During his lifetime, Eigner wrote dozens of books and published poems in more than 100 magazines and collections. Ron Silliman dedicated the 1986 anthology of Language poetry, In the American Tree, to Eigner. In its introduction, Silliman identifies Eigner as a poet 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, a phrase linking him conceptually to Language writing.