I have
always been drawn to biographies and the mysteries of how people live,
particularly artists and poets. I grew up in rural California where the lack of
activity and culture frustrated me. Hence, I was always interested in reading
about how other people lived. As a teenager, I read dime store like biographies
of movie stars, notably Rock Hudson and Marilyn Monroe. As a teenager, I read
every biography of Andy Warhol that I could get my hands on. However, the first biography that profoundly
affected me was Mark Rothko: A Biography
by James E. B. Breslin. Breslin not only wrote about the painter Mark Rothko,
he detailed the history of the abstract expressionism and modern art movements
in New York City, including the founding of the Whitney Museum for American Art
and the Museum of Modern Art. This model of including the culture around the
artist, as well as the individual life, influenced me as I began to write about
Larry Eigner.
In the
1980s, while I was still in high school, my father, Lee Bartlett, wrote The Life of Brother Antoninus, a
biography of his mentor, William Everson. I fondly remember “hanging out” on
Telegraph Avenue for hours while my father made yet another trip to the
archives in the mysterious Bancroft Library.
For years, I longed to write a biography myself. My first choice was
Muriel Rukeyser, someone whose work and life I have an affinity. Rukeyser was
my first love in poetry. I wrote my thesis on her during my MFA program, and I
was interested in the intersections in her life of mother, activist, and
documentary poet. In the
end, Larry Eigner seemed like a better choice. ,I have lived the life of a poet with cerebral
palsy. Cerebral palsy is a neurological
condition acquired from brain trauma at birth or in the first few years of life.
“Cerebral”
refers to the brain and “palsy” refers to the spasticity that accompanies the
condition. Cerebral palsy manifests in a number of ways. It can affect all limbs
severely or just one side of the body and only slightly, making the disability
barely perceptible. It can affect strength, balance and the ability to control
one’s muscles to the extent that those with the condition may not be able to
walk unassisted or care for themselves in typical ways. While my impairments are much less severe than
Eigner’s, an awkward gait and a speech impediment, I felt that I could lend a
particular insight to his life and poetics.
In
researching the project, I was distressed at how much misinformation about
Eigner’s disability was taken for granted among his readers, publishers, and
champions of his work. The realities of his life were unknown most of his
readers, including myself. Before I began researching Eigner's life, I did,
myself, not know that he could walk, that he attended middle school, or that he
could write by hand, kept notebooks, and often wrote marginalia in his books. I
had no concept of the number of other poets and editors he corresponded with
and his influence on modern poetry. I had heard stories that he learned to
speak later in life, the he never traveled, that he didn't give poetry readings
or appear in public; all of which turned out to be false.
As I
wrote, I felt pressure to downplay Eigner’s cerebral palsy. Some critics and
scholars wholly ignore his disability -- perhaps as reaction to their own
discomfort. Others consider the palsy to be the sole or primary influence in
his life and writing. There are a handful of scholars who explore Eigner’s work
within the context of his disability in a holistic way. This biography also
falls into that category.
The
daily reality of any person with a severe disability remains a mystery to
nearly everyone. Only a handful of people who live with severe disabilities
have the opportunity to share their experiences with the public. Most with a
disability as severe as Eigner’s live isolated lives with their families --
what was once called "housebound"-- in group homes or hidden away
institutions. When Eigner was born, it was routine for people "like
him" to be put in institutions for life.
Therefore, I wanted to tell Eigner’s story to the best of my ability. In
reading his correspondence, I was able to cast aside mythology and piece
together an accurate picture of his relationships, education, poetics,
impairments, and capabilities.
As I
wrote, I realized how different -- and how much alike -- our situations. Until
the age of 51, Eigner lived with his parents; his mother, Bessie, was dedicated
to taking care of him. He was not required to engage the world in typical ways
such as having a job, doing housework, or raising a family. He was unable to
travel out of the house alone, and although he did attend culture events and
gave more readings than critics assume, he spent most of his time at home on
the glassed-in porch that his parents converted into an office for him. The
Americans with Disabilities Act, which would have made it easier for him to
inhabit public spaces, was enacted only six years before his death. Although he
wrote often of solitude, he was never able to be truly alone other than for
short periods of time.
Due to
the circumstances of his life, he also was largely protected from ableism or
the prejudice against people with disabilities, and some claim he was immune to
it. Eigner's close friend Professor Arnold Goldman noted that Eigner did
mention being teased by school children who passed by enclosed porch, but he
responded lightheartedly, and after a time, the children lost interest. I argue
that he was not immune to prejudice, but simply lived a life where he was
protected from it.
In part,
this book was written as a response
to my own experience of attempting to navigate the world as a person with
cerebral palsy. Unlike Eigner, I have lived the life of a typical person. After
college I moved from New Mexico to New York City, got married and had a child.
