George Hart is Professor of English at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness (Fordham University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner, (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). His book Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner's Ecrippooetics is under contract with the University of Alabama Press.
Authors | George Hart
Articles on Amodern by George Hart
LARRY EIGNER’S ECRIPPOETICS
This essay combines ecopoetics and disability studies to propose that Larry Eigner’s compositional practice be considered an ecrippoetics. Eigner wrote his poems on a manual typewriter, a type of prosthesis that accommodated his disability, cerebral palsy, which made writing by hand and other activities such as walking difficult. Using Michael Davidson’s idea of the “defamiliar body” and Barrett Watten’s notion of “the missing X,” in combination with Timothy Morton’s deconstructive dark ecology, I argue that Eigner’s typing creates irreducibily graphic texts, “material pages” that refuse distinctions between inside and outside, foreground and background, thereby producing poems that think “the ecological thought” in form and content.