Jennifer Bartlett on Larry Eigner, in conversation with Thad Ziolkowski

Jennifer Bartlett on Larry Eigner, in conversation with Thad Ziolkowski

Tuesday, November 19, 6:30 pm

the Skylight Room, the Graduate Center

365 5th Ave., New York, NY 10016

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.

Jennifer Bartlett is the author of four books of poetry and Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner. She is co-founder of Zoeglossia, an organization for poets with disabilities. She is the author of four books of poetry and co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.

Thad Ziolkowski is the author of Our Son the Arson (What Books, 1996), a collection of poems, the memoir On a Wave (Grove/Atlantic, 2002), which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and Wichita (Europa, 2012), a novel. His most recent book, The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery, was published by HarperCollins in 2021. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, 4Columns, Galerie and Interview Magazine. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University.

Host or Publisher The Leon Levy Center for Biography