Sustaining Air

"The American poet Larry Eigner (1927-1996) is the subject of a true renaissance in recent literary scholarship. Until recently, Eigner was relegated to a peripheral place next to the work of his friends and fellow poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Eigner was nonetheless a key figure in the "New American Poetry" that grew from the Black Mountain School and the San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets who followed in their footsteps. Eigner suffered from cerebral palsy his entire life, limiting his mobility and his ability to communicate both verbally and in writing, and yet he went on to make a place for himself as one of the most prolific and innovative American poets of the late twentieth century. In 2010, the University of California Press published The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner in a four-volume set that runs to 1,868 pages, meant principally for libraries and collectors. In 2016, the University of Alabama Press published Calligraphy Typewriters: The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner, a more affordable paperback of the poet's most significant work, meant for a popular readership and the classroom. Other volumes have followed, among them Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), a gathering of critical appreciations of Eigner's work and legacy, and George Hart's Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner's Ecrippoetics (forthcoming, University of Alabama Press, 2022). While each of these volumes makes available either Eigner's poetry or critical studies of his work, none of them have ever presented a comprehensive biography of the poet, other than the biographical context necessary for the framing of each volume. Jennifer Bartlett's The Sustaining Air will be the first single-volume biographical account of Eigner's life. Bartlett-a poet, teacher, and life-long disability advocate who herself lives with cerebral palsy-covers every significant phase of Eigner's life: his childhood and young adulthood in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with many noteworthy poets of the era; how he and his family contended with his disability both before and after his move to Berkeley, California, and the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators that he established there. The result is a deft, incisive, and inspiring account of a singular figure and voice in postwar American poetry"--