For the month of December, we will be dedicating the "Poem of the Week” series to Larry Eigner. Eigner (1927–1996) wrote over three thousand poems on a manual Royal typewriter (a bar mitzvah gift) with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Disabled by a forceps injury at birth, Eigner lived with cerebral palsy his whole life; able to walk only with support or assistance, he made his way through the world in a wheelchair. Until his father died and his mother was too old to care for him, he lived at home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, writing many of his poems in the glassed-in front porch that served as his office. In 1978, Eigner relocated to Berkeley, California, at first living in a communal house for adults with disabilities and then residing with poet-friends, mainly Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin, who also served as his caregivers. 

In late 1949, Eigner heard Cid Corman reading Yeats on his Boston radio program This Is Poetry. Eigner didn’t like the manner in which Corman read Yeats’s poetry aloud and wrote a letter to tell him so. 
A long friendship and correspondence between the two poets followed. Through Corman, Eigner became involved with the Black Mountain Poets: specifically Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Olson was Eigner’s primary influence and Eigner could be considered the first Olson scholar in some respects.

Zoeglossia considers Eigner as somewhat a predecessor to Disability Poetics. It is with this in mind, that we have made an image of Eigner’s original typewriter our logo. Eigner, himself, rarely wrote about the disabled body, but since his death, his poems have been read through this lens, specifically through the work of the great critic Michael Davidson. The wonderful thing about Eigner’s work is how it has created a bridge across many “schools” of poetics. In addition to influencing the poets associated with Black Mountain College, his work is championed by Language Poets and eco-poets.

We begin the series with a video of Eigner reading his work from series “USA Poetry” created by the New York Poet Bob Holman. In this short video, Eigner reads from his home in Berkeley. The video was taken late in life. For more on Eigner watch this space, and thank you to George Hart for the biographical information.