Collected Poems brings together, for the first time, all of the approximately 3,070 published and unpublished poems composed by Larry Eigner (1927–1996), a prominent American poet of
the postwar era and one of the principal figures of the influential Black Mountain school. He was a leading practitioner of spatial poetry, in which the placement of words and letters on
the page were intended to convey part of the poem's meaning.
Eigner's output and productivity were all the more remarkable in light of the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair for his entire life, the result of cerebral palsy. His instrument (on
which he typed with his right finger and thumb) was a manual typewriter, and his medium was the whole world imagined and gathered into the space of each sheet of paper.
Eigner's genius was his capacity to combine imaginative range, moral purpose, determined observation of (and immersion in) details of his 'ordinary' surroundings, and a fine attention to
the placement of letters in the space of his typewriter page. Organized chronologically, Collected Poems preserves the appearance of Eigner's typewriter pages, presenting each poem
on an 8.5"x11" page in an equivalently spaced Courier font that mirrors the poet's own.
With the publication of this edition, Eigner's life's work will find its place as one of the most amazing achievements of 20th century American poetry.
