Eigner and Dickinson

I've been much-inspired lately by the poetry of Larry Eigner and Emily Dickinson. After my incursions into digitized cut-and-paste techniques, these two poets take me back to the basic materials of pen, paper, typewriter; and in Eigner's case, the poetry of immediate perception.
The work of both these writers is also resistant to print and publication; in Dickinon's case because almost all her poetry came down to us hand-written, with no authorised print version, and in Eigner's case, because his disability meant that he produced text using a typewriter with great difficulty; his typescripts, with their positioning of text and his corrections and annotations, are arguably the most authentic representations of his poems. Yet the manuscripts of both of these poets are hard to see; in Eigner's case, his big Collected from Stanford University Press is set in Courier, and is doesn't consist of scanned originals. In the case of Dickinson, her handmade fascicle booklets are available in fascimile, but at a cost - around 300 pounds; but why aren't the originals of her poems available on the web? There are a few, if you look for them, but why haven't the been scanned and made available as a public resource? Why can't we buy selections of her work with the original manuscripts alongside, as you can with Blake? It's incredible that, one hundred and twenty five years after her death, Dickinson's work is not out of copyright. As Dickinson scholar Betsa Erkkila puts it "[The Dickinson papers] are now owned collectively by Harvard University and Amherst college, where access to and circulation of her writing are vigorously policed and controlled. If you want to quote from or publish the work of Dickinson, you must ask for the privilege and pay the price." All of which is ironic, when the poet herself said:

Publication - is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man -

I've been reading the poetry of Larry Eigner this last week or two. John BR kindly sent me two of his books: a Selected Poems, and "readiness/enough/depends/on" his last collection published shortly before his death. John has just bought Eigner's monumental Collected Poems, which reproduces his original typescripts, which is why he could send me books. I don't know why I haven't paid Eigner much attention in the past; I've been missing out in a big way. I started reading these poems aware of Eigner's disability, but I soon forgot that, as the poems are universal. Eigner reminds me of Joanne Kyger; the latter's Buddhist acts of attention being mirrored in Eigner's diary-entry observations of exactly what he sees. But more than that, both poetries give us poems of thought, that is, the poems that re-enact a thought process, mirroring the way the process evolves and simulating the spontaneous associations of thought. I have found some these poems profoundly moving. But they're also intellectually exciting. Eigner has been a huge influence on the LANGUAGE poets, I guess due to his foregrounding of the text, and isolation of words as units partly due to their placement on the page. He also pursues the no-ideas-but-in-things" notion to the nth degree.

I suppose Eigner's disability provided a constraining mechanism in the same way that a strict poetic form does; the sparseness of his text necessitated by the slow and painstaking way in which they were put onto paper. It’s interesting that in one sense Eigner’s work is very-modern(ist), in another his poems are tied to their mode of production, in which the typed and scrawled page is as much part of the work as the scroll in a classical Chinese picture-poem.