Larry Eigner

Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, directed by Leonard Henny (1973).
© Estate of Leonard Henny. Used with the permission of Alexander Henny.
from the PennSound Cinema & Eigner pages

The selected poems of Larry Eigner is just out from the series I edit with Hank Lazer at the University of Alabama Press. We are able to offer a 30% discount, so you can get this 350-page book for $17. 

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.

My foreword to the book is included in Pitch of Poetry.  It is also on-line here. 

De l’air porteur / articulations / un monde: poèmes 1952-1966
poèmes choisis et traduits de l’américain par Martin Richet

A few days ago, the Poetry Magazine Twitter (@poetrymagazine) tweeted a rather simple link to an excerpt from their February 1964 issue, featuring six poems by Larry Eigner. Tweeting links to poems in old issues is fairly standard practice for @poetrymagazine, but the Eigner feature made me think back to some of the truly great video features on PennSound: The Larry Eigner “Sacred Materials” recordings, and The Cloud House Poetry Archives, which was generous enough to make these recordings of Eigner available.

The “Sacred Materials” consist of three videos: the last public reading given by Eigner on November 17, 1995 (he would pass away a little over two months later on February 3, 1996); the Jewish Ground Ceremony for Eigner on February 6, 1996; and a tour later that day of Eigner's Writing Environs, which shows the mountains of manuscripts surrounding Eigner's typewriter where he painstakingly composed his poems.

Poems from Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, plus an excerpt from Jennifer Scappettone’s introduction.

On July 1 and again on July 11 in 1974, Michael Koehler recorded Larry Eigner reading twenty-seven of his poems in Swampscott, Massachusetts. The recordings were later released by S Press, as tape number 37 in their series, under the title Larry Eigner: around new / sound daily / means: Selected Poems. A number of university libraries — and of course individuals — own copies of the recording; but it is fairly rare at this point. Among the libraries with a copy is the special collections archive at the University of Connecticut, where the tape was apparently part of the materials Cid Corman gave them to form the Corman Papers there. I located the Eigner recording in the Corman finding aid, asked the UConn librarians to copy it for us at PennSound. (Many thanks for Melissa Watterworth Batt, curator of Literary, Natural History and Rare Books Collections there.) Soon after, with permission from Richard Eigner, Larry's brother and the executor of the poet’s literary estate, we digitized, uploaded and then segmented the recording into individual poems. They are now available for both streaming and downloading at PennSound’s Eigner page.

I gave a talk on this book as part of Al Filreis's 1960 symposium at Kelly Writers House, Penn.