Preface to Limits/ are what we/ are inside of

http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Calligraphy-Typewriters,6487.aspx

I have always been drawn to biographies and the mysteries of how people live, particularly artists and poets. I grew up in rural California where the lack of activity and culture frustrated me. Hence, I was always interested in reading about how other people lived. As a teenager, I read dime store like biographies of movie stars, notably Rock Hudson and Marilyn Monroe. As a teenager, I read every biography of Andy Warhol that I could get my hands on.  However, the first biography that profoundly affected me was Mark Rothko: A Biography by James E. B. Breslin. Breslin not only wrote about the painter Mark Rothko, he detailed the history of the abstract expressionism and modern art movements in New York City, including the founding of the Whitney Museum for American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. This model of including the culture around the artist, as well as the individual life, influenced me as I began to write about Larry Eigner.

In the 1980s, while I was still in high school, my father, Lee Bartlett, wrote The Life of Brother Antoninus, a biography of his mentor, William Everson. I fondly remember “hanging out” on Telegraph Avenue for hours while my father made yet another trip to the archives in the mysterious Bancroft Library.  For years, I longed to write a biography myself. My first choice was Muriel Rukeyser, someone whose work and life I have an affinity. Rukeyser was my first love in poetry. I wrote my thesis on her during my MFA program, and I was interested in the intersections in her life of mother, activist, and documentary poet. In the end, Larry Eigner seemed like a better choice. ,I have lived the life of a poet with cerebral palsy.  Cerebral palsy is a neurological condition acquired from brain trauma at birth or in the first few years of life.

“Cerebral” refers to the brain and “palsy” refers to the spasticity that accompanies the condition. Cerebral palsy manifests in a number of ways. It can affect all limbs severely or just one side of the body and only slightly, making the disability barely perceptible. It can affect strength, balance and the ability to control one’s muscles to the extent that those with the condition may not be able to walk unassisted or care for themselves in typical ways. While my impairments are much less severe than Eigner’s, an awkward gait and a speech impediment, I felt that I could lend a particular insight to his life and poetics.

In researching the project, I was distressed at how much misinformation about Eigner’s disability was taken for granted among his readers, publishers, and champions of his work. The realities of his life were unknown most of his readers, including myself. Before I began researching Eigner's life, I did, myself, not know that he could walk, that he attended middle school, or that he could write by hand, kept notebooks, and often wrote marginalia in his books. I had no concept of the number of other poets and editors he corresponded with and his influence on modern poetry. I had heard stories that he learned to speak later in life, the he never traveled, that he didn't give poetry readings or appear in public; all of which turned out to be false.

As I wrote, I felt pressure to downplay Eigner’s cerebral palsy. Some critics and scholars wholly ignore his disability -- perhaps as reaction to their own discomfort. Others consider the palsy to be the sole or primary influence in his life and writing. There are a handful of scholars who explore Eigner’s work within the context of his disability in a holistic way. This biography also falls into that category.

The daily reality of any person with a severe disability remains a mystery to nearly everyone. Only a handful of people who live with severe disabilities have the opportunity to share their experiences with the public. Most with a disability as severe as Eigner’s live isolated lives with their families -- what was once called "housebound"-- in group homes or hidden away institutions. When Eigner was born, it was routine for people "like him" to be put in institutions for life.  Therefore, I wanted to tell Eigner’s story to the best of my ability. In reading his correspondence, I was able to cast aside mythology and piece together an accurate picture of his relationships, education, poetics, impairments, and capabilities.

As I wrote, I realized how different -- and how much alike -- our situations. Until the age of 51, Eigner lived with his parents; his mother, Bessie, was dedicated to taking care of him. He was not required to engage the world in typical ways such as having a job, doing housework, or raising a family. He was unable to travel out of the house alone, and although he did attend culture events and gave more readings than critics assume, he spent most of his time at home on the glassed-in porch that his parents converted into an office for him. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which would have made it easier for him to inhabit public spaces, was enacted only six years before his death. Although he wrote often of solitude, he was never able to be truly alone other than for short periods of time.

Due to the circumstances of his life, he also was largely protected from ableism or the prejudice against people with disabilities, and some claim he was immune to it. Eigner's close friend Professor Arnold Goldman noted that Eigner did mention being teased by school children who passed by enclosed porch, but he responded lightheartedly, and after a time, the children lost interest. I argue that he was not immune to prejudice, but simply lived a life where he was protected from it.

