Larry Eigner (1927-1996), born with cerebral palsy, was an active and significant figure for the New American Poets of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with the Black Mountain School. While his writing has been overshadowed by his contemporaries, such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Eigner's work has had a significant influence on generations of poets as he was at the center of the development of a postmodern poetics. The essays in this collection examine the breadth of Eigner's interests and influence, considering issues pertaining to ecopoetics, race and ethnicity, disability, technology, media, soundscapes, phenomenology, and popular culture. This book promises to be a foundational text for Eigner studies as well as an important addition to critical work about twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner is a valuable contribution to scholars in the field and to academics researching the intersection of disability studies and poetics.

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 has created not a new form of surrealism, nor of magical realism, but a kind of supernal realism which leaves room for dreams, visions, and angels as well as the panoplies of both country and urban life. These "realia" attribute a marvelously textured, immediate, and linguistically inventive ground to all she writes. The overcoming, without fuss, but with a brave, almost saintly decorum, of a young venture far too burdened by tragedy and disability is the deep subject of this book: a life has visibly been saved, and built, by poetry. One welcomes with delight this brilliant new talent."--Nathaniel Tarn

"Bartlett speaks for and with her generation's anguish at an existence where love is the residue rather than force of feeling between people and events. There are no myths, rites or symbols, no sanctuaries outside of movies, which allow one to experience a rapture of separation from the real. The poems in this collection articulate the situation with great honesty."--Fanny Howe

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, 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"

Chosen by the American Library Association as a 2012 Notable Book in Poetry.

Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace.

" BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." -Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree

"This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

From "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries:

How else can I quench this thirst? My lips
travel down your spine, drink the smoothness

of your skin. I am searching for the core:
What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the laws

of nature be defied? Your body tells me: come
close. But beauty distances even as it draws

me near. What does my body want from yours?
My twisted legs around your neck. You bend

me back. Even though you can't give the bones
at birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside.

You give me-what? Peeling back my skin, you
expose my missing bones. And my heart, long

before you came, just as broken. I don't know who
to blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my body

doesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. If
innocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful.

Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship.

Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school.

Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.