This is the first of a series – Uncommon Measures – looking at poetry that doesn’t fit, that makes the eyes shiver and the brain itch, which is to say the good stuff.
Larry Eigner, Poem for Duncan
Typewriters are loveable machines not wanting to hurt us or to spell us out. A typed poem; there are clattery bones to be heard. The thing is squeezed out like accordion music, clear and meant. At least I like to think so.
I am composing this on my Mac and it knows what’s best for me. I have to keep fucking over its appetite for syntactic hygiene, leaving the odd turd in the laundry basket when a chance shows itself.
Larry Eigner was a poet. He didn’t write poems but worked on them. There was nothing spare. He used a Royal Manual Typewriter (manual as in hands).
His body wouldn’t do as it was told.
You can feel the brain flex. He thought in poetry not tidy notions but a mind making a way.
Magic instants flinching on a hook air shrinking off - there the desperate plain here.
A poem should not be sentimental as there isn’t time. It should be alive stretching out from the last foot.
I chose this poem because it has my name in it.
Essential Information
Youtube Larry Eigner, a poet with severe cerebral palsy, reads a poem.
From The United States of Poetry episode "The Word."
Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.
