Finding the Weight of Things
Larry Eigner's Ecrippoetics

George Hart (Author)

9780817321130, The University of Alabama Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 February 2022

192 pages
22.6 x 15.1 x 1.8 cm, 0.346 kg

“George Hart’s Finding the Weight of Things stresses the poet Larry Eigner’s longstanding interest in ecology and environmental politics, not only as subject matter for his poems but as coextensive with his particular embodiment. Not only did Eigner live as a differently abled person, he wrote from within an awareness of a threatened and vulnerable globe. Hart’s masterful application of ecocriticism and disability theory makes this a vital and important contribution to Eigner’s work, specifically, and postwar poetics generally.”—Michael Davidson, author of Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime, despite profound physical limitations caused by cerebral palsy. Using only the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Eigner generated a torrent of urgent and rich language, participating in vital correspondences as well as publishing widely in literary magazines and poetry journals.

While Eigner wrote before the emergence of ecopoetics, his poetry reflected a serious engagement with scientific writing and media, including Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring. Eigner was writing about environmental disasters and climate change long before such concerns took on a moral incumbency. Similarly, Eigner was ahead of his time in his exploration of disability. The field of disability studies has expanded rapidly in the new millennium. Eigner was not an overtly biographical poet, at least as far as his physical limitations were concerned, but his poetry spoke volumes on the idea of embodiment in all its forms.

Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner’s Ecrippoetics is the first full-length study of Eigner’s poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner’s two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic—one whose work has much to tell us about the ecology and embodiment of our futures. Hart sees Eigner’s overlapping concerns for disability, ecology, and poetic form as inextricable, and coins the phrase ecrippoetics here to describe Eigner’s prescient vision.