MICHAEL DAVIDSON
MISSING LARRY: THE POETICS OF DISABILITY IN LARRY EIGNER
how
to dance
sitting
down
(Charles
Olson, “Tyrian Business”)
I Ramps
The year 2000 marked the tenth anniversary of the
Americans with Disabilities Act, an event commemorated in June by a twenty-four
city relay by disabled athletes and activists. The torch for this relay arrived
in Southern California, carried by Sarah Will in a jet ski on Venice Beach.
After handing the torch to another disabled athlete, Will was lifted into her
wheelchair to join a trek down Venice Boulevard to the Western Center for
Independent Living.1 Although some disability activists might criticize
the triumphalist character of this celebration––crippled athletes hitting the
beach in jet skis––the event’s climax at an Independent Living center was a
fitting destination for persons who came out of various medical closets in the
1960s and began living together in communal spaces and public housing. The
Center for Independent Living is, coincidentally, the same venue that brought
the poet Larry Eigner from his home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, in 1978 to
live in Berkeley, California, where he spent his last years.2
The passage of the ADA in 1990 capped three decades of
activism by persons who, for physical or psychological reasons, had been denied
access to public buildings, insurance policies, housing, medical treatment,
signage, education, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing––not to mention legal
representation and respect. Activism on their behalf began in social movements
of the 1960s, but unlike anti-war, feminist, and civil rights struggles, the
disability rights movement has not–until recently––received the same attention
by historians of civil rights, This silence is odd since the disabled community
cuts across all demographic, racial and class lines and, potentially, includes
everyone. It may be that the very pervasiveness of disability contributes to
its marginal status as a rights claiming category.
There are a number of reasons why the subject of
disability is often omitted in the roster of 1960s social movements, although
this absence is being corrected in a number of recent books dealing with
disability history.3 Civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s could
invoke long traditions of advocacy going back to antebellum abolitionism; the
anti-war movement grew out of pacifist and anti-imperialist politics of the
nineteenth-century; feminism grew out of suffragism and the labor movement.
Disabled persons, however, were treated as medical “cases,” best kept out of
sight, their wheelchairs, braces, and oxygen tents sequestered in hospitals,
clinics and asylums. Individual disabilities were treated independently of one
another, balkanized by separate regimes of treatment, therapy and social
service. Social support often came from charity movements and parental groups
that reinforced a paternalist ethos of the disabled person as innocent victim
or child rather than fully vested citizen. Nor was the disability community
unified in its goals and social agendas. Persons with occasional or
non-apparent disabilities may choose to pass in able-bodied culture and refuse
the protections of social legislation; someone who loses sight late in life may
lack the same institutional and cultural support as someone blind from birth;
Deaf persons often do not want to be viewed as disabled, preferring to see
themselves as a linguistic minority; persons with cognitive or developmental
disabilities are often separated from those with physical impairments. Forging
alliances among such disparate populations was, needless to say, difficult for
early disability rights activists who sought coalitional formations across
medical lines yet honored material differences among separate disabilities.
Beyond these factors, there were economic disincentives
to recognizing disability as a civil right since redress required pro-active
investment in infrastructure modification, technologies, sign language
interpreters, transportation and other accommodations. Providing ramps and
elevators for wheelchairs, TDDs, and braille signage would cost businesses
money, and many legislators felt that federal funds should not be spent when
private philanthropy could serve the same function. As Lennard Davis point out,
both the political left and right perceived the disabled body as
“unproductive,” which, in a world based upon instrumentality and
capitalization, was not a basis upon which class analysis or public policy
could be forged (“Nation” 18). As I suggest in chapter seven “universal design”
means more than ramps for wheelchair users or “talking” traffic signals for
deaf persons; it implies breaking the hold of stigma in order to examine the
ways in which a rhetoric of normalcy infects social attitudes and thwarts the
forming of community. Recently, one of my colleagues who is active in the field
of minority rights complained about the university administration’s
insensitivity to diversity: “It was like talking to a deaf person,” he said,
linking authorities who won’t listen to people who can’t. The
idea that the deaf are “dumb,” in any sense of that term, is precisely the
stigma that needs to be erased if alliances between traditional civil rights
based on class, race, gender, and sexuality are to be forged with disability.
Which is why a poetics––as much as a politics––of
disability is important: because it theorizes the ways that poetry
defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within
language. A poetics of disability might unsettle the thematics of embodiment as
it appeared in any number of literary and artistic movements of the 1960s. This
same thematics was shared with the New Left in its stress on the physical body
as localized site of the social. Whether in feminism’s focus on reproductive
rights, youth culture’s fetish of sexual liberation, cultural nationalist
celebrations of “race men,” or the anti-war movement’s politics of heroic
resistance, the healthy, preferably young body becomes a marker of political
agency. Within the world of art, this
same emphasis on a normalized body emerged through a set of imbricated
metaphors––gesture, breath, orality, performance, “leaping” poetry, “action”
painting, projective verse, deep image, happenings, spontaneous bop
prosody––that organized what Daniel Belgrad has called “the culture of
spontaneity” in the 1960s. While a poetics of embodiment foregrounds the body
as source for artistic production, it nevertheless calls for some unmediated
physical or mental core unhampered by prostheses, breathing tubes, or electric
scooters.
