Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner

The biography of a poet seminal to postwar American poetry

The poet Larry Eigner (1927-1996) was a key figure in New American poetry, which grew out of the Black Mountain School and San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the Language poets. Eigner also had cerebral palsy as the result of an accident at birth. It is fortuitous that the poet lived his life in two locations vibrant in both poetics and disability activism. Except for brief periods attending camp and school, he lived with his parents in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until the age of 51. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, at the height of the disability rights movement. In the 1950s, Eigner attended Camp Jened, which later became famous in the film Crip Camp.

Bartlett's biography covers every significant phase of Eigner's life: his childhood and young adulthood when 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 poets of the era; and after his move to Berkeley, the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators he established there. The result is a deeply insightful account of an utterly distinctive voice whose influence widens and deepens with each new generation that encounters him.


Author: Jennifer Bartlett
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Published: 07/18/2023
Pages: 198
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.98h x 5.91w x 0.55d
ISBN13: 9780817360818
ISBN10: 0817360816
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | People with Disabilities
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Jennifer Bartlett is the author of four books of poetry. With Sheila Black and Michael Northen, she coedited Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Bartlett's poetry, nonfiction, and curatorial work has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Typo, and many other places. With George Hart, she edited Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner.