’s own work—the Robert Grenier Papers—is housed in Stanford University’s Green Library.

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