With best wishes to all the people who work for Paideuma
Petr Mikes, Czech Associate

I began (numbers 1 + 2 on my list) by specifically pointing to Eigner’s (your term) “native skills” (his intelligence and curiosity), yet you imply I am entirely dismissive of such things with respect to his creative work. That’s just not true.

Of course things like cummings aren’t seen “in specifics” in all of Eigner’s poems, and I didn’t write that they were. I simply pointed out the things that Eigner himself pointed out (including cummings’ Collected Poems had been important in finding his poetic voice. I did so in response to you writing that you were “confounded” about how Eigner moved from his eighth grade work to his adult poems.

Your final comment that I should read The Collected Eigner and think about 1952 is odd. That’s just what I did in pointing out four things that he brought to the typewriter. I am in awe of creative achievement, and the mystery of it, including of Eigner’s. His achievement though, given what he was and what he saw, isn’t a totally confounding mystery.

What an incredible trivialization of my comment, and of Larry’s accomplishments as a poet.

There was nothing typical or casual about Eigner’s poetics. It wasn’t simply “growing up” the way all intelligent people do.

An aesthetic sublimation or synthesis is the consequence of native skills, in combination with influences of one kind and another.

The question I posed was much more specific and directed: We know what Eigner was reading, but there are few clues as to how he arrived at his style. You can see Cummings and Olson, in a general sense, but not in specifics.

Try reading the Eigner collected poems, and then thinking about the question in terms of the historical context circa 1952.

It’s all in his “Rambling (In) Life.” I’ll condense it, as it relates to the question of how the “adult voice” came about: (1) Eigner was a brainiac of the most astute kind; a high IQ was id’ed at young age, he later took correspondence courses from the U of Chicago, for goodness sakes; (2) his brain worked hard, at everything (see his mention of baseball and doing math in his head), and he was insatiably curious and imaginative — he “tried to look through factory wall, just about, to see how machines . . . worked”; (3) cummings’ Collected Poems and some good modern anthology; and (4) Cid Corman (who pointed him to Williams + Pound) “anyway in the next year I started writing again,” so Eigner tells it.

“Rambling (In) Life” appears in areas lights heights (Roof Books 1989), edited by Ben Friedlander, natch.

Thanks for this rendering, and your emphases.

We so hoped that others would see the value and surprise of Larry’s early efforts, and find in this mysterious transformation–from the early boy poet of rhymed verses–to the mature, and unusual and intriguing vision of his adult voice, which first appears in the early 1950′s. How he made this leap still confounds me. How did he accomplish it? Surely it wasn’t simply letters with Corman or Creeley. There wasn’t anything like it “in the air” in 1952.

Wow — your “blogger” (wordpress?) program doesn’t “take” the html code for spaces? That’d be hard!

Permit me to note that the second version here of my fun with Eigner’s poem repeated “love” in the third line from the bottom due to a cut and paste error with the html code. I went and turned Eigner into some kind of a gushing hippie-romantic!

Doing this fun stuff with others’ texts isn’t for me at all “sacrilegious.” There are at least four — maybe five now — do-overs of Shakespeare’s sonnets, all in the last 20 years, and of course parts of Paradise Lost has been done over at least twice, and Ashbery’s “Europe” took from a pot-boiler novel, and Yedda Morrison took apart Heart of Darkness just last year. And Mac Low and what he did with any number of texts, including Woolf, I think James Joyce too, and the dictionary. I’m probably not remembering here many other examples.

But I don’t want to get too far from why I first commented here: I LOVE this post, the beauty of it, with the visuals, and best of all the way you take in (discuss) both Eigner’s kid-work and adult writing. It sent me back to the kid-poems, to start thinking about them again. Thanks!