What the Air Became: Rereading Eigner to Read Compositional Tools in Networks

This essay problematizes readings of postwar poet Larry Eigner's work that overemphasize the role the typewriter played in his aesthetics, and proposes the use of contemporary poet Joey Yearous-Algozin's Air the Trees, a 2013 remediation of Larry Eigner's 1968 book of the same title, as a key by which to critique Microsoft Word. This reading of Yearous-Algozin, using a modified form of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory that takes ideological forces into account, will demonstrate a new way to interpret Eigner's relationship to his typewriter, as well as the relationship between contemporary users and Word. Ultimately, I argue that Eigner's understanding of networked environmental systems serves as an informative poetics for representing capitalist ecologies, such as those inherent to Microsoft Word.