What would happen if we subjected a poetics of embodiment
to the actual bodies and mental conditions of its authors. What would it mean
to read the 1960s poetics of process and expression for its dependence on
ableist models, while recognizing its celebration of idiosyncrasy and
difference? By this optic, we might see Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John
Berryman not only as confessional poets but as persons who lived with
depression or bi-polar disorders, for whom personal testimony was accompanied
by hospitalization, medicalization, and family trauma. What would it mean to
think of Charles Olson’s “breath” line as coming from someone with chronic
emphysema exacerbated by heavy smoking? What if we added to Audre Lorde’s multicultural
description of herself as a Black, lesbian, mother, “sister outsider,” a person
with breast cancer (as she herself does in The
Cancer Journals)? Robert Creeley’s lines in “The Immoral Proposition,” “to
look at it is more / than it was,” mean something very particular when we know
that their author has only one eye (125). To what extent are Elizabeth Bishop’s
numerous references to suffocation and claustrophobia in her poems an outgrowth
of a life with severe asthma? Robert Duncan’s phrase “I see always the
underside turning” may refer to his interest in theosophy and the occult, but
it also derives from the poet’s visual disorder, in which one eye sees the near
and the other far.4 Was William Carlos Williams’s development of the
triadic stepped foot in his later career a dimension of his prosody or a
typographical response to speech disorders resulting from a series of strokes?
It is worth remembering that the signature poem of the era was not only a poem
about the madness of the best minds of the poet’s generation, but about the
carceral and therapeutic controls that defined those minds as mad, written by
someone who was himself “expelled from the academies for crazy.”5
And if we include in our list the effects of alcoholism and substance abuse, a
good deal of critical discussion of 1960s poetry could be enlisted around
disability issues.
I am not suggesting that a focus on the disabled body is
the only way to read postwar poetry, but it is worth noting that its poetics of
embodiment brought a renewed focus on the vicissitudes of hand and eye,
musculature and voice, as dimensions of the poetic. The salient feature of
poetries generated out of Beat, Black Mountain, New York School, Deep Image and
other non-formalist poetries was a belief in the poem’s registration of
physiological and cognitive response, the line as “score for the voice,” the
poem as act or gesture.6
Charles Olson’s assertion that “Limits / are what any of us / are inside
of” speaks as much for the creative potential of the disabled artist as it does
for the American self-reliant hero of his Maximus
Poems (17). Perhaps it would be more balanced to say that the self-evident
status of a certain kind of body has often underwritten an expressivist poetics
whose romantic origins can be traced to a tubercular Keats, syphilitic Shelley
and Nietzsche, clubfooted Byron, and mad John Clare and Gerard de Nerval.
II Missing Larry
My title refers to Larry Eigner, a significant figure in
the New American Poetry, who is missing in a number of senses. On a personal
level, I miss Larry, who died in February 1996 as a poet whose curiosity and
attentiveness remain a model of poetic integrity. Although his movements were
extremely restricted due to cerebral palsy contracted at birth, he was by no means
“missing” from the poetry world, particularly after his move to Berkeley.
Thanks to the efforts of Bob Grenier, Kathleen Frumkin and Jack Foley, Larry
was present at many readings, talks, and parties throughout the 1980s. Nor, as
those who knew him can attest, was a reticent presence at such events. He was a
central influence on the emerging “language-writing” movement of the mid-1970s,
publishing in their magazines (“L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,” Bezoar, This, Hills) and
participating in their talk and reading series. His emphasis on clear, direct
presentation of moment-to-moment perceptions also linked him to the older
Objectivists (George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky)
as well as poets of his own generation living in the San Francisco Bay region
such as Robert Duncan and Michael McClure.
A second dimension to my title refers to the Eigner
missing from discussions of postwar poetry. Although he was centrally
identified with the Black Mountain movement and corresponded with Olson, Creeley,
Duncan, Corman and others, he is seldom mentioned in synoptic studies
(including my own work) of that generation. What few critical accounts exist of
his work come from poets. Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Clark Coolidge, Cid
Corman, Charles Bernstein, Robert Hass, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten have all
written appreciations of his work, but he has had little response from the
critics.7
And although he was aligned with language writing later in his life, his name
seldom appears in books or articles about that movement.8 Perhaps most surprisingly, given his
centrality in the New American poetry, he is seldom included in discussions of
disability arts. With the exception of an appearance in Kenny Fries’ anthology
of disability writing, Staring Back,
he is not included in major treatments of disability arts.9
This brings me to the tertiary level of my title––the
absence of cerebral palsy in discussions
of Eigner’s poetry. In what little critical treatment of his work exists, the
fact of his physical condition is seldom mentioned. The lack of reference to
cerebral palsy leads me to ask how one might theorize disability where least
apparent: how to retrieve from recalcitrant silences, markers of a neurological
condition that mediated all aspects of Eigner’s life.10 In the process, we
might discover ways of retrieving other social markers––of race, sexuality,
class––where not immediately apparent. Eigner by no means adhered to New
Critical warnings about the biographical fallacy–the idea that poems should finesse
biographical or historical contexts through formal, rhetorical means. At the
same time, he seldom foregrounded his mediated physical condition–his daily
regimes of physical exercise, his limited mobility, his slurred
speech––preferring to record real-time perception and observation. In order to
retrieve disability from this lacuna we need to “crip” cultural forms, not
simply to find disability references but to see the ways Eigner’s work unseats
normalizing discourses of embodiment. Cripping Larry Eigner allows us to read
the body of his work in terms of his “different” body and to understand how the
silences surrounding his poetry are, in some way, a dimension of––perhaps a
refusal
of––that embodiment.