I earned two Masters degrees and embarked on a dream of being an inner-city
high school teacher. My difficulty in convincing others that I was a valuable
employee coupled with the barrage of daily prejudice sparked by my speech
impediment and awkward gait became too much to handle. I left the NYC
Department of Education after five years of teaching English. I briefly taught
First-Year Writing, but after twenty years of fighting for gainful employment,
I dropped out, if only temporarily. I needed to have an outlet for my boundless
drive and energy, but I no longer had the emotional or physical energy to beg for a
place in the world.
Like
Eigner, if the typical world not have me, I would create a world. So, I allowed myself to live on Social Security
Disability, and like Frank O’Hara, I began to “make my own days.” I joined to
New York Society Library on Manhattan’s Upper East Side – a place that remains
seminal to me—to have an office space, a “social life” in the company of other
quirky people book-obsessed individuals, as well as access to some of the
research material I needed. I began this project with no institutional backing
or formal education on how to do research. With the help of my father and a few
others, I taught myself how to do research and build relationships with
librarians.http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Calligraphy-Typewriters,6487.aspxThroughout my process, I had two colleagues who continuously
helped and supported me: Andrew Rippeon and George Hart.
The job
was further complicated because Eigner’s correspondence is archived in numerous
places: Stanford University, Brown University, University of Kansas, The Dodd
Research Center at the University of Connecticut, SUNY Buffalo, the New York
Public Library, and a private collection. Further, while it is difficult to
interpret any correspondence that is not your own, Eigner’s correspondence is
particularly difficult due to consistent typos, quirky abbreviations, and
hundreds of references to books, radio and television programs, poets and
political figures.
The
biography only utilizes a relatively small selection of Eigner’s vast
correspondence. It focuses on a few of his primary literary and private
relationships. It traces his reading, engagement with culture, and influence of
such on his poems. His poems are interspersed throughout the manuscript in
order to highlight his life and creative process. It is, by no means, a
comprehensive biography, nor is it a critical biography.
Eigner’s
first known piece of literary correspondence was a postcard to the Boston poet,
Cid Corman. In December 1948, Eigner and his brother Richard “happened upon” Corman’s [JS3] radio program “This Is Poetry” on WMEX in
Boston. The postcard sparked a 40-year correspondence, ending only shortly
before Eigner’s death in 1996.
In my
early research, I spent months attempting to locate this initial postcard. It
has been lost, despite the diligent archiving of both parties. However,
Eigner’s archive at the Dodd Research Center does include their earliest
correspondence as well as initial correspondence between Eigner and Robert
Creeley. In some ways, it was unavoidable that Corman become nearly as much a
part of the biography as its subject due to the length of the correspondence
and the influence Corman had on Eigner’s early work. Eigner spent time with most of his
correspondents at some point in person. Vincent Ferrini, Charles Olson and
Denise Levertov all lived near Swampscott for long period of time. Jonathan
Greene, Ann and Sam Charters, Robert Grenier, and Allen Ginsberg traveled to 23
Bates Road to meet him. When he traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area, he
spent time with David Gitin, Robert Duncan, Robert Grenier and Kathleen
Frumkin, the latter two he eventually
lived with for ten years.
Corman
was an exception. The two met in person only a handful of times, if that.
Although Corman lived in Boston for many years, he spent most of his life out
of the country, moving throughout Europe, finally to settle permanently in
Japan. However, they corresponded on nearly a daily basis and Corman was
responsible for introducing Eigner to most of the poets and editors he would
read and publish with throughout his life.
As I
worked on the biography, I realized there was one poet whose work is continuously mentioned. This poet is Charles Olson[. When I began the book, it was with the
knowledge that Eigner is thought to be an exemplar of Projective Verse. As my
research unfolded, I became aware of the full impact of Olson’s writing on
Eigner’s thinking and work. In a letter to Corman, Eigner writes, “I wish I
could go up to BMC to hear O’s voice.” While Eigner was never able to visit
Black Mountain College, he spent a lifetime attempting to hear that voice. He
consistently went to secondary sources to further understand Olson’s work and
spoke of this often in his letters. He wrote essays on Olson, and in one of
these, made the endearing argument that Olson should not have given up politics
for poetry and should run for president. His own copy of Olson’s Maximus Poems was heavily annotated.
Later in life, Sherman Paul’s “Olson’s Push” was among of his most beloved
books. In some ways, Olson personified
the male archetype and it is possible that Eigner idealized this archetype
which was so different from his own experience.
In
short, this biography is different from biographies that catalog a poet’s
comings and goings, love affairs, and travels. It is arguable that Larry Eigner
lived life largely in his boundlessly and expansive mind, not exclusively
because of his physicality, but simply because some poets are like that. In
this, Limits/ are what we/ are inside of [a quote taken from Olson’s Maximus Poems which Robert Grenier
believes best explains Eigner’s life] means to make a map of that mind and the
poems that derived from it.
