A collection of 42 poems and two prose pieces, published by Curtis Faville's L Publications in 1975
Curtis Faville, editor with Robert Grenier of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, has posted a three-party essay on his blog, The Compass Rose, on his relationship to Eigner’s work (part one), his approach to editing the work (part two), and his thoughts on Eigner as person (part three). These considerations form a sequel to his essay in the fourth volume of Collected Poems, “The Text as an Image of Itself.” That essay situates Eigner within a broader context: page design and poetics after the invention of the typewriter. All of this makes for a generous addendum to his editorial work.
Two competing ideas stand out to me in these prose notes. On the one hand, the poem as material fact. On the other, the poem’s printed text as interpretation. The first idea is emphasized in “The Text as an Image of Itself,” where the particulars of Eigner’s process are cited as a constraint on the editors’ exercise of aesthetic will:
All decisions regarding type-face, composition and layout are aesthetic, though they may masquerade as practical requirements: legibility, size, density, and so forth. In the case of Eigner’s work, determined by the manual typewriter’s equivalent spacing, and the traditional letter-size sheet, these are a priori frames, within which other problems must be mediated. Eigner’s text itself is, therefore, in every sense, an “image” of itself — or, in William Carlos Williams’s sense, “the thing itself” — opaque and obdurate. It is not a version of something, but the thing itself.
The second idea is emphasized, with an important qualification, in part two of the blog essay:
The qualification here is that Faville distinguishes the shape of the poem as set by the typewriter from the disposition of that shape on the page. The latter is subject to interpretation; the former ought to be preserved. In this sense, the balance is clearly tipped toward material fact. Still, having allowed for an adjustment of one aspect of Eigner’s “a priori frame” (i.e., “the traditional letter-size sheet”), the possibility arises that a departure from the other — from “the manual typewriter’s equivalent spacing” — might also be managed, at least under certain circumstances. If the page is not crucial, perhaps the proportionate spacing isn’t either. A different edition might legitimately tip the balance in the other direction, toward interpretation.
The issues Faville raises are familiar to me from Emily Dickinson scholarship, where competing notions of faithfulness — of what constitutes a substantive or accidental feature of the text — have led to radically different transcriptions of the manuscripts. What those radical differences teach, moreover, is that a definitive edition is not, finally, possible. What is possible: an edition where the decisions are explained and options shared, so that readers can share in the editing as well as in the poetry.
Which makes Faville’s reflections especially welcome.
I hope you continue your thoughts, here Ben. In the last paragraph of your post, too much seems too implied, or perhaps I am just missed it. I’ll have out with it: do you think, feel, the books did Eigner’s poems right?
A major part of my disappointment with the lay-out of the poetry in the Stanford Collected Eigner is that the editors did not acknowledge or explain (or even directly acknowledge) their decision to shift the left starting margin of many poems to a position close to the left page edge. As such, I either don’t understand, or disagree with you, if you are suggesting that the Stanford volumes — as opposed to the post hoc blog posts — explained anything.
Do you agree with facilitator-editor Faville’s blog post assertion that there’s “no evidence” that Eigner wanted the poems placed in positions on the page as he typed them? I find that claim insulting to the work of Eigner. Eigner wrote. “Everything on the page matters,” Eigner wrote. According to Faville, Eigner’s core principle includes everything — the letters typed, the spaces between those letters, the spacing between words and lines — EXCEPT where the poem is seen on the page. Hmm.
And consider the words Faville uses. He says Eigner’s poem-on-the-page layouts cannot be “precisely” reproduced or “slavishly replicated.” But who’s talking about “precise” or “slavish” replication?
It is quite possible to publish the poems, no matter the page size, in very close proportion to the shape-on-the-page that Eigner put down.
Which of course is exactly what was done in many editions of Eigner’s work, including the Black Sparrow edition edited by Grenier. The claim that the left margin starting point of particular poems is no big deal in Eigner’s work — that there’s no evidence it was important to Eigner — suggests that these earlier editions somehow all willy-nilly ended up with wide left-side margins for the poems.
Yes, Eigner and Faville made an editorial decision. It’s a decision that violates what Eigner typed on the page. It’s one that results in a look and feel for the poems vastly different than what the poems looked and felt like when seen and read in the best previous editions of Eigner’s poems. The editors also didn’t explain the decision in the books, or even acknowledge what they did. It all bothers me immensely, particularly since the books were marketed as preserving and presenting the poetry as Eigner typed it.
Steven, I do intend to continue these notes, piecemeal, as time permits — and I’m glad you found them.
I wish I could give you a detailed answer to your question. I can’t … well, for a couple of reasons. But the main one is, I would like to process my thoughts more fully before taking the time needed to articulate them. Because, sad fact is, it takes me almost forever to get my thoughts down in reasonable order. Better to do it, then, when I know more surely what I want to say.
But I don’t want you to think I’m evading, so maybe a few general principles will do.
First, I think it’s essential that the typescripts themselves be made available, eventually, for those who would immerse themselves in the poems, whether that be from an expensive book only libraries can afford, or on a CD, or through a password-protected website.
Doing that would help to clarify the particular needs of a print edition, even a scholarly one, since right now, I think, those needs are clouded by the desire to make print serve as a point of access to the typescripts, which is impossible, or anyway fated to be exposed as inadequate.
Second, however, I believe that the typescripts too are inadequate: they require translation into print as much as print requires the authority of the typescripts. Think of those poems where Eigner drew an arrow to show how a poem would extend beyond the limits of the page — one of several ways he indicated that his typescripts were meant to be means to an end.
But what is that end? And how far can it stray from the typescript before becoming simply unfaithful? How much latitude does an editor have in distinguishing contingent from essential features of a text? This is where my thoughts become intuitions, unprocessed, and also unfixed. Certainly, I don’t share your outrage over the margins. Nor, for that matter, do I share Faville and Grenier’s belief in the necessity of a proportionately spaced font. But why that is, and what it means, I can’t yet say. It may be the seed of an alternative perspective on the editing. It may be my own prejudices, and my own experiences working with Eigner, getting in the way.
Anyway, right now, I’m content to keep working through the books, thinking my thoughts, appreciating the immense labor that went into them.
I too appreciate the work it took to get the poems, all of them, out. And the poetry, oh my the poetry! Here’s a little of what I’ve been thinking about that: a post about what is, to me, a very interesting sub-set of Eigner’s poems.