To confront this issue, I have appropriated Barrett
Watten’s important essay, “Missing ‘X’,” which locates the salient features of
Eigner’s writing in its suppression of predication and syntactic closure.
According to Watten, the most characteristic feature of Eigner’s poetry is its
truncation or effacement of rhetorical connectives, creating a “predicate for
which the act of reference is located outside of or is generalized by the
entire poem” (178). One could supply an “X” for elements outside the poem that
are nevertheless implicit in the phrase-to-phrase, stanza-to-stanza movement.
Hence, to take Watten’s example, Eigner’s lines “Imagination heavy with / worn
power” could be rewritten as “an element of the world is ‘Imagination heavy
with /worn power.’” The couplet “the wind tugging / leaves” could be rewritten
as “an element of this poem is ‘the wind tugging / leaves.’” The suppression of
subjects and predicates allows Eigner’s noun phrases to function independently
of any overarching narrative, creating unexpected links and suturing
discontinuous phrases. To some extent, Eigner’s use of abbreviated phrases
resembles the practice of language-writers––including Watten––who restrict the
logical and rhetorical completion of a period, leaving shards to be recombined
in new structures.
The implications of Watten’s argument are significant for
differentiating Eigner’s poetry from that of more traditional poets for whom
metaphor often contextualizes the outside within the poem. For someone like
Hart Crane, as Watten observes, predication is propositional; all grammatical
elements work to render an idealized object. An object (Crane’s “Royal Palm” is
his example) may be invoked by discontinuous means; nevertheless, it organizes
the processes of predication and metaphorization. All figures, however oblique,
point toward a single focal point. Eigner, on the other hand, creates a mobile
grammatical structure in which subjects and predicates occupy multiple
positions. “In Eigner an absolute object is not referred to in the poem. Rather
the entire idiom is predicated on the lack of such reference” (179). But what
is the nature of this “outside” that serves as an absent cause for partial
phrases? What are the implications for the disabled poet when we base
predication on “lack”? Is the mobility of noun phrases strictly a function of
indeterminate syntax, or a register of alternative modes of mobility and
cognition in a world based on performance? The danger of providing concrete
answers to these questions is that they make Eigner’s poetry a compensatory
response for physical limits rather than a critical engagement with them.
Conscious of this danger, I want to extend Watten’s useful speculations about
predication to describe the ways that the “missing X” could also refer to an
unstated physical condition that organizes all responses to a present world.
And since that world is defined by compulsory able-bodiedness, not
referring to its coherence and unity may indicate a nascent critique.
III Page / Room / Weather
In order to discuss Eigner’s poetry in terms of disability
we must first honor his own reticence on the subject. Throughout his memoirs,
interviews, and poetry, the subject of his cerebral palsy seldom appears. In
his author’s biography at the end of Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry Eigner describes
himself as a “shut-in partly,” (436). Bob Grenier observes that “Larry’s work
does not derive from his palsy,” but on the other hand, his poetry
cannot help but be affected by it. In order to discover disability where it is
not present, it is first necessary to find where it is––in Eigner’s numerous
prose writings, memoirs, and stories. Consider the following passage from his
1969 memoir, “What a Time, Distance”:
Cigarette
cigar signs stores mostly Variety groceries and how many things candy a little
not much good might very well be a good deal everything smelled bread was
designed with packaged loaf fresh and down the street daily paper words flashes
and then sentence dateline dispatches...(Selected
114)
Here, Eigner remembers
childhood experiences in a variety store, the sights and smells of products and
signage rendered in quick succession. One might imagine such passages divided
into lines and splayed out over a page, but these memories are constantly
mediated by conditions of restricted motion, regimes of physiotherapy and
exercise, which frame his access to such “variety”:
Over the
toilet rim in the bathroom at home into the bowl his weemer between large
knuckles, cigarette shifted to mouth preparatory or in other of grandfather’s
hands. Coffee label. Good to the last drop. Waste not want not. To go as long
as you could manage it. Bread is the staff of life, Grampa said many times
buttering it at the beginning of dinner. Relax, try how get to fling ahead legs
loosened quick as anything in being walked to different rooms the times he
wasn’t creeping to do it yourself as soon as possible, idea to make no trouble
or spoil things but live when somebody agreed to a walk as he ought to have,
sort of homework from the therapy exercising not to sit back need to start all
over to come from behind. Thimble yarn darn stocking waterglass stretch
wrongside patch, cocoon tobacco cellophane bullet wake finger ring. (Selected 115)
A series of Joycean
associations mark this passage––from peeing, with his grandfather’s help, to a
coffee label and its ad (“Good to the last drop”), to Depression era adages
about thrift (“Waste not want not”) and health (“Bread is the staff of life”).
These axioms rhyme with internalized parental imperatives regarding physical control
(“Relax”) and self-motivation (“do it yourself”), which for the young boy with
motor impairment mark his distance from an able-bodied world. Those
difficulties are rendered syntactically in the phrase “try how get to fling
ahead legs loosened quick as anything,” which may provide some verbal
equivalent of the child’s anxiety over muscular control.11
Adult advice to “make no trouble or spoil things but live when somebody
agree[s] to a walk,” express a world of agency where everything from urinating
to walking requires assistance.
