Momentous Inconclusions - (Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century) by Jennifer Bartlett & George Hart (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner provides engaging and wide-ranging consideration of the poet's prolific adventure in poetry."--Patrick James Dunagan, Rain Taxi

"The first book on a major, though underdiscussed, late twentieth-century poet, this work is original and timely. Momentous Inconclusions is thorough, well-constructed, and coherent, and it accomplishes two of the most fundamental goals of such a volume: it makes me want to read more Eigner, and it makes me a better reader and teacher of his work."--Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry

"This anthology brings Eigner into the present by looking beyond those associations (with the New American Poets) to recent developments in cultural theory, ecopoetics, phenomenology, and disability. With Momentous Inconclusions we have a capacious critical overview of a poet who was by no means limited in his intellectual and physical life but lived, as he says, in 'the endless / Room at the center.'"--Michael Davidson, author of Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic