Six letters by poet Larry Eigner from 1954 to 1964 are published for the first time in the December 2014 issue of Poetry Magazine, including a letter from Larry Eigner to Charles Olson dated October 20, 1956.  The letter, from the Charles Olson Research Collection housed here in Archives and Special Collections, was selected for Poetry Magazine by co-editors Jennifer Bartlett and George Hart.

Jennifer Bartlett, a poet who is currently writing a biography of Larry Eigner, was awarded a travel fellowship by the Archives to use the Larry Eigner Papers.   Her work reflects a fresh and growing attention on the life and poetry of Larry Eigner that has emerged in recent years.

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote over three thousand poems on a manual Royal typewriter and was an energetic letter-writer.  He published more than 40 collections of poetry, among them From the Sustaining Air (1953), Another Time in Fragments (1967), Things Stirring / Together / or Far Away (1974), now there’s-a-morning-hulk of the sky (1981), and Waters / Places / A Time (1983).

George Hart writes in the Introduction to the letters:

Throughout the fifties, Eigner absorbed Olson’s theory of Projective Verse, and he was grouped with the Black Mountain poets in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking The New American Poetry anthology in 1960. Of the poets in this group — Olson, Creeley,Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov (Corman chose not to be included in the anthology) — Eigner might be the one who put Olson’s theories to work most productively. Projective Verse, with its emphasis on the exchange of energy between poet and reader, and the typewriter as a means of graphing or scoring words on the space of the page, seems particularly well-suited to Eigner’s embodiment and temperament. The fact that Olson put so much stress on the stance of the poet and the poet’s breath as a form of measure, which might seem to discourage someone like Eigner who had difficulty walking and speaking, makes Eigner’s achievement even more impressive. In excerpting Eigner’s correspondence for this special feature,Jennifer Bartlett and I have chosen to focus on passages in which he writes about, or directly to, Olson regarding his poetry, poetics, and other Black Mountain poets.