This brief passage could serve as the “missing X” for
many poems in which reference to physical limits has been evacuated, leaving
only the “variety” of the Variety store on the page. In his prose, Eigner
merges sensuous associations with things seen and felt (“thimble yarn darn
stocking...”) with physical contexts of their apprehension. In his poetry,
specific references to those contexts drops away, leaving acts of attention and
cognition paramount. Those acts are deployed through three interrelated spaces:
the page on which he worked, the room in which he lived, the weather or
landscape he saw from that room. I would like to look for Larry in these three
frames.
Eigner’s is decisively a poetry of the page, a field of
intense activity produced entirely with his right index finger, the one digit
over which he had some control. The page––specifically the 8 ½” by 11"
typewriter page––is the measure of the poem, determining its lineation, length
and typographic organization.12 Although a few poems run
on for several pages, often as not Eigner continues the poem as a second column
on the same page.13 Nor is the machine by which he produced
those pages insignificant. Because Eigner needed to lean on the keys and peer
closely at the sheet of paper, he could not use an electric typewriter and thus
worked with a succession of Royal or Remington portables that permitted him a
degree of flexibility in composition. The manual typewriter also allowed him to
release the platen occasionally and adjust the spacing between words or lines,
jamming letters or punctuation together or running one line onto the next.
Eigner’s careful spacing of letters and words, his indentations and double
columns, could be seen as typographic idiosyncracy, a variation on Charles
Olson’s “field” poetics, but they are also cognitive maps of his internally
distanced relation to space. In a video of Eigner’s funeral made by Cloud House
productions, the film maker, Kush, returns to Eigner’s house following the
gravesite ceremony, and trains his camera on Eigner’s typewriter for several
minutes, a cenotaph for the poet’s living remains.
We can see the characteristic qualities of Eigner’s page
in a section from air the trees. The page is divided into three areas, a long,
short-lined poem that fills the right half of the page, a short epigram to its
left and a longer poem––perhaps a continuation of the second––at the bottom
left. Each of the three elements drifts gradually from left to right,
reflecting Eigner’s characteristic carriage shift, one that never quite seems
to reach the left margin. While it would be impossible to verify that this
rightward drifting lineation was a result of his physical difficulty in
shifting the carriage, it was certainly the case that typing, for Eigner,
required a considerable effort. Thus the epigrammatic tercet at the left, “slow
is / the / poem,” may describe considerably more than a Chaucerian resignation
(“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne”) and testify to the sheer
physical difficulty of making a mark on a page.14 Acts such as
hitting the space bar, putting a new sheet of paper into the typewriter or
moving the carriage for a new line are no small features in creating the
measure of Eigner’s line.
The poem in question––or perhaps three poems––seems
to concern a seascape with birds, whales, clouds, and islands. At the center of
the longer section is a reflection on the poet’s reflexive interest in the shifting movements
within this landscape:
heat
past
sunshine
vibrations of air
spiders,
then birds, settle
reflexive
man
bringing what he can
interest
in
the quickening run-though
one
thing at a time
tides, a large motion
small waves give boats (air 25)
The phrase, “quickening
run-though,” appears to be a typo for “run-through,” in which case the poem
chronicles its somewhat tentative, incomplete nature, as though Eigner is
trying to approximate multiple simultaneous perceptions in a linear form. The
poem does seem to be about a
“reflexive / man / bringing what he can” to the diversity of movements
suggested by this watery landscape. As in Wallace Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full
of Clouds,” with its five balanced variations on the phrase “that November off
Tehuantepec,” Eigner wants to render a seascape that, by its very nature,
cannot be fixed: “tides, a large motion // small waves give boats.” The couplet
compacts the “large” motion of tides and their local effects on “small waves”
and “boats,” and these contrasts are further enhanced by the lines to the left
of these:
rock
crumbles to earth
under rain
the seas
clouds mulct the moon
flats
the
whale is still hunted
in certain parts
prodigal
the deep light (25)
The poet’s “reflexive”
interest in things leads to reflections on the creation of geological forms
through the interaction of rock and water. The whale, “prodigal / the deep light,”
stands as the talismanic figure for the poem’s contrasts––large yet human,
mammal yet stone-like, deep yet surfacing, inert yet “prodigal.” Eigner’s
steady attention to phrasing and evenly patterned syllables (“the voice far
tinkling bells,” “small waves give boats”) shows an intense
concentration on small verbal elements, yet his focus is always on the creation
and destruction of large forces. The interplay of three separate elements on
the page permits each to join with the others so that, for example, the
reference to islands rising like whales in the longer poem seems to continue in
the reference to “menageries / from the bottom” in the third.
I have chosen an example that does not thematize
disability in order to suggest how the material limits of the poet’s physical
act of writing govern the creation of rhythm.
If the poem is “slow,” as he says, it is not for lack of interest or
attention. Rather, that “slowness” permits a degree of discrimination and
attention; the space of the poem is, in Eigner’s case, less a score for the
voice than a map of intensities whose subject is “a large motion” of global,
geological forces.