In part, this book was written as a response to my own experience of attempting to navigate the world as a person with cerebral palsy. Unlike Eigner, I have lived the life of a typical person. After college I moved from New Mexico to New York City, got married and had a child. I earned two Masters degrees and embarked on a dream of being an inner-city high school teacher. My difficulty in convincing others that I was a valuable employee coupled with the barrage of daily prejudice sparked by my speech impediment and awkward gait became too much to handle. I left the NYC Department of Education after five years of teaching English. I briefly taught First-Year Writing, but after twenty years of fighting for gainful employment, I dropped out, if only temporarily. I needed to have an outlet for my boundless drive and energy, but I no longer had the emotional or physical energy to beg for a place in the world.

Like Eigner, if the typical world not have me, I would create a world. So, I allowed myself to live on Social Security Disability, and like Frank O’Hara, I began to “make my own days.” I joined to New York Society Library on Manhattan’s Upper East Side – a place that remains seminal to me—to have an office space, a “social life” in the company of other quirky people book-obsessed individuals, as well as access to some of the research material I needed. I began this project with no institutional backing or formal education on how to do research. With the help of my father and a few others, I taught myself how to do research and build relationships with librarians.http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Calligraphy-Typewriters,6487.aspxThroughout my process, I had two colleagues who continuously helped and supported me: Andrew Rippeon and George Hart.

The job was further complicated because Eigner’s correspondence is archived in numerous places: Stanford University, Brown University, University of Kansas, The Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, SUNY Buffalo, the New York Public Library, and a private collection. Further, while it is difficult to interpret any correspondence that is not your own, Eigner’s correspondence is particularly difficult due to consistent typos, quirky abbreviations, and hundreds of references to books, radio and television programs, poets and political figures.

The biography only utilizes a relatively small selection of Eigner’s vast correspondence. It focuses on a few of his primary literary and private relationships. It traces his reading, engagement with culture, and influence of such on his poems. His poems are interspersed throughout the manuscript in order to highlight his life and creative process. It is, by no means, a comprehensive biography, nor is it a critical biography.

Eigner’s first known piece of literary correspondence was a postcard to the Boston poet, Cid Corman. In December 1948, Eigner and his brother Richard “happened upon” Corman’s [JS3] radio program “This Is Poetry” on WMEX in Boston. The postcard sparked a 40-year correspondence, ending only shortly before Eigner’s death in 1996.

In my early research, I spent months attempting to locate this initial postcard. It has been lost, despite the diligent archiving of both parties. However, Eigner’s archive at the Dodd Research Center does include their earliest correspondence as well as initial correspondence between Eigner and Robert Creeley. In some ways, it was unavoidable that Corman become nearly as much a part of the biography as its subject due to the length of the correspondence and the influence Corman had on Eigner’s early work.  Eigner spent time with most of his correspondents at some point in person. Vincent Ferrini, Charles Olson and Denise Levertov all lived near Swampscott for long period of time. Jonathan Greene, Ann and Sam Charters, Robert Grenier, and Allen Ginsberg traveled to 23 Bates Road to meet him. When he traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area, he spent time with David Gitin, Robert Duncan, Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin,  the latter two he eventually lived with for ten years. 

Corman was an exception. The two met in person only a handful of times, if that. Although Corman lived in Boston for many years, he spent most of his life out of the country, moving throughout Europe, finally to settle permanently in Japan. However, they corresponded on nearly a daily basis and Corman was responsible for introducing Eigner to most of the poets and editors he would read and publish with throughout his life.

As I worked on the biography, I realized there was one poet whose work is continuously mentioned. This poet is Charles Olson[. When I began the book, it was with the knowledge that Eigner is thought to be an exemplar of Projective Verse. As my research unfolded, I became aware of the full impact of Olson’s writing on Eigner’s thinking and work. In a letter to Corman, Eigner writes, “I wish I could go up to BMC to hear O’s voice.” While Eigner was never able to visit Black Mountain College, he spent a lifetime attempting to hear that voice. He consistently went to secondary sources to further understand Olson’s work and spoke of this often in his letters. He wrote essays on Olson, and in one of these, made the endearing argument that Olson should not have given up politics for poetry and should run for president. His own copy of Olson’s Maximus Poems was heavily annotated. Later in life, Sherman Paul’s “Olson’s Push” was among of his most beloved books.  In some ways, Olson personified the male archetype and it is possible that Eigner idealized this archetype which was so different from his own experience.

