Transcribing the Typescript

Abstract

he publication of Letters to Jargon: The Correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams is cause for celebration. Larry Eigner’s correspondence is vast and distributed across university archives and personal collections. Some institutions have major holdings: the University of Kansas, where a repository of typescripts was established in the late 1960s by a cousin of Eigner’s who taught English there; Stanford University, which holds the papers of Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, two early correspondents; the University of Buffalo, where the Jargon papers are held; and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, which holds a number of collections with Eigner correspondence, mainly his letters to Cid Corman from the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these major archival collections represent only a fraction of the letters Eigner wrote to fellow poets, friends, family members, and editors. Eigner’s significant correspondence begins as he enters into the conversations about writing among the Black Mountain poets (which includes not only Creeley, Levertov, Williams, and Corman, but also Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Paul Blackburn, all of whom Eigner corresponded with). It continues in the 1960s as Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry introduced this coterie poetics to a wider audience and extends into the G E O R G E H A R T