The Brooklyn Rail

Larry Eigner’s work has been foundational for contemporary American poetry. His use of ellipsis and disjunction, his quick leaps and feints across the page, sprawled like a fractured music score or an action painting, in which spaces and gaps between words become as eloquent and important as the words themselves—all this formal innovation, seemingly natural and effortless in Eigner—serves as a clear precursor to the later development, much more codified, rationalized, theorized, and various, that became known as the Language Movement.

I was thunderstruck by Eigner’s work when I first read it in the mid 1970s. It seemed to be exactly what I wanted and needed in poetry. Beyond self obsession, self absorption, self torture, to an opening up of the field of language: a liberation. So many of the poets I knew and admired then—Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Bob Grenier, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Charles Bernstein, Kit Robinson—and many others, were champions of Eigner’s work, published him and referred to him as a mentor and source. With the publication, in 2010, of the astonishing huge-format four volume Collected Poems lovingly and laboriously edited by Grenier and Curtis Faville—and the follow-up, the more digestible Calligraphy Typewriter: Selected Poems—we could see the scope of the achievement.

What was missing was the biography, which now, thanks to the storied Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, we have. The most interesting, challenging, and salient fact of Eigner’s life was his disability: he was born with severe cerebral palsy, which rendered his speech difficult to understand, and his body hard to manage. Though he eventually was able to take care of himself to some extent, he lived most of his life as a recluse, looked after by his mother at their home in Swampscott, MA. Famously, he was able, although with difficulty, to type, and this was how he composed his poems. Recognized early by poets Cid Corman, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, and others, he was very much connected, despite his lack of mobility and normal social discourse, to important poets of the period.

The interesting and crucial question for the biography is: to what extent, if any, did Eigner’s disability condition his poetry? It seems clear that only a person similarly disabled would be able to deal with this question fairly and with nuance and understanding, and, fortunately, Eigner’s biographer is such a person—Jennifer Bartlett, poet and writer, daughter of poet and critic Lee Bartlett. Her Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, is a terrific book. I, as they say, couldn’t put it down, finishing it in a day, and wishing for more.

Progress in the question of disability rights has gone from night to day since 1927, the year of Eigner’s birth. Eigner was considered a “cripple,” a “spas,” and his being homebound and considered incapable of any normal intellectual or social life was simply assumed. Today Jennifer Bartlett, whose cerebral palsy, though quite noticeable, is not as severe as Eigner’s, gets around extensively in the world, does readings, teaches classes, engages socially, has a family. Her sensitive understanding of Eigner’s condition, and of the social position of disabled people of his time, and how that condition and position influenced Eigner’s inner life (backed up by extensive references to his correspondence and interviews with people who knew him well) is the thread that runs through the book.

Some of the poets who knew him well and supported his work, notably Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, assumed that his style was a product of his disability, which, it seems, they had a hard time fully appreciating, though they were accepting and understanding. That is, they more or less reasoned that since Eigner’s body and speech were to some extent uncontrollable and jerky, the look and sensibility of the poetry must also be that way. They did not understand that Eigner’s intelligence ranged far above yet integrated his physical condition, and that he was fully capable of the sort of reasonable (or, in Duncan’s case, coherently mystical) work that they considered normative and necessary for writing, but also that he had developed—mainly out of his reading of Olson, but also of many other sources—a poetics that was after other effects. Bartlett is not arguing that Eigner’s disability was unimportant for his work—rather that its importance was far more nuanced, complex, and intentional, than those two, and doubtless many other poets understood. Living as he did, he was forced to see the world, as it were, from the ground up, intensely inward and yet inwardly-outward (he is probably above all a nature poet, sensitive to weather and the phenomenology of being in a physical world)—and to develop, quite consciously and carefully, if at the same time spontaneously, a way of writing that could express this directly, rather than explain it. (For me, this emphasis on world as inside-outside, and the direct expression of that facticity in language that doesn’t attempt to understand or explain in any normative sense, but is direct, in the words themselves, rhymes with the experience of Zen Buddhist meditation, a practice to which I have dedicated my life.)

Eigner’s work situates itself in the world uniquely—intensely present with it, with ranging thought and perception, and, above all, without sentimentality. It’s as if he sees the pain and the difficulty all around and within, but accepts it dispassionately simply as grist for the mill—simply the way things are, the conditions that prevail, and that make living, and the work, possible and joyful. Bartlett’s biography mirrors this attitude—she approaches Eigner’s life, with its many difficulties, unsentimentally and yet deeply sympathetically, with the sympathy of one who does not say “poor soul, there but for the grace of God go I,” but rather “this is the given path, to be tread and used: what other choice is there?”

For my money, Eigner’s work is exemplary. As is Bartlett’s wonderful book.