My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

~gain figneT
There is no writing I know as vivid as Larry Eigner's. He's invented, for
poetry, something equivalent to three-dimensional photography: his
works present a series of perceptions etched deep into the mind, where
the mind is charted on a page and the page becomes a model of the thinking
field. Perception and thought (words and things) are completely intertwined
in Eigner's work, which brings to a visionary crescendo the exploration
of the ordinary-the transient f1ickerings of the everyday that
otherwise pass more unnoticed than regarded, more dismissed than
revered. In Eigner's poems, one "fragment" is riveted to the next, so that
one becomes, in reading this work, likewise riveted by the uncanny
democracy of details, where attention is focussed unhesitatingly on each
particular with equal weight, equal exhilaration. This is a poetics of "noticing
things", where, as Eigner writes, "nothing is too dull" with "material
(things, words) more and more dense around you." But equally, Eigner's is
a poetics of coincidence, where "serendipity" (contingency) takes its rightful
place as animating spirit, displacing the anthropocentric sentimentality
of much of the verse of our time .
. . . I can't collect my thoughts any further, dwelling on the meanings
of Larry Eigner's life, except to remember the time spent with him in conversation,
or say the time Bob Grenier, Brian Mcinerney, and I took him
to the Museum of Natural History on his one trip to New York. As we
came into the room with some of the largest dinosaurs, Larry pointed
straight ahead and said "that's interesting". He wasn't pointing to a
dinosaur skeleton, though, but to an old sign posted on the back wall; it
was interesting, in a style long banished (in exhibition halls now replaced).
I think of that remark of Larry's as displaying how much he lived out his
version of a democracy of particulars, as against the craving for highlights,
for the heightened, that is as much a literary aesthetic as a consumer
imperative. For Eigner, this didn't mean a flattening of affect; on the contrary,
it meant a luminosity of every detail: the perceptual vividness that
his work so uncannily concatenates. This acknowledgment of the daily, a
series of remarks on the otherwise unremarkable, a sort of poetic alchemy