Jennifer Bartlett

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.

Jennifer Bartlett writes, "a word here, a word there," yet, somehow, never manages to write like anyone else. These poems concern themselves with the messiness of relationships and how those relationships operate in both real and fanciful worlds. Her poems comment on one another, on themselves, and on this fascinating character named Jennifer who weaves in and out of the poems. She writes about swimming pools, sex, neurology, the duality of names, and friendship. Along the way she offers no hindrances for the reader. Instead this book shows poems by a poet writing at her joyful, dizzy best. --Mike James, author of Crows in the Jukebox and My Favorite Houseguest

A critical and commercial success since the 1970s, Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941) has become one of the most visionary and influential artists of our time. In the words of New York Times critic John Russell, Bartlett’s art “enlarges our notion of time, and of memory, and of change, and of painting itself.” Her abundant intelligence and inventiveness allow her to synthesize diverse sources and styles, and imbue her paintings with expressive life and moral imagination. Included in this handsome volume are an intimate interview with the artist and an excerpt from History of the Universe, Bartlett’s first novel, giving further insight into the thought processes of this uniquely creative artist. Distributed for the Parrish Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (06/27/13–10/13/13) Parrish Art Museum (04/27/14–07/13/14)

Of course, I wish I had done it differently when I saw you with her, but then again hysteria is the soul voyaging. Instead of coldly leaving to wander the vegetable aisle, I stayed, flaying sound like a target, trying to bring you back into this world. Rain is so difficult to capture on film, no matter how you light it. It was as though we had to walk though the scene again and again in altering gradations until you found the right movement, the right way to get it down. - from ""Derivative of the Moving Image"".