Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner by Jennifer Bartlett, The University of Alabama Press, 2023

Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, Jennifer Bartlett’s new biography of Eigner, is a boon. We ought to be very grateful to this author for her tireless research and careful approach to the life and work of this underappreciated poet. Why, indeed, is Eigner’s name so infrequently spoken, when it was so well-known to colleagues and friends like Robert Grenier, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov? These same colleagues spoke and wrote of his vital interventions into Charles Olson’s projective verse and his resulting seminal contributions to the development of Language poetry. Still, ableism shrouds disabled relationships to life and literary production in secrecy and shame, and Eigner struggled all his life to enter a social world that afforded him few if any accommodations for his cerebral palsy.

We can also say that, frankly, Eigner’s contribution is hard to apprehend because it is intimidating. Olson wrote of “the breathing of the man who writes,” but it was Eigner who, casually and without pomposity, took up this notion and attached the dazzling high stakes of his own precarious life, proceeding to dispense jagged, dryly-delivered, primary-colored insights on the phenomenal world. His descriptions of weather and color tantalize with idiosyncrasy; they slip frustratingly easily from the mind. That a disabled man could accomplish these effects—that his problems with his body were produced by an inaccessible world, and that his body itself enabled rather than hindered the development of his style as a poet—was a matter long ago resolved for him. His description of the way he perceives is so matter-of-fact in its high modernism:

And hanging-moss eyes are not a question of politics or even dignity—in Eigner’s arch descriptions of disabled life, he bounces over them both. It is a simple question of what Olson had already said about the body, of saying what the words that push inside your particular body have to say.

When Eigner’s line moves across the page along with what he called the “wild side” of his body—that is, the side with more tremors—it doesn’t need disability liberation as a tool to do so. We may certainly wish, and we do, that Eigner had had access to more community, more resources during his life. He might have lived longer, for one, and his thought might have evolved in useful ways, but Bartlett takes care not to write about these possibilities in such a way as to diminish the value of Eigner’s actual life and work. Even without access to these things, his power and agency within his own poetry was absolute. “If life, things, weren’t so interesting, it, they would kill me,” he wrote. As it was, they gave him what he needed to write, even over many years in isolation in his parents’ home. It’s hard not to think about Emily Dickinson, who also so accentuated the social aspect of poetry by exercising an isolation-saturated perceptual apparatus. Eigner’s formative experiences with other disabled people were in institutional situations that set up everyone involved in them for pain. These experiences, and his resultant cynicism on questions of disability solidarity, are painful to read about. Bartlett reminds us often how Eigner repudiated identification with disability, but she emphasizes that this did not mean a disavowal of his body. In fact, it meant a full identification with it, untroubled by the meaning placed on it by those around him. Eigner assumed the exaltation of his body as a tool of poetry, “a machine for talking.” Bartlett’s respectful insistence on the possibilities of disability liberation makes a fine counterpoint to Eigner’s cynicism about solidarity. He thought of any association with other disabled people as an inevitable path to humiliation and infantilization, but the care Bartlett exercises in her account of his life is itself a testament to what such association, in the form of solidarity, has to offer Eigner. Considering all these seemingly contradictory facts requires equanimity, political courage, literary acumen, and love, and Bartlett delivers in spades.

The care she takes with Eigner’s story makes legible the ways in which all poets, not only disabled ones, emerge into literary history not purely “on their own merits,” but as a function of the care networks that enable them. Bartlett here particularly excels in describing Eigner’s painful and beautiful relationship with his mother, Bessie Polansky. It was Polansky who advocated for her son to be educated, and to escape institutionalization; Polanksy who took dictation for him and later, bought him a typewriter, a life-changing device; Polansky who loved poetry, and shared this love with her son. It’s true also that it was Polansky who was often cruel to him, and whose forms of care kept her son isolated and infantilized. Bartlett holds all this and correctly insists that Eigner deserved better, and so did his mother—they both deserved access to forms of care and assistance that don’t make any reasonable person want to scream about wages for housework.

Eigner hated being read as a “disabled poet,” as some kind of unusual “cripple” success story, but his public success as a poet often came with this pitfall. When the poets he admired wrote of him in reviews and blurbs—poets of the Black Mountain and the proto-Language schools—they tended to do so in this idiom, foregrounding not his body and the poetry he made with it, but his body’s pathology, its diagnosis. Bartlett offers a thoughtful examination both of Eigner’s desire for such acclaim and visibility, and of his rage and frustration that this was the form in which they came. Strangely, however, Bartlett historicizes this rejection, and Eigner’s rejection of conventional narrative, as a rejection of “confessionalism,” which she chooses to represent with two figures: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, the latter of whom is famously the opposite of a confessionalist. Eigner himself seems to have been not so much anti-confessional as not very interested in the whole thing. He spoke of Lowell’s “academic touch”—but even this was a reaction not to Lowell’s work but to his dismissive remarks about Eigner’s own poems, which, Bartlett reports, Eigner had initially wanted Lowell to read. The problems that attend to telling readers about personal struggle pertain to a much larger set of aesthetic choices, movements and patterns than confessionalism alone. In misidentifying Eigner’s experimentalist style as a rejection of confessionalism, Bartlett mistakenly displaces onto confessionalism this array of larger concerns.

Ron Silliman felt that Eigner was “the first man to isolate words/phrases/perceptions in such a way as to force the attention onto them, not to the context.” This placement of attention may be easily mistaken for a disavowal of the social or political, but in fact such attention ends up asking how language feels in the body. For Eigner, it feels precarious, insufficient, relational, gorgeous, painful, and yes, politicized, as in this description of navigating power, humiliation, dependence, love, and care with his mother:

Asking how language feels in the body, for Eigner, is the ultimate version of Olson’s “composition by field,” and Bartlett’s biography shows us Eigner’s central role in transforming many Black Mountain-type notions into Language-type notions. The closeness and depth of his relationship with his friend and colleague Robert Grenier, which Bartlett writes about beautifully, can illustrate for us the depth of Eigner’s influence on the latter movement: when we read Grenier’s famous provocation, “I HATE SPEECH,” we may think of Eigner’s efforts to embody Olson’s poetics in a body that struggles with speech as a physical task. We can thank Jennifer Bartlett for the reminder that some of Language poetry’s beginnings lie in Larry Eigner’s experimental account of his embodied life—that it was not just a coincidence or a matter of personal affection that made Ron Silliman dedicate his 1986 Language anthology, An American Tree, to Eigner. There are so many different types out there who are bound to be interested in this biography—Language poetry people, lovers of the Black Mountain avant-garde, people who like embarrassing stories about Robert Duncan, disability arts people, disabled people who recoil from the notion of disability art, family abolitionists, and other theorists of care—and Bartlett’s biography provides all these with fruitful jumping off points. I look forward to an Eigner revival.