In short, this biography is different from biographies that catalog a poet’s comings and goings, love affairs, and travels. It is arguable that Larry Eigner lived life largely in his boundlessly and expansive mind, not exclusively because of his physicality, but simply because some poets are like that. In this, Limits/ are what we/ are inside of [a quote taken from Olson’s Maximus Poems which Robert Grenier believes best explains Eigner’s life] means to make a map of that mind and the poems that derived from it. 

Letter from Larry Eigner to Bessie Eigner from Camp Jened

"My social experience always must be pretty discontinuous. And to have it going on and on wd never be enough anyhow. One example is, this girl (i) thought was a counselor – to give her a brief mention—I’ve on stumbling over her quite a bit, esp. yester…. Actually, I’ve been all through it before – ages 14-18 or thereabouts – and don’t plan on going all through it again.. (Back in my teens I fell out of propriety I shd tell you of it but was scared I’d wiggle too much if I did. Thinking it had something to do with the STARS or something. Etc.) I’ll see what I can make of the whole vacation later. All the material will take some time to assimilate.”

Denise Levertov’s Introduction to On My Eyes by Larry Eigner Jargon Press 1959

First let it be said that Eigner is never careless. If he seems arbitrary it must be understood that he is deliberately arbitrary. Whether from the personal circumstances of his life or not, he sees the world from an unusual angle. Often in his poems he is noting the disconnected passage of objects as seen from a moving car. He notes these caprices of the unintegrated world- a world unthinkingly modified by self-absorbed human activities – with the precision of an innocent, but intelligent mirror. In a room, at a window, -- it is always, not what you would see, nor I but a view narrower and wider – more aware of some humble details, More aware of greater spaces also. In a world where anything may happen, since, deprived of some wise-guy logic most of us acquire, Eigner does not let perceptions close in his horizons.

In his best poems, he shares with us this wide open filed of vision in which disparate objects activate themselves, move apart of closer to each other, or at great distances from each other reveal to us an essential connection of which they remain unconscious. He gives to the humblest pebble the same attention- and so the same value by implication – as to. let’s say, a man. Instinctively, our pride cries out against this- until perhaps pride breaks and we look again and see there is no contempt for man n this attention given to a pebble only the sense that both are strange unknowable unpredictable.

Reading Eigner the reader has to keep his imagination at work and leap from line to line as fast as the seagulls sweep across the square of sky in a window joining a lonely chimney to a cloud by the line of their flight: Seagulls fly in and out of many of his poems,. The landscapes are mainly suburbaian, there is the sense of the scattered and sporadic one has at the edge of cities, where bits of old fence and field still hang about undecidedly, wondering if the country won’t come back after all.

There are some lines of Henry James (in the Bostonians) that several years ago I copied into a notebook under the heading “Quality of Eigner’s poems’: perhaps that was not precise, but these words do continue to express for me the atmosphere of a great many of the poems. (I didn’t copy the quote…)

The sea, the great life-giving unchangeable ocean, is nearby but not often seen is nearby always, but not often seen full and clear. It is usually back of other things, other people’s things, streets, houses, telephone poles, other people’s needs and decisions – for Eigner can’t get to the ‘real’ sea unless through the agency of others. Yet how much more present it is to him than to them, as force, as space, as the unconscious. He has to do a lot of guesswork about living, as most people know it: and he never pretends to definitive knowledge of anything but what he sees.

When I was asked to select from the mss. of this book what I thought the flower of it, I began tentatively putting aside those poems which I did not understand.  After a while that came to seem stupid. If one becomes familiar with Eigner’s work it becomes apparent, as I began by saying, with what care and intension he writes: and again, that more than almost any poet I can think of, he demands a suppleness, an imaginative agility to leap with him from image to image: so that I distain to judge (as I would with another kind of poet) which are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’ poems. It is a question of which I can keep up with – and those I would have thrown out might be epiphanies  to another reader. It is only where there is a right degree of care and craftmanship that one can thus abandon ‘judgment.”