The vantage from which he creates this page and watches
the world is his room. The best
description of his Swampscott room is in the author’s biography at the back of Windows / Walls / Yard / Ways, which was
probably written by Eigner, but utilizing a third person perspective. In it he
describes
a
2-windowed bedroom (summer heat, winter cold, and snow, wind, springtime, Fall)
overlooking backyard and porch with clothesreel in a closed-in while big enough
neighborhood (sidestreet and 2 dead-end sidestreets, a path through woods,
shortcut to the beach before the easterly one nearer the shore ended, after its
joint with Eigner’s street at the foot of the hill much steeper than the one
going down from the town’s main road. (195)
When he moved to Berkeley,
that room, as the PBS United States of
Poetry documentary segment on him indicates, is crammed with pages, each
filed in dated folders and placed in shelves at wheelchair height. Like Emily
Dickinson, Eigner’s “endless / Room at the center” plays a significant role in
determining the content of the poems (Selected
xiii). Until 1978 when he moved to California, Eigner spent most of his time in
a porch at the front of his parents’s home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, from
which vantage he observed the birds, trees, passing cars, clouds, storms and
sunlight that populate his verse.
squirrels
everywhere all
of
a
sudden (Things
Stirring 59)
what birds
say Comes in
all
the windows
No end of wires through trees (Things Stirring 36)
The haiku-like spareness of
such lines suggests an Imagist emphasis on objects, but it becomes clear that
Eigner’s room is porous. He may hear birds through the windows, but he observes
that they sit on the same wires that penetrate the house with news from
elsewhere. What might appear as a limited perspective is instead figured by him
as “inward performance,” the active measurement of spaces and distances by an
unusually sensuous, alert mind:
The midnight birds remind me of day
though they
are
out in the night
beyond the
curtain I can’t see
Somehow
bedrooms don’t carry
tradition I
and the
boxed radio
is off. But what am I reading
inward
performance
Has
relevance. Allows me to hear
while
something speaks. As for the bed
straightened
by visible hands
only it is
huge
when I
feel Down in darkness (Selected 4)
Lying in bed at midnight,
listening to birds outside, the poet feels like a radio, an instrument that
although turned off continues to receive messages. The birds beyond his room,
the tradition beyond the bedroom, “visible hands” that straighten the
bed––these are forms of agency that seem “huge” and threatening. Yet against these “outward” forces, “inward
performance” (of which the poem is a record) sustains his nocturnal revery. The
awkward phrase, “Somehow bedrooms don’t carry / tradition” can be seen as a
rueful recognition of the poet’s confined position. In a world where individual
talent is measured against a heroic tradition, one realized in domestic spaces
like bedrooms may seem insignificant. Opposed to outward measures of cultural
and social value rests the “inward” ability to imagine absent birds as present,
night birds in day.
To some extent, the “boxed radio” provides a
counter-tradition for Eigner to that of Eliot or Pound, bringing a world of
music and news into his room. The radio provided Eigner with a fruitful early
poetic education when he discovered Cid Corman’s radio show in 1949 that
exposed him to many of the poets with whom he would later be associated. “Radio
and TV have been audio-visual prosthesis,” he says in a felicitous merging of
media with the disabled body (areas
163). But the intrusion of the news also brings with it a world increasingly
administered by the media:
the more
read more
Jump
at the firecrackers
after what Knowledge
jets blades
these days
n b c
from above
there’s no bird like a bell
the road of
life
is it still going the
isle
is full the
pony express?
people
like radios
radios as people
he claps she swings
they’re
passing somewhere
between bursts (Things Stirring 98)
For the person with limited
mobility, this poem is strikingly rich in movement. Eigner here experiences the
Vietnam War vicariously through its displacement in July 4th
celebrations (the title is “4th
4th “). He compares himself to Caliban in The Tempest, alarmed at Propsero’s
magical “isle /...full [of noises].” Those noises include the sound of
firecrackers in the neighborhood that lead him to think of T.S. Eliot’s
“Gerontion” (“After what knowledge / what forgiveness”) and then militarism
(“jets blades / these days”) and their appearance in the media (“nbc / from
above”). Although the radio provides Eigner with knowledge of the violent outer
world, it reminds him of how much people resembles their radios, how much “nbc
/ from above” determines what knowledge can be. If, as I have surmised, he is
playing a subaltern Caliban to Prospero’s NBC, his connection to birds, clouds
and nature is potentially subversive. This would seem to be the significance of
the final lines, in which he hears a couple outside: “he claps / she swings /
they’re passing somewhere / between bursts.” Here, “bursts” extends reference
to firecrackers and distant warfare in Southeast Asia, but the sounds also
provide a rhythmic––and perhaps redemptive––contrast to the news. Perhaps they
express a positive answer to the question raised midway through the poem: “the
road of life / is it still going...”?
Once again, these examples do not address cerebral palsy
directly; but they embody its effects on the poet as he registers the world
from a stationary vantage. So attentive is Eigner to the processes of measuring
thought and attention that the subject often dissolves into its acts of
perception and cognition. This gives the work an oddly unstable feel as lines
shift from one location to another, never pausing to conceptualize a scene but
allowing, rather, the play of attentions to govern movement. What might be
regarded as a form of impersonality turns out to be an immersion of the subject
into his perceptual acts:
back to it
The good
things go by so softly
Themselves
it is our strengths
that run
wild
The good and
the strong, dissipant,
an
ob-jective joy
sky
is
empty There are clouds
there must
be sound
there
the horizons are nothing
the
rain sometimes is not
negligible
out on the sky
the other direction
growing until it is nothing
there are
mirages and numberless deserts
inside the other house
lines,
broken curbs
travel
and distance
proportion themselves
we must be animate, and walk
turn,
abruptly
the lines are irregular (Selected 24)
These lines are
irregular, carving the page in variable indentations and spacings. The couplet
“the rain sometimes is not /negligible” sits at the right gutter, at the edge
of the poem, its double negative animating the contrast between a sky that is
both “empty” and full of clouds. Moreover, the poem shifts rapidly between
reflective (“it is our strengths / that run wild”) and descriptive (“sky / is
empty”) observations. By juxtaposing these two levels, subjective and
objective, without transition, the poem maps a “dissipant...joy.”
