Stephen Kuusisto interviewed Jennifer Bartlett about her work and Larry Eigner’s life. Following the interview is Steve’s review of Bartlett’s book, Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner.
Editor’s Note: Readers are encouraged to engage with Michael Northen’s review of Sustaining Air, published in an earlier issue of Wordgathering.
SK: Let me begin with some personal observations from the place of being a blind poet whose childhood was often isolated and for whom “being” in the world still often feels provincial. I cried at various points while reading Sustaining Air—so my first question is did you cry while writing this book? It seems Larry Eigner’s life as a disabled poet still thoroughly mirrors so much of what it is to be a crip poet today…
JB: I don’t really view it this way. I think things are vastly different now for poets with disabilities. True, most literary organizations are still ableist. In trying to get my memoir published, for example, I have discovered how ableist the system is itself; people are expected to do hours of free labor for something that may not pan out. Disabled voices are largely suppressed. That said, not to toot my own horn!, but the work started by Jim Ferris and Mike Northen, continued by me and Sheila Black, really has changed disability poetics in America. Disabled poets have been in Poetry and the New York Times. We also have the internet where disabled poets can gather and publish. In this, we have a voice. All Larry had was his typewriter. Also, libraries and such are now somewhat accessible and disabled people have access to education. By no means am I defending the ableism that is still very prominent in America, but it’s not like it was when Larry was born.
SK: Again, on the personal front, you mention the University of Iowa and the critic Sherman Paul. When I tried to take a course with him, what with being interested in Olson, he said if I was blind, I couldn’t be in his class. Again, with the tears. I scuttled down to my teaching assistant’s office and wept behind the closed door. Though this was before the ADA was signed into law, I threatened legal action and the university said sure, sure, you can be in his class. I quit grad school the next day. So, here’s the question: Eigner had to make his boat and sail it himself because the rest of the poetry tribe was largely uncongenial. Do you think this made him stronger at the broken places as Hemingway would have it?
JB: No, not really. Larry did not think in these terms. I will note that Larry had a huge amount of internalized ableism. But mostly, he was just getting through the day. It’s interesting, and alarming, that Sherman Paul said that to you. Now, Eigner is considered to be the explaire poet of Projective Verse. PV is not about the external landscape, it’s about an internal one.
SK: Even the American poets who were engaged with open forms and experimental verse had a kind of small “r” romanticism. This is certainly true of both Olson and Williams. Even Ginsberg. I think Larry resisted sentimentality rather successfully. Can you talk about this?
JB: Not sure what to say about this…
SK: As a poet yourself has Eigner influenced you? You’re not required to say yes. Still, you have a rich fascination with his work, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that?
JB: I think Eigner’s work has definitely influenced my work as a poet. We were kind of kindred to begin with because both of our work pays attention to small details. I think that may be the consequence of moving through the world more slowly than other people and having a constant awareness of the environment which is necessary for survival. I am fascinated with Eigner’s life as a disabled person in early 20th century America.
SK: This is an opinion (mine), but I think the literary establishment is still terribly ableist. As crip poets we all have our stories. But the word “sustaining” is very important, and I wonder if you could speculate on poetry as a vehicle of endurance?
JB: Yes, poetry, reading, and correspondence were definitely endurance acts for Eigner. They staved off loneliness, kept him busy, and intellectually stimulated. In this, they became a vehicle for survival. I know how this feels after spending Covid in Brooklyn and going through a terrible divorce where my entire world was cracked apart (and so was I). Poetry, reading, and writing are necessary. I could say that attempting to live as an abled person in the United States in the particularly unfair and crushing environment of New York City, was a failed experiment for me. Now, I kind of live like Eigner, in rural Iceland with my books and correspondence. But I had a choice. He did not.
Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner (Jennifer Bartlett)
Reviewed by Stephen Kuusisto
Writers of a certain vintage remember when American poetry was divided into opposing camps: the cooked and the raw; formalists vs. Beats; Lowell-ists vs. Olson-ites, Black Mountain College vs. the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Each group had its canonical anthology: Donald Hall’s The New Poets of England and America and M. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. The poet Larry Eigner belonged with the raw but as Jennifer Bartlett shows us in Sustaining Air, her new critical biography of Eigner, he bridged both camps with a surgical precision for clean image arrangements as well as a keen understanding of breath as a unit of measure. As George Hart puts it in his foreword, Eigner had “a spare, immediate, visually exact use of language on the page.”
Sustaining Air is more than a biographical appreciation because it’s also a book about disability and the imagination. In Eigner’s day no one talked about “crip gain”—though by the 1980’s Marjorie Perloff was writing about William Carlos Williams’ stroke and how it influenced his later work—especially as Williams adapted to a fragmented style. But as Bartlett dramatically proves, Eigner’s poetic triumph was not in spite of his disability but because of his extraordinary, dynamic, crippled intelligence.
This is an important part of the story but it’s not the whole story—Bartlett tells us that like Eigner she has cerebral palsy and is, like him, an adept reader of Charles Olson’s work. Olson’s “Projective Verse” advanced the connection between embodiment and the act of writing poetry. As Bartlett traces Eigner’s life, the spirit of Olson is always present as are the sensibilities of many others—Louis Zukovsky, Jack Spicer, Jackson Mac Low, and Hayden Carruth, just to name a few. This book is not about crip gain arriving from a vacuum. It relates Eigner’s life in poetry and a hundred affirmations by way of correspondence.
This is a vivid book. Bartlett has wisely spent considerable time with Eigner’s letters. As she puts it:
Given the depth of Eigner’s correspondence, which also extended to family members, I have chosen to build his life directly out of his own words and those of the people who wrote to him. I had to choose a few poetic relationships to focus on, specifically Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan.
This is, as they say in the vernacular, one hell of a list. Bartlett points out that given the circumstances at the time, Eigner’s correspondence was “nearly exclusively with white men.” And yet Eigner emerges as a champion of disability justice in an era when this was still largely a pipe dream.
One of the greatest obstacles to disability inclusion remains the idea that being disabled, especially with speech and walking challenges, means one also lacks intellectual acuity. Writing of Eigner’s childhood in the 1930s Bartlett notes that:
when children were diagnosed with cerebral palsy, it was believed that they could not be educated intellectually. Any of the few treatments at the time for people with disabilities were focused on the condition as a medical problem. Many children, of course, were kept at home and not given any treatment at all.
Eigner had the good fortune to have a mother who fought for his education. She bought her son a typewriter when he was nine.
It’s not hard to see why Eigner would eventually gravitate to the work of Olson, who among other things, championed the typewriter as a medium for a new expressive poetics. The typewriter in Olson’s view enhanced the composition of poems by rendering breath, word pauses, even syllable suspensions with precision. Eigner (who typed with great difficulty) found his instrument. Bartlett relates the moment the poet and the typewriter became one:
It is unclear how long it took him to master the machine, and Bessie {his mother} would still type his papers throughout high school and college. Eventually, he was able to type fast enough using the most ambulatory part of his right hand: his thumb and index finger. In his typical sense of humor, he later referred to his “typing skills” on a Guggenheim grant application, reporting that he was able to type “ten words a minute!” He likened the typewriter to the family piano, at which he would sometimes stand, using it to prop up books and papers as he worked:
I
I can only play one note at a time
(and I’ve got ten fingers) This is the piano
and I should think of something I have to
play
and have to vary without looking
from precision of simple things
bam
with only that and
the tune in my mind
This early Eigner poem is a perfect illustration of Olson’s declaration that the typewriter offered poets a new means of composing—one where the very shape of thought is expressed with the immediacy of action painting. (I have no evidence that Olson ever made this comparison, but it seems apt.) Bartlett highlights how Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” opened doors for Eigner:
In “Projective Verse,” Olson made a distinction between “closed” poetry, or poetry written in uniform meter and rhyme, and “‘open’ or ‘projective’ poetry, shaped by the individual poet’s breath and physiology.” He urged poets to be “wary of similes, adjectives, and description” and to be willing to break syntax open, since it imposed restrictive logical conventions on thought.” Olson insisted that a poem derive from “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings,” rather than follow a predetermined form. He believed that when composing, the poet was able to “declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination.”
Disability poetry is hazarded: its discoveries are impossible to have imagined before entering the page for there’s no framing of the eye, no anticipation of sights, but always a sequence of surprises.
Larry Eigner’s story is, in Bartlett’s telling, both a recounting of a man’s life and of a revolution in how to think about what today we call “crip gain” or “cripistemology.” Cripistemology favors disability as a way of knowing, foregrounding the perspective of disabled people and it advances and centers the meanings of disability. As a verb, cripping is richly interdisciplinary and energizing. As Zubal-Ruggieri and Wiener, among others, have noted, cripping is one way of “taking back” language and power from those who have used it historically (and, in some cases, even presently) to harm disabled people.
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About Stephen Kuusisto
Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Close Escapes; Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?; Only Bread, Only Light; and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.
About Jennifer Bartlett
Jennifer Bartlett was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and educated at the University of New Mexico, Vermont College and Brooklyn College. She is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image, (a) lullaby without any music, Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography, and Hindrances of a Householder. She also co-edited Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability with Sheila Black and Michael Northen. Her latest book is Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner. Bartlett was an advisor for The New York Times Disability column, where she published two opinion pieces and curated the NYT‘s first selection of poetry. As a disability justice activist, she co-founded the Elevator Action Group—which advocates for accessibility on New York City subways and buses—with Sasha Blair-Goldensohn and Jessica Murray. From 2019-2021, she worked in the Office of the President for NYC Transit (under Andy Byford) in the Systemwide Accessibility Office. Bartlett has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Fund for Poetry, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Gloucester Writing Center and the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. She has given lectures on poetry and disability at Hamilton College, Brown University, Hunter College and School of Visual Arts. Bartlett currently lives in Laugarvatn, Iceland, where she studies Icelandic as a Second Language. Visit her website at: https://www.jenniferbartlettpoet.com/.