He does some things with spacing and punctuation: I don’t think that they always work, but what is important is that they are always designed to work, to function: that is, it is never a matter of unthinking mannerisms, much less of vanity, with Eigner. He regards spacing and punctuation rightly, as tools, and does not voluntarily obtrude them between the reader and the poem which they should be unnoticeably supporting. I myself dislike the unclosed parenthesis, as a poor tool having no function that can’t be performed better by other typographical means. But in Eigner I accept it for it seems expressive, again and again, of his own oblique (?) modest, set-aside yet not to be quenched, enquiring spirit.

           

What is most likely to be criticized here is a lack of coordination, or (and in this case it is the same thing) a lack of economy. It is admittedly hard to see form in such unique poems. There is no repetition, he makes for himself and the reader no precedents. But the answer to these charges is the same: each poem is in fact a searchingly experienced area having the form of its limits- it is for the reader to say with it, to realize in his own responses the connections between object and object,

No one reader in going to find his way in everyone of the poems. But there are many poems, many possible readers. Such poems make me think of floating seeds in September, their lovely hesitant apparently hazard movement passing by. The next year there are new patches of williowherb – ‘’’fireweed” – in unexpected places. So Eigner’s seemingl7y random words drift across the mind. And later one finds a flowering of new perceptions, perhaps in some part of oneself one had thought sterile.

DL  June 1959

Larry Eigner Kickstarter

I am doing a Kickstarter to travel to Standford Library to research my Larry Eigner Biography there are only three days left and we have almost reached the goal! Please Help!

Larry Eigner Vol. 3

Dear Friends,

I have an announcement. I have an opportunity to distribute a number of copies of Vol. 3 of the Collected Larry Eigner. To those who are interested, I can send you one for only the mail price, which is about $7. I am looking for Eigner/poetry lovers who either will cherish the book for themselves and/or have an opportunity to share Eigner's work with others. If interested, please leave a comment or email me to let me know your circumstances.

Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials

Eigner Book 1

The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner is rapidly becoming my favorite poetry book, period. As I read/ as I write/ there are many issues to address. This portion of the review  will only be a beginning impression.

First is the mere physicality of the book. The four weighty volumes, 3,070 poems in all, speak to Eigner's utter dedication to this vocation that is called poet. Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville's work on putting it together (a seven year task!) is a testament to their passion. Eigner, in his life, published many books (75 plus) but these remain scattered, some in small editions, often expensive, or hard to get. More frustratingly is the inability to look at how the poet transforms. Here, like any collected work, the reader can study the growth of the poet -- which is particularly interesting for two reasons. Eigner began writing and publishing at an early age. Also, due to Eigner's physicality; both his cerebral palsy and the way he wrote, on a manual typewriter, there is a literal transition in the look, the spacing, the breath of the work.

I have art books of less quality. The cover is utterly wonderful. As so far, I'm a good 100 pages in, and have skipped to other parts. I've read most of Grenier's narrative, some of Faville's, and the tribute from Richard Eigner. What captures me is that way Eigner's supporters discuss his disability. This collection is not marketed (a ridiculous word to be in a sentence with poetry?) as a collection of poems by a crippled author nor is it a book of identity poetics. However, nor does it ignore Eigner's cerebral palsy.

Among the eight blurbs, Eigner's cerebral palsy is only mentioned once; Creely notes, "I have never read anything so particular to the edge of one's own physical body and the surrounding 'world" which it lives....the fact that he had to deal with cerebral palsy as a poet  means that his engagement with and proposal of the given world..." Here, Creeley describes cerebral palsy, not as problem, but as mere fact. Yes, disability is something to be dealt with, like any other of the 10,000 good and 10,000 bad daily things.

Eigner's biography is interesting, yes. But, what is more interesting is how the body, anyone's body really, informs the poems. Perhaps each poet's corporeal condition informs their writing, but with a poet with "severe" cerebral palsy, the connection to the poetic movement is laid bare. Particularly as Eigner's poems were typed before computers, one can see the skeleton, the underpinnings, of the connection between soul/body/breath/poem.  Hence, disability becomes opportunity.