The irregularity of these lines carries more than
prosodic implications. For Eigner in his closed-in porch, the issue of access
is a problem and a way of being. For him, “travel and distance” do
proportion themselves, relative to physical ability. The imperative to “be
animate, and walk / turn, abruptly” can only be performed on the page; as a
physical possibility, such imperatives must be measured in terms of “lines,
broken curbs.” One of the key provisions of the ADA was the erecting of curb
cuts for wheelchair users, and although Eigner could not, in the late 1950s
when the poem was written, imagine such accommodation, he is speaking of
irregular surfaces within the poem as a prosodic principle, and in the world,
as a physical set of limitations. That is, Eigner measures an objective world
full of “lines” and “broken curbs” as one which he must negotiate with
difficulty.
IV “I can’t believe I’m
here”
Such negotiations of textual and physical barriers may,
as I have indicated, manifest themselves on a page, but they no less dramatize
senses of historical otherness that Eigner felt keenly. The claims of presence
that animate many of his poems are often filtered through secondary
voices––radio news commentators, public officials, friends and
correspondents––that ventriloquize his participation. The plural pronoun above
who announces “we must be animate” is as much the voice of social mobility and
ableism as it is a measure of Eigner’s “irregular” status within such a frame.
In the following example, the “I” who announces “I can’t believe I’m here” is
not the poet who celebrates survival out of physical infirmity but the survivor
of a Nazi death camp interviewed in Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, who, in revisiting the Polish
camp of Chelmo marks his disbelief at being able to return:
skulls
piled along the wall
I
can’t believe I’m here
yes, this is the place
over here were the ovens
trees (pointing)
planted to hide the graves
at first they just burned
the bodies
flame up in the sky (“Dance” [n.p.])
These lines are the opening to a remarkable sheaf of
poems that Eigner collected for a project (never completed) on the subject of
“Dance.” The chapbook was to be part of a second series of responses to Charles
Olson’s “Plan for the Curriculum of the Soul,” a project announced in the late
1960s by Olson, for which various poets were assigned topics.15
Eigner’s selection, “Dance,” might seem an unlikely choice until one
understands that for him, dance is a way of talking about movement within
severely restricted limits––alternative choreographies that defamiliarize
normal movement. And for Eigner as a Jew, such restriction implies the
difficulty of movement within a moment of historical erasure. The synthesis of
two discourses––of disability and race––come together in a poem written, on the
same page to the left of the poem above:
They made
him sing along the river
the
beautiful the beautiful river
(and
race with ankles tied)
— he was agile
while
people were dying
(Incinerating
he had to
choose
life
age 13 and a half
so
he’s one of the two survivors
out
of 300,000
Here is the most disturbed
image of dance imaginable: a Jewish boy is forced to run with bound ankles for
the amusement of his Nazi captors, the nearby crematoria reminding him of what
might befall him. In “He was agile,” the
commentator asserts, although the movement must also have been ungainly and
awkward. One of the villagers remembered him as having a “lovely singing voice”
and another explained that the German captors “made him sing on the river. He
was a toy to amuse them. He had to do it. He sang, but his heart wept”
(Lanzmann 6). These remarks are transformed by Eigner into a reference to
African American spirituals (“the beautiful, the beautiful river”) that links
the condition of Holocaust child to black American, Jewish poet to Auschwitz
survivor, Jewish survivor to crippled poet.
The
epigraph to this page is from “The Dance” section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge: “The long moan of a dance is
in the sky,” but given the context in Eigner’s poem, this moan could also be
the smoke from the crematoria (73). Eigner thought of titling his series “Gyre
/ (scope) / loop the / loop,” as if to condense the metaphors of stability
(gyroscope), perception (“scope”), historical cyclicity (Yeats’ gyres) and
vertiginous movement (“loop the / loop”) in one figure. It is an ideogram that
merges Eigner’s primary concerns with perception and place, but sets them
against the backdrop of historical vertigo, the rightward shifting margin
marking the stumbling movement of movements under duress. The incredulous testimony of survival (“I
can’t believe I’m here”) is measured against an act of physical awkwardness
that resembles a dance of death, not unlike the coffle songs and shuffle dances
developed by black slaves in the antebellum South. Such powerful mergings of
physical grace with carceral control turns “Dance” into a personal signature
for Eigner’s proprioceptive position.
Eigner’s ventriloquized testimony at being “here” in the
shadow of the Holocaust is measured against his own attempts at dance,
described in a subsequent section of the poem that invokes, as well,
Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and Keats’ “Ode to Psyche.” From Wordsworth’s lyrical
invocation of a “jocund company” of dancing flowers and Keats’ invocation of
seeing the “winged Psyche with awakened eyes,” Eigner insinuates his own daily
physical exercises:
Out of a leaning towards getting ahead (?)
I’m poor at,
negligent of, exercise, inten-
tional
back-and-forth or circling movements, watch-
ing dances,
especially social ones I guess, I’ve been
puzzled...
