US Poet Larry Eigner 1927 - 1996

Laurence Joel Eigner / Larry Eigner (August 7, 1927 – February 3, 1996) was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the influential Black Mountain School.

Eigner is one of the lesser known Black Mountain poets, although he was influential among the next generation's Language poets. Highlighting Eigner's influence on the "Language School" of poetry, his work often appeared in the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and was featured on the front page of its inaugural issue in February 1978.

In Ron Silliman's introduction to his anthology of Language Poetry, In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation,1986)---dedicated to Eigner--- Silliman identifies this poet as one who has ‘transcended the problematic constraints’ of Olson's speech-based projectivist poetics. Eigner has himself pointed out that his poetry originates in ‘thinking’ rather than speech.

During his lifetime, Eigner wrote dozens of books and published poems in more than 100 magazines and collections. Charles Bukowski once called him the "greatest living poet."

Life and work

Palsied from hard birth, Eigner grew up in Swampscott, Massachusetts. His parents believed that he was incapable of language until he taught himself to use a typewriter in his teens. As he matured into an artist, Eigner overcame many physical obstacles and limitations to achieve a mastery over the material text, producing his typescripts on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter using only his right index finger and thumb.

Perhaps the best realization to date of the idea of "composition by field" proposed by Charles Olson in his landmark essay "Projective Verse," the physical act of writing took tremendous effort from Eigner.

Larry Eigner authored more than 40 books, among them From the Sustaining of Air (1953), Another Time in Fragments (1967), Country/Harbor/Quiet/Act/Around-selected prose (1978), and Waters/Places/a Time (1983). His work appeared in well over a hundred magazines and collections, most notably Origin, The Black Mountain Review, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and in Don Allen's anthology The New American Poetry. In 2010, Stanford University Press published The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1–4 (Vol. I: 1937–1958; Vol. II: 1958–1966; Vol. III: 1966–1978; Vol. IV: 1978–1995). The four volumes were edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville.

Larry Eigner died from pneumonia and other complications on February 3, 1996.

Swedish Poet Georg Stiernhielm 1598 - 1672

Georg Stiernhielm (August 7, 1598 – April 22, 1672) was a Swedish civil servant, linguist and poet. Stiernhielm was born in a middle-class family in the village Svartskär in Vika parish in Dalarna. The surname Stiernhielm, literally "Star Helmet", was taken in later life when he was raised into the Swedish nobility.

He grew up in the Bergslagen region where his father worked with the mining industry. Stiernhielm received his first schooling at Västerås, but he was also educated in Germany and the Netherlands.

He was a pioneer of linguistics, and even if many of his conclusions later proved wrong they were accepted by his contemporaries. Stiernhielm tried to prove that Gothic, which he equated with Old Norse was the origin of all languages, and that the Nordic countries were Vagina gentium, the human birth place.

His most famous work is "Hercules", an epic poem in hexameter, about how Hercules in his youth is being tempted by Fru Lusta ("Mrs. Lust") and her daughters to choose an immoral lifestyle for his future. The allegory can be traced back to the Athenian sophist Prodicus of Ceos, as preserved in Xenophon.

Stiernhielm was the first Swedish poet to apply the verse meters of antique poets to the Swedish language, modifying their principle of long and short syllables to a principle of stressed and unstressed syllables, which better suits the phonology of Swedish, using ideas first developed by Martin Opitz and later theoretically applied to Swedish by Andreas Arvidi. This made him known as "the father of Swedish poetry".

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in December 1669.