The other blurb (ists) do not mention disability at all. Rather, they take the opportunity, again to connect to a bodily existence.  Conversely, Grenier's texts, which mirror the style of Eigner's syntax and experimental punctuation/grammar, do include stories of disability. Immediately, I learned many things I did not know about Eigner - that he was not exclusively "home-schooled" but attended a "school for the handicapped" housed in a hospital. Until very recently, this was a common method of education. That he subsequently published his first collection in the 8th grade...that he did attend, through correspondence, high school and seven courses of college in addition to Herbrew school.

Richard Eigner writes, "Along with the identification of Larry's birth injury as cerebral palsy came the widely accepted claim that his disability impaired cognitive capacity, as if limitation on Larry's mental development would match limitations on his capacity to manage his body's physical movements. Larry's mother Bess would not accept this claim."

Note:

As a person with milder cerebral palsy, this misnomer has been the bane of my existance. My cognitive ability has been questioned again and again by strangers, children, employers, and so on. This percieved connection between movement, slurred speech, and cognitive ability seems particular to cerebral palsy -- although I am not sure.  There is something in the so-called abled-bodied mind that jumps to the conclusion that bodily movement is a reflection of internal awareness.

More soon! Other Eigner stuff http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ andhttp://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/TOTTELS15/html/pictures/001.html

Paul Guest/ John Ashbery

Paul Guest has responded to my questioning of him letting Ashbery call him an invalid on his book jacket, and hence being mistaken for buying into the mainstream notion of what it means to be disabled. Guest doesn't confront the question, exactly. He does through out a number of insults throw, which is fine.

As I have said before, my bone isn't to pick with Guest. My problem is that there are very few people with disabilities in the mainstream, virtually none. So, it is alarming that when someone with a disability perpetuates the stereotype by allowing people to refer to them as invalids, which implies that we are unhealthy or to be pitied etc.. Guest states that he 'doesn't understand' this comment. Perhaps I think he doesn't. I am not sure if he's involved in any disability rights or has read any thinkers with disabilities. He still hasn't answered this question. To read people like Michael Davidson, Harriet McBrdye, and Simi Linton and disagree with them would be fine. Guest is part of a minority. If he doesn't want to represent the major ideas of that minority (that disability is largely a social construct and there is a difference between disability (society) and impairment (bodily)) that is fine, but why doesn't he want to at least acknowledge that there are other people with disabilities who have a different view? Why would he not what to hear these voices? This very attitude, that we are 'invalids' is what keeps society from treating us equal and what makes society able to resist the very same things that Guest complains about (non-accessible cabs). If we are able to convince the world that disabled people deserve civil rights, that it is more than just the personal problem, then cabs would be accessible. Note: Wheelchair users chained themselves to the street and went to jail to get the MTA to have assessible buses.

Guest notes, "That I'm not really cognizant of a word's weight or that I am aware in the most calculating, self-hating ways." But, he still hasn't addressed what the word means to him or why he thinks it's relevant when applied to him or the fact that (historically) people with disabilities are trying to dispel this myth. He hasn't explained, in short "Why?" Does he not see negetive value in the word? Would a woman be called 'bitch' on her book and not explain why it's appropriate?

The way Guest is shown in media seems to imply that he thinks his disability is the greatest tragdy of his life and he would give anything to be able-bodied. While I am not sure this is his perspective, he has done little to confront people like Mary Karr or Ashbery who imply this. And his publisher has made the perceived horror of disability into it's primary marketing point - which is unfair to Guest and other people with disabilities.

Many, many, many other people with disabilities do not want to be pitied or cured. We are happy/comfortable with our bodies. We don't want to be regarded as invalids.

 NB

Dear Curtis, RE Eigner, ok. You win.

Portland Update 4

Last night we had the luck of eating at Navarre in Portland. Navarre recently got voted the best restuarant of the year in Portland, so we thought we'd give it a try. The first shocker, for me, was that there was no line to get in on a Friday night. I told jim that if it had been silly new york, you wouldn't be able to get a table for 3 years after such a review. We also, shockingly, got into the new Harry Potter movie (the theatre wasn't even full!) and for seven dollars to boot!

There is this thing I love about Oregon. New York is so hard everywhere. Everything is hard, so that when you come to Oregon, you still have NY standards and problems stuck in your head, so you feel blessed when say; all the poets are super nice or it's easy to get into a movie. I wouldn't give up that struggle that is NY for anything, but it is nice to escape for awhile.