..............................................................................
but
sometimes, at the bar where I do walk to
and fro on
the porch. holding on, standing, I
swing hips,
revolve them, or in and out, bend,
as holding /
jacknife. As holding on I step sidewise,
facing nextdoor
along
the arteries
bowed
lines over the earth
spindle
The transition from Auschwitz
and the young Jew’s coerced, awkward dance to Wordsworth’s Lake Country may
seem an impossible leap, but the connection seems to be made through the poet’s
awareness of his own bodily movements.
As if to mimic the play of poetic line and dance he segues into an
iambic cadence (“but sometimes, at the bar where I do walk”) and sees himself
“at the bar” like a ballet dancer practicing plié. By linking his
physical exercises to romantic versions of transcendence in Wordsworth or
Keats, Eigner takes the subject of dance into his own territory. His
enjambments and irregular meters contrast to the steady iambs in the romantic
poets, yet his lines pace out an equivalent rhythm to his own motions. In his
final image, the various representations of dance–those of his own and of
romantic poets–coincide in a kind of cosmic merging “along the arteries / bowed
lines over the earth//spindle.”
IV Nothing about Us without Us
“As a
cripple, I swagger”
(Nancy
Mairs)
Discussing poems like “back to it” and “Dance” in terms
of physical access or physical limitations poses an interpretive dilemma: how
to avoid reducing the poem to an allegory of disability while respecting the
complex social valences of terms like “strength,” “travel,” and “animate.” Are
the “good things” that go by “softly” good because they are unobtrusive and
thus invisible––the ableist position––or because there is a physically mediated
perspective that registers their passing? Because Eigner seldom uses the first
person pronoun except when quoting someone else, we cannot easily identify his
attitudes about disability or social ostracism. Yet there are moments when the
“I” in quotation marks seems to meet the ontological I, and we hear the poet
speak in propria persona:
I have felt
it as they’ve said
there is
nothing to say
there is
everything to speak of
but
the words are words
When you
speak that is a sound
what have
you done, when you have spoken
of nothing
or something I will remember
After trying my animal noise
i break out
with a man’s cry (Selected 79)
Were this a poem by Robert
Creeley, such lines could be describing the mediating force of language in
claiming identity: “As soon as /I speak, I / speaks” (294). In Eigner’s case,
we must include in the poem’s deixis the opprobrium by which the disabled
person is interpellated in society. “I have felt it as they’ve said” may
include feelings inflicted upon one whose own speech may appear to others as an
“animal noise.” Terms for agency (“I will remember,” “i break out with a man’s
cry”) must be framed by the difficulty of utterance when there is, to all
intents, no interlocutor.
I began this chapter by wondering how to represent
disability where it is missing, both in critical discourse and in the poet’s
own writing. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Eigner was establishing his literary
identity, and despite increasing support for social and cultural difference,
people with visible disabilities like cerebral palsy, polio, MS and Down’s
syndrome were still considered wards of a welfare state, “shut-ins,” poster
children for charity telethons. People with disabilities were in many respects
invisible, within both the public sphere and emergent social movements. They
inhabited medical closets that could be cautiously opened for purposes of
sympathy or compassion and as quickly closed again. To be disabled was to be
one of Jerry’s kids.16
During this period there were few activists like Nancy
Mairs who could emerge from the disabled closet and use the term “cripple” with
arrogance and pride:
Perhaps
I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom
the fats / gods / viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth
of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger. (9)
Mairs writes her coming-out
narrative as a person with multiple sclerosis for whom there is no Stonewall or
March on Washington to galvanize action. For Larry Eigner in the 1960s, his
parent’s home in Swampscott was both a safe haven and a closet, in Eve
Sedgwick’s sense, a place of refuge but also a speech act, a place of inward
performance but also performativity. The missing X in Eigner’s poems is, to
adapt Sedgwick, “not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues
particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds
and differentially constitutes it” (3). That discourse, in the 1960s, is called
ableism, and not to speak its sentences is to stutter or mumble, to divert
attention from the normalized body outward onto birds, sky and weather. Such a world
could never sustain itself as outer or other but was constantly being refigured
and remapped through Eigner’s difficult syntax and variable lineation. This was
Eigner’s letter to the world, not an “X” but a lower case “i” that says “After
trying my animal noise / i break out with a man’s cry.”
1.
Manuel Gamiz, Jr., “Torch Relay for Disabled Arrives by Land and Sea.” Los
Angeles Times, 20 June,
2000, B 7.
2.
Eigner was a reluctant participant in the Independent Living movement in
Berkeley. His first communal
living situation with other disabled persons was not successful, and he left to
form a household with poets, Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin. Nevertheless,
he continued to visit local community centers, and working with disabled senior
citizens at the Berkeley Outreach Recreation program in Live Oak Park (areas 140-1).
3.
The best overall survey of the disability rights movement is Fleischer and
Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Other sources include Longmore and Umansky,
Campbell and Oliver, Charlton, Davis (Enforcing),
Linton, Shapiro.
4. This condition is the
subject of Duncan’s poem Crosses of Harmony and Disharmony” in The
Opening of the Field:
so that the lines of the verse
do not meet,
imitating that void between
two images of a
single rose near at hand, the one
slightly above and to the
right...
“The double
vision
due to maladjustment of the
eyes” like
“Visual delusions arising from
some delirium
illustrates
surrounding spatial regions” (45)
5.
These line are from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (126).
6.
