>i was curious if anyone knows anything about breathing in Eigner? I
>love feeling like staccato (SP?), if indeed that is how his lines
>rupture.
>
>Ryan

Well, because of his cerebral palsey and related physical problems
(some of which were helped considerably by some surgery that he had in
his 30s), he was publishing his early books before he learned to speak.
His parents did not think that he even "had" language before he learned
to use a typewriter in his late teens.

The line in his work is an extraordinary physical act, given his
ability to use three fingers on one hand and a basic grasping motion
with the other. When I first read his poems on the page in the mid-60s,
I "heard" that voice too and it was not until I tried calling him on
the phone that I first realized exactly how much of a projection that
was. Eigner may in fact have been drawn to Olsonian poetics precisely
because it was there that he could in fact "speak."

Once his parents got to be too old to care for him and he first moved
to California, he was set up in a group home in North Berkeley where
his brother bought him a desk that had the drawers on the wrong side
(Larry can only reach to the right), so for him to reach a piece of
paper to get (with some difficulty) into the typewriter meant spinning
the wheelchair 360 degrees.

Those "light, airy" poems are in fact the complex choreography of one
whose total physical vocabulary is in use in the composition of the
poem.

Ron Silliman