Anyway, Navarre has a menu of small dishes (kind of tapa size) with many, many different choices. You have to order by checking your choices with a magic marker. The choices were a bit overwhelming. I had the salami plate, au gratin, salad, bread with 'grass' olive oil. Jim had buffalo, cavier, and beet greens with gruyere. I have to say that the food was probably the best I've ever tasted (outside of new mexican and my husband's). The ingredients were so fresh (a very oregon thing). But, disappointly, the service was absolutely horrible. We felt ignored most of the dinner. They forgot to bring all of our dishes. We had to wait 15 minutes for desert and I had to go up to the cash register to ask to pay the bill. They had 2 waitresses for a completely full place (about 25 tables) and no busboy.

*

I will be offline for a few days. During this time, I will be reading Duncan/Levertov Letters. I got an amazing letter from the Portland poet Michael Weaver a few days back. In it, Michael notes (info I didn't know) that Levertov is dismissive (at first) of Eigner's abilities. I have to go research this for myself. Ordinarily, I would be pissed at Levertov, someone who I have idolized for years. I have always respected, not only her poetry, but her activism, her close friendships with Duncan and Rukeyser, and her questioning of feminism. I am not mad, though, as her potential Eigner comments fit into my 'evil plan.' The idea of the Eigner book just doesn't go away. I constantly question my ability to make something worthwhile. I know that there are so many other living poets/people who lived with Eigner and they are much more capable of speaking than me. However, I do think that because I have cerebral palsy and am intimately aware of the prejudices, I have a different perspective.

Grumpy Portland Part 2

A couple glasses of wine and a visit to the public pool (tho not in that order) have put me in a better mood. On Pg. 165-166 of the Spicer bio, Ellingham and Killian write:A victim of cerebral palsy, Eigner had been in a wheelchair all his life. Perhaps that's my problem -- I'm a victim of cerebral palsy. They do admit to Eigner's cheeky side tho; (Quote from Eigner) "He asked me if I knew Josphine Miles, and the idea amused me, like a branch of Poets in Wheelchairs Anonymous.

*

Here is our bus report from today. My bike lost it's breaks. So, they make a good idea to put bikes on the front oF buses. We waited 15 minutes for our bus to go to the bike shop. But, the driver tells us, in the most impassively voice humanly possible, only 2 bikes on the front of the bus. So I say, well, the kid's bike is small, we'll just bring it on the bus. Driver says, 'no' and drives away. I just can't get my way on these damn buses!

*

I'll be reading in the next Spare Room Reading. Here's the info:

Jennifer Bartlett
Sarah Mangold
Lindsey Boldt

Saturday, July 25
4:00 pm

4903 SE Rural (south of Woodstock, between 39th and 52nd)
PORTLAND, OR
for directions, or other information:
503-819-9455

NOTE: This is a house reading and potluck hosted by Maryrose Larkin and Eric Matchett; all are welcome.
Parking is on the south side of Rural, or in the driveway.


We suggest not taking the bus, if you value your sanity.

My Larry Eigner

Below are my thought today on the LE book: Note there may be typos as in process; also, I hope I didn't use any quotes people didn't want me to use. A bibliography will follow:

My Larry Eigner

What started this essay was a curiosity of the lack of discussion of the influence of 'restricted movement' in Larry Eigner's work. There exists a sort of a claiming that Eigner's body was secondary or not influential in creating his voice. What is interesting is that, as I research Eigner's letters, ignoring the issue was not how he dealt with cerebral palsy. He begins letter after letter stating that he is 'in a wheelchair.' This explanation is always matter of fact.

Eigner was a poet who was loved intensely. To read the essays by Jack Foley, Ron Silliman and others is to find words full of understanding. Many of these poets admit the obvious difficulties. Jack Foley, Eigner's friend of ten years, writes, 'I was able to stay friends partly because I didn't live with him and partly because I understood his speech as well as anyone. This was more something I willed than something I learned.' I am assuming that this relief at not living with Eigner may have been from, not only not having to take care of Eigner, but from getting rests from his intensity which seems to have rival Robert Duncan's.

Foley explains Eigner's will, not just to write, but to speak. This is apparent in the radio interview that Foley did with Eigner. Foley attempts to interact -- to translate. Eigner just keeps talking without pause. In Eigner's passion to communicate through copious letters, poems, and conversations one is forced to see the true situation of cerebral palsy -- or any other disability. While the different body becomes so-called less than, the will becomes more than.