The poetry movements mentioned here received their inaugural appearance in
Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry, which first divided poets into groups
(Beat, Black Mountain, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance) and provided
an appendix of poetics statements at the end. Although each of these groups
claimed different literary antecedents, they were all influenced, in one way or
another, by modernist free verse poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., and Gertrude Stein, within the American
tradition, and Surrealism and Dadaism within the European avant garde
tradition. They strongly dissented from the then-reigning New Critical position
that stressed formal cohesion, structural complexity, and impersonality in
favor of a freeverse line, cadential rhythm, and expressive–even vatic–use of
language.
7.
George Hart has written an excellent article on Eigner as a nature poet,
“Reading under the Sign of
Nature” and Benjamin Friedlander has written a useful encyclopedia entry on him
in the Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography series. The latter is the best
introduction to Eigner’s life and work.
8.
This critical disregard may change soon when Stanford University brings out Eigner’s Collected Poems, edited by Robert
Grenier and Curtis Faville.
9.
Kenny Fries, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from
the Inside Out, features
four poems by Eigner.
10.
Eigner’s reticence in foregrounding his cerebral palsy aligns him with another Berkeley poet,
Josephine Miles, who lived with rheumatoid arthritis from an early age but who
did not identify as disabled or with the disability rights movement. Susan
Schweik has made the case that despite her reticence, Miles’ early work often
anticipates “conditions for the emergence of a new contemporary social
group––but only if that group is understood in both broad and complex terms”
(489). If we understand “disability rights” in the contemporary, post-civil
rights sense, then Miles does not accept the label “disabled.” Schweik locates
Miles’ acknowledgment of disability in a discursive resistence to the language
of reason and rationality. “In [Miles’ poem] ‘Reason’ and other colloquial
poems, Miles devises a vigorous alterative to this particular tradition, one in
which colloquy replaces soliloquy. The poem deflects identification, or at any
rate renders it elastic and provisional. In ‘Reason’...Miles develops a
(counter)narcissistic poetic that challenges a dominant equation of disability
with aggrieved self-absorption, not by evacuating narcissism, but by revealing
and reveling in it––as the basis of all (un)reasonable spoken
interaction, and as a force that both generates and is tempered by
conversation” (500).
11. Benjamin Friedlander notes that in 1962 Eigner
underwent cryosurgery to freeze part of his brain in order to control his
spastic movements (121). The successful operation is described in a letter to
Douglas Blazek:
Sept. 62 cryosurgery, frostbite in the thalamus (awakened to see if i
was numbed, test whether they had right spot, felt much like killing of a tooth
nerve!), tamed (and numbed some) my wild left side, since when I can sit still
without effort, and have more capacity for anger etc. Before, I had to be
extrovert, or anyway hold the self off on a side, in this very concrete,
perpetual sense. A puzzlement of the will. (qtd. in Friedlander,121)
Friedlander notes that prior to the surgery, “Typing, of all
activities, provided relief from the wildness, from the distraction of the
flailing, and from the effort of holding the body still, or trying to” (121).
12.
According to Bob Grenier, who is editing the forthcoming collected edition of
Eigner’s poems, Stanford University will honor his page size by printing all three volumes in an 8 ½” by 11"
format and in a font that approximates his typewriter font (personal
communication, 1/7/06).
13. In his
letters, some of which have been published, Eigner tends to fill the page,
writing even in the margins and blank spaces of the page:
Well letters get crowded just from attempt to save time, i.e., cover
less space, avoid putting another sheet in the typewriter for a few more words
as I at least hope there will only be. There’ve always been so many things to
do. For instance with only my right index finger to type with I never could
write very fast––to say what I want to when I think of it, before I forget it
or how to say it; I sometimes say 2 things at about the same time, in two
columns. It’ll be from not deciding or being unable to decide quickly anyway
what to say first, or next. Or an after thought might as well be an insert, and
thus go in the margin, especially when otherwise you’d need one or more extra
words to refer to a topic again (areas
149).
Here is a good instance of how a textual parataxis that one associates
with the Pound/Olson tradition can be read differently by a poet for whom the
act of changing a sheet of paper or typing a few more words is a considerably
more difficult task. The desire to render the phenomenological moment remains
the same for Eigner and Olson, and certainly the look of the page is similar,
but the physical circumstance of writing must be factored in as well.
14.
Ezra Pound quotes Chaucer’s lines in his Imagist manifesto, “A Retrospect,” 10.
15.
Ben Friedlander was the instigator of this second round of the “Plan for the
Curriculum of the Soul,” which was to feature, among other topics, Andrew
Schelling on “Walking,” Gail Sher on “cf. Weyl” and Friedlander on “The
Dogmatic Order of
Experience.” In the original series the subject of “Dance” was chosen by Lewis
MacAdams. Other pairings included Robert Duncan on “Dante” and Olson on
“Pleistocene Man.”
16.
This is not to say that there weren’t isolated examples of disability activism
before the 1950s. See for
example Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, “The League of the Physically
Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability
History.” See also Longmore and Lauri Umansky’s The New Disability History: American Perspectives which offers a
number of essays on pre-cold war disability activism. My point in speaking of
the silence of poets like Larry Eigner or Josephine Miles around disability is
to contextualize the absence of a fully developed social movement around
disability rights until the early 1970s.
[This essay makes up Chapter 5 from Michael
Davidson’s CONCERTO FOR THE LEFT HAND; DISABILITY AND THE DEFAMILIAR BODY. U of Michigan, 2008. Reprinted with permission of the
author.]