Widely respected American poet Larry Eigner, the author of over 75 books and broadsides, was born “palsied from hard birth” (as he phrased it) in Lynn, Massachusetts, on August 7, 1927. With the exception of two teenage years in residence at the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton, Eigner spent his first fifty years at home in his parents’ house in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where he was cared for by his mother, Bessie, and his father, Israel, and where he came to do his writing in a space prepared for him on the glassed-in front porch basically every day.
Curtis Faville has worked as a teacher, editor, and publisher with degrees in English, creative writing, and landscape architecture. He has published four collections of poetry—Stanzas for an Evening Out, Ready, Wittgenstein’s Door, and Metro—as well as books by Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, and Larry Eigner, among others, under the L Publications/Compass Rose Books imprint. He maintains an eclectic Internet blog, The Compass Rose.
Poet, essayist, and visual artist Robert Grenier has taught literature and creative writing at UC Berkeley, Tufts, Franconia College, and Mills College. He edited Robert Creeley’s first Selected Poems for Scribner’s, and subsequently edited three books of poems by Larry Eigner: Waters / Places / A Time; Windows / Walls / Yard / Ways; and readiness / enough / depends / on. Working with Eigner, Grenier completed the preparation of some 1,800 “established texts” of Eigner’s poems. An archive of Grenier’s own work—the Robert Grenier Papers—is housed in Stanford University’s Green Library.