For the poets who loved and surrounded Eigner, however, to name this body would mean to have to deal with the constant barrage of idiocy that comes - not from the actual body, but the reaction to it. This societal bigotry is much more tedious than disability itself. It is much easier to cope with society by ignoring the crippled self - to make Eigner one of us. There is a subtle distinction to be made here. The difference is to accept Eigner fully as a person with cerebral palsy and to accept cerebral palsy fully in the way one would claim to accept homosexuality or race or any other 'different' given. Not as less than, but as is.

In a defense of the poet who is disabled, the so-called able-bodied community is forced to defend the poet on two fronts. The first of which is dispell society's attempt to 'cutify' the poet's work. A disturbing example of this would be Eigner's New York Times obituary 'Poet Who Saw the World From His Wheelchair' which condescendly overplayed disability in Eigner's work; "As a result of a birth injury, he developed cerebral palsy, a condition that confined him to a wheelchair. His disability had a profound influence on his poetry, which often captured, in emotional bursts of language, fleeting impressions received through the window of a house, an airplane or a car window." Rather, Eigner's case is, as Silliman notes of an earlier event, "The interviewer wanted to make of the occasion an uplifting "my left foot" kind of tale, amazed that someone so afflicted with cerebral palsey could write poetry at all. But that of course was NOT the story. The story might have been this: that one of the great poets of the 20th century -- no further qualification needed -- happened to have had cerebral palsy." And Sillian might have noted that 'My Left Foot' wasn't exactly even a 'My Left Foot' story; Christy was a obnoxious drunk who played on the streets as child equally with his neighbors and brothers. But, O how society wants to manifest things. To package stories into something 'we' can accept.

The task in the poetry community to protect Eigner's work from 'cute little handicapped poet syndrome' is a valid one and I think it why poets such as Curtis Fayville are hesitant to through disability into the mix. But, the work is powerful and oblique enough that it manages it's own task. In Eigner's own disjointed lyric, he gives permission to explore the role of disability because the work isn't about disability itself. This also brings into play the fact that the other always has whether/how/and how much she will let this otherness gain attention for her work. Some poets go the opposite spectrum. One such poet is Paul Guest, who has chosen to make disability the forefront in his work -- to the extent that he has a pending autobiography. This willingness (or non-willingness) creates a tension in every disabled poet's life and work.

The second difficult role that the able-bodied critic as friend or admirer of the fully realized poet with a disability is forced into a position of defending. It is shocking how, within the poetry community with all our freaks and outsiders, prejudice abounds. While I don't suffer fools lightly, I recently came across an 'essay' written by Kirby Olson's from last December where he claims, "I remember Eigner had been brought up in Larry Fagin's class at Naropa University in 1977. That was the only time I had heard the name. I remember too hearing that he had a disease or a disorder of some kind, and I didn't know what to make of it. I think it's cruel somehow to think that a defective mind that is unable to process words properly is therefore "poetic."' Here, is an example of the so-called able-bodied speaking liberally about something he know nothing about. The person with cerebral palsy is put in the tedious position of explaining that CP is a 'disability' not a 'disease' and cerebral palsy, itself, is a physical condition, not a mental one. And then one must deal with the fact that people are unable to understand such distinctions and their meaning.

The primary barrior is that the able-bodied critic simply does not know what it means inherently to be disabled. People argue that by association, one can come to realize what disability truly means, while functioning on a dally basis in a body that society endorses. One wonder whether having a disabled child, for example, might give the parents a new understanding. Although I am sympathetic, my estimate is that, with the exception of the Deaf community who don't accept Deafness as a disability, the able-bodied parent always longs for their child to be cured instead of truly accepting them.

Can disability be sexy? Not sexy in meaning I want to fuck you - but sexy as Peter Littlefield would use it ; attractive in the global sense. Can disability be anything other than the old metaphor we have assigned it ; weak, ugly, distasteful, less than, messy. Can it be translated into something new and powerful? Can a disability pride exist?

Of course, for much of Eigner's life, so-called disability pride or even understanding was farfetched, as it still is by most today. In Eigner's day, people with cerebral palsy (and their caregivers) were merely involved in the struggle not to be abused in institutions such a Willowbrook. Eigner's situation was so vastly an exception.