Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, October 16

That’s the title of Jennifer Bartlett’s recently released biography (The University of Alabama Press) of the poet Larry Eigner (1927 - 1997). On this evening Jennifer Bartlett was in conversation with the poet & critic Charles Bernstein at The Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, NY, with projected images of Eigner & of pages from his manuscript. 

Eigner lived most of his life in Swampscott, MA, & later in life in Berkeley, CA. As a result of birth trauma he had cerebral palsy & nearly all of his 3,070 poems were typed on a manual typewriter with his thumb & forefinger. He was meticulous in his spacing of his poems on the page, even to the point of correcting his published poems, even when only 1 space off.

Bartlett said that the seed of this book was reading the poet Charles Olson’s magnum opus The Maximus Poems. Olson lived in Gloucester, MA not far from where Eigner lived, & was an influence on Eigner’s approach to poetry, particularly through his (Olson’s) essay “Projective Verse.” Bartlett said it took her 17 years to write & publish the book, the first book-length biography of Eigner.

Charles Bernstein described Eigner as “a great poet of the everyday” — a reader can often tell the time of the year a poem was written by his details description of the weather; he also proposed he could be a great poet of New England, against the work of Robert Lowell, writing at the same time, whose work is so different. Bernstein said that Eigner did not "thematize" his disability, that there is “no self-dramatization in Eigner.”

The next day at the Albany Public Library weekly Book Talk, sponsored by the Friends & Foundation of the APL, I delivered my review of Sustaining Air, which we had scheduled much earlier in the year before the book was published. & Jennifer Bartlett, on her way to Buffalo, stopped by & helped me field questions from the audience. One might call it an example of “synchronisitry” — or simply good luck. 

Sustaining Air is a very readable & informative biography of Larry Eigner, an important figure in the mid-20th Center poetry scene. I